When Jews Sweat Labor
Ex-Con Stands Between Workers, ILGWU
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, March 18, 1994
BROOKLYN — In a cold and windowless Williamsburg factory that houses the S&W Knitting Mill, the garment workers — mostly Hispanic women — smile as their boss, Issachar Weiss, walks through. “It’s a real nice place,” one employee tells a visiting reporter. But after work, when the bosses aren’t around, workers tell a different story. “We want a free union,” one worker says in Spanish. “But they won’t let us have one.”
It is David Ganz’ job to make sure they don’t get one. Ganz, a Satmar Chasid and a convicted embezzler who spent five months in prison, heads the Tri-State Commercial Association, an umbrella group of Chasidic factory owners who have banded together to keep the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and other independent unions out of their Williamsburg shops. Though ILGWU has won over some shops, the owners have had their successes, too, largely because they themselves set up a union to represent their employees, a union which, not surprisingly, has never struck one of their factories.
Running Scared
Eighty-three years after a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company took the lives of 146 young garment workers, thousands of struggling immigrants still crowd the region’s sweatshops, and ILGWU is still trying to organize them. One thing that has changed is that the workers are no longer predominately Jewish and Italian; they are mostly of Hispanic, Caribbean and Asian origin. But Jews can still be found among the owners, and in no place are they as evident as in the Chasidic enclave of Williamsburg.
ILGWU has some of these Chasidic owners running scared; it has won supporters in dozens of shops, and elections between ILGWU and the “sweetheart” union, Local 1718 of the United Production Workers Union — a union with no connection to the AFL-CIO — have already been held in about 20 factories so far. Local 1718 has won the majority of these elections, but the National Labor Relations Board is investigating charges that the owners and leaders of the local conspired to intimidate the workers out of voting for ILGWU. Ganz and other factory owners deny the charges, and while they fight ILGWU on the shop floor, Ganz and his company are opening up another front in their fight, this one in the city’s Jewish community: They charge that ILGWU’s president, Jay Mazur, who, like many of ILGWU’s leaders, is Jewish, is nothing less than a traitor to his people. Their argument has already been carried in The Jewish Press, one of the most widely read Jewish newspapers in the area’s Orthodox community.
Workers’ Rights
“Why the hell doesn’t he go after the goyim and stop shedding Jewish blood?” Ganz asked in an interview with the Forward. “Mazur won’t let go. The shvartzes and the Spanish and the Asians said, ‘We want to stay with the Jews. We like the Jewish union.’ “
Mr. Mazur, responding to Ganz’ statement, said: “For him to make these comments is outrageous and untrue. This has nothing to do with whether you’re Jewish. We’re talking about the rights of workers to join a legitimate union….The ILGWU represents 100 different nations, including thousands of Jews and immigrants.”
S&W workers, along with employees of the KG Knitting Mills, which is housed in the same decrepit building as S&W, say owners told workers that the factories would be closed if Local 1718 was thrown out; the ILGWU has filed charges with the National Labort Relations Board against both companies. The owners have denied the charges.
One ILGWU organizer at KG, Alfega Vargas, says that most KG employees want to switch from 1718 to ILGWU because their current union does not offer them protection.
“We never get paid vacation, we get no pension, we get no health insurance,” Ms. Vargas says. The president of Local 1718, Douglas Isaacson, said the union provides good representation to its members. Mr. Weiss, the co-owner of S&W, says that his workers are well-paid and treated fairly. He said wages in his shop can run “as high as” 400 a week, though he said that female workers with children at home earn less because “they only work from nine to five.”
Mail Fraud Conviction
Ganz himself served as president of Local 1718 for 12 years, until he was convicted in 1987 on mail fraud and embezzlement charges connected to his union activities. He served five months of a 14-month prison sentence at the Allenwood federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Though Ganz now officially represents management’s interests in the Williamsburg labor wars, ILGWU says he has always been on the owners’ side.
“He’s a man without principle,” Mr. Mazur says. “He has never been a representative of workers, and his history and background reflect that. His betrayal of working people is well-known.”
Ganz’s current anti-ILGWU strategy is apparently founded in his belief that Jewish union leaders have some sort of religious responsibility to go soft on Jewish-owned shops. In a letter he sent factory owners last month, Ganz wrote that the ILGWU leadership “brutalizes and persecutes their own brethren in America.”
“All this conducted by a union headed by a jew sic, Jay Mazur…and other Jewish members of the Executive Board with the help of Jewish lawyers. One of them…betrayed his faith and married a shiksa.”