Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
“Horowitz Says We Shall Make No More Brassieres”
or, A Family History of the Safety Net
When I got my first job as a lawyer in the labor movement in 1994, I assumed it would come fully loaded. Benefits just came with a job, after all, and I assumed mine would include health insurance, a retirement plan, and the protection of basic labor laws. I assumed that a safety net would be there if I needed it. I was wrong. America’s safety net was already in free fall then. Today, it’s almost gone entirely.
The collapse of the safety net was no accident. It was the result of neglect on the left and sabotage on the right, and it has left us with a society exposed to risk tof an unprecedented degree. For many workers in the United States, the severity of this decline has become obvious only recently. But the crisis we’re in today has been a long time coming.
I’ve been organizing freelancers for more than twenty-five years. They are the vanguard of the changing economics of work and have experienced the dissolution of the old safety net firsthand. In fact, my family had front-row seats to the rise and fall of the safety net in the twentieth century. That story—of how America’s workers first built a safety net for themselves and saw government scale that safety net through the New Deal, only to see it hollowed out from within beginning in the 1970s—starts with my great-grandmother’s arrival in New York around 1900. It goes like this.
I am the second Sara Horowitz in my family. The first Sara Horowitz was an immigrant, a garment worker who came to the United States from a small town on the Russian-Polish border around 1900 with her son, on the run from anti-Semites and looking for work. She settled in New York City and, like countless other new arrivals from central Europe at the time, found work in the garment district on Manhattan’s West Side, which at the time was a hive of activity concentrated into a few city blocks that produced much of the clothing worn in America.
Immigrants like Sara often had worked as tailors in their home countries, designing and making whole garments—a dress, a shirt, a pair of pants—from scratch. This kind of work required skill and expertise; each garment was literally tailor-made for a single, often wealthy, client. But technology was changing, and the nature of work was changing with it. The Industrial Revolution meant that for the first time in history, it was possible to produce affordable, ready-made clothing at scale. Suddenly, more Americans than ever could afford to buy fashionable clothes for themselves, and making that clothing was too big a task for individual tailors. The era of mass-produced, low-cost clothing had arrived. So a new kind of worker—the assembly worker—was born.
My great-grandmother did piecework, making specific parts of an item of clothing, not the whole thing. She might have sewn buttons onto dress bodices and sleeve cuffs, stooping over her detailed work for hours on end. She worked when the company needed her, but it often wasn’t enough to make a decent living; she couldn’t necessarily rely on having work every day. No one had thought much about what kinds of protections this new workforce might need, and the garment industry exploited that fact. Part of why business was booming in those years was that immigrant workers like Sara were cheap, and they worked hard.
But there was good news coming for workers like Sara, too. Industrial workers were starting to build organizations that helped them protect one another from exploitation by their employers, and these new unions were becoming increasingly powerful. The “needle unions” that helped protect garment workers like Sara were among the most dynamic of them all. On June 3, 1900, around the time Sara would have landed in New York, representatives from seven of these garment workers’ unions met and agreed to found one of the great unions of the early labor movement: the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).
The ILGWU became a cornerstone of my family’s life throughout the twentieth century. Decades later, when I was a girl, it was through the ILGWU that I first learned about the safety net and first began to develop the ideas that I now call mutualism. But the ILGWU’s prominence in my family’s story is largely thanks to one man: Sara Horowitz’s son, Israel, my grandfather.
Israel Horowitz was only thirteen when he arrived in New York with his mother. He had always been willing to stand up for himself: according to family lore, Israel once “opened somebody’s head” in the old country. (He would have been just a boy at the time, and my father used to joke that this might have had something to do with why the Horowitzes ended up in New York.) Like many new immigrants, Israel went to work as a dressmaker in the sweatshops. But he was the kind of kid who was bound to rise, and since his mother was a garment worker, the way for my grandfather to rise in the eyes of society was through his union.
Less than ten years after Sara Horowitz arrived in New York with Israel in tow, my grandfather was already making headlines. Israel was a member of the Local 25 chapter of the ILGWU, and on November 23, 1909, Local 25 executed a plan to lead a massive strike that came to be called the Uprising of the 20,000. Fifteen thousand shirtwaist makers, mostly women, walked out of factories all around New York City. Five thousand more joined the strike the following day. They were advocating for improved pay, a shorter workweek, better working conditions, and union recognition. The strike lasted for three months, until mid-February of 1910, and would be remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of the American labor movement. The ILGWU’s membership ballooned: comprising roughly two thousand members at its founding in 1900, the ILGWU had won higher wages for fifteen thousand workers by the end of the strike, and Israel was part of it. According to family lore, a headline in a Bayonne, New Jersey, newspaper during the strike read:
HOROWITZ SAYS WE SHALL MAKE NO MORE BRASSERIES
My grandfather would go on to play an increasingly important role in the ILGWU. As he moved up from shop chairman to executive board member to business agent and manager of the New York Dress Board, his responsibilities gradually increased. Along the way, he met a woman named Esther, a fellow garment worker who had emigrated from Russia when she was just a girl. The two married and in 1918 had a son, Milton Horowitz, my father.
Eventually, Israel became a vice president of the union and the general manager of the union’s eastern out-of-town department. As a vice president of the ILGWU, he thought about how to create a safety net for the workers. How could the union improve the lives of its members and make it easier for them to sleep at night? How could it keep their wages high and also protect them against hard times? In a changing economy in which employers weren’t looking out for the well-being of their workers, how could the ILGWU become a backstop against risk?
Israel got his start during the years before the New Deal—before a national, governmentally enshrined safety net was passed into law, and people wondering how to put a roof over their heads, how to feed themselves, and how to provide for their children and their own futures had to figure it out on their own. Industrialization had created a new class of workers who could be easily exploited. Workers like Sara and Israel Horowitz had to come together to protect one another, and through organizations like the ILGWU they did.
This was a safety net built by workers, for workers. In the decades before the New Deal, there was an explosion of worker-built institutions that existed solely to meet the needs of these new industrial workers. Many of them you’ve probably never heard of, but some are still around today, albeit transformed, including Amalgamated Bank, which today oversees $40 billion in assets; many of New York City’s original housing cooperatives, which were originally built as worker housing; and the ILGWU itself, which today lives on as part of Workers United, a union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
The ILGWU wasn’t just a labor union in the way we think of unions today. Yes, it collectively bargained with factory owners at the shop floor for better working conditions and wages, but its vision of the safety net extended into the very lives of its members. The lifeblood of the ILGWU was its community, workers whose commitment to one another was holistic, structural, practical, and pragmatic. While the ILGWU was busy fighting Sara Horowitz’s employer for higher wages, it was simultaneously setting up local healthcare clinics, housing cooperatives, retail centers, credit unions, and more. To the ILGWU, a worker like my great-grandmother wasn’t just an economic unit or a piece of human capital: she was a human being, a whole person who needed to have art, nature, leisure, and education in her life.
But the money for this worker-built safety net had to come from somewhere.
