Rose Schneiderman

Rose Schneiderman (April 6, 1882 – August 11, 1972) was a Polish-born American labor organizer, feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with popularizing the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.

Early years

Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Rose Schneiderman on April 6, 1882, the first of four children of a religious Jewish family, in the village of Sawin, 14 kilometers (9 miles) north of Chełm in Russian Poland. Her parents, Samuel and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman, worked in the sewing trades. Schneiderman first went to Hebrew school, normally reserved for boys, in Sawin, and then to a Russian public school in Chełm. In 1890 the family migrated to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Schneiderman's father died in the winter of 1892, leaving the family in poverty. Her mother worked as a seamstress, trying to keep the family together, but the financial strain forced her to put her children in a Jewish orphanage for some time. Schneiderman left school in 1895 after the sixth grade, although she would have liked to have continued her education. She went to work, starting as a cashier in a department store and then in 1898 as a lining stitcher in a cap factory on the Lower East Side. In 1902 Schneiderman and the rest of her family moved briefly to Montreal, where she developed an interest in both radical politics and trade unionism. Her brother was communal worker, writer, and editor Harry Schneiderman.

The main theme of many of Schneiderman's most impactful speeches was that it would not make that big of a difference if a woman got the vote; however, women needed to vote to be able to get protection through the laws. She knew that a woman physically being in office would not make a huge difference and chose to not hide that fact. Instead, Schneiderman presented the idea of women voting to change laws instead of making laws in the first place. This idea helped her gain traction and the number of people who supported her boomed. This gave Schneiderman motivation and proved that she was doing something right.

Career

Schneiderman returned to New York in 1903, and with a partner worker started organizing and coordinating with the women in her clothing factory. When they applied for a charter to the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union, the union told them to return after they had succeeded in organizing twenty-five women. The women already knew they wanted to join, so they got to work recruiting others. They did that within days, and the union then chartered its first women's local.

The first strike of that union that Schneiderman participated in centered on a factory in Bayonne, New Jersey run by employers who had left Manhattan in an effort to avoid unionization. During this strike she gave a speech to workers that went over very well and contributed to her being elected a member of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union's general executive board. At just twenty-two, Schneiderman became the first woman to hold a position at that level in the trade union movement.

Schneiderman obtained wider recognition during a citywide capmakers' strike in 1905. Elected secretary of her local and a delegate to the New York City Central Labor Union, she came into contact with the New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), an organization that lent moral and financial support to the organizing efforts of women workers. She quickly became one of the most prominent members and was elected the New York branch's vice president in 1908. Schneiderman left the factory to work for the league, attending school with a stipend provided by one of the League's wealthy supporters. She was an active participant in the Uprising of the 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York City led by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in 1909. She also was a key member of the first International Congress of Working Women of 1919, which aimed to address women's working conditions at the first annual International Labour Organization Convention.

Schneiderman was born into a Jewish family. Her mother was very religious, but Schneiderman felt that the role of women within the religion was too restricting. She spent her life breaking gender expectations for women of Jewish background in the 1900s. Though Judaism was not a major part of her activist career, Schneiderman still did many things to help the Jewish community. Through her speeches and acts she managed to bring better economic standing and safety to the people of her community. In the 1930s and ‘40s Schneiderman helped to rescue European Jews, and was commemorated by Albert Einstein for her work.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 garment workers were burned alive or died jumping from the ninth floor of a factory building, dramatized the conditions that Schneiderman, the WTUL, and the union movement were fighting. The WTUL had documented similar unsafe conditions–factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials–at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey, shortly before the Triangle disaster. Schneiderman expressed her anger at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the WTUL:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us–warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Despite her harsh words, Schneiderman continued working in the WTUL as an organizer, returning to it after a frustrating year on the staff of the male dominated International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She subsequently became president of the WTUL's New York branch, then its national president for more than twenty years until it disbanded in 1950.