Background: In this excerpt, Jewish factory owner Louis Borgenicht describes the effects of unionization on his business and personal life. According to his memoir, he was one of the first and few factory owners in the girls’ clothing industry to willingly let his workers unionize.

My working conditions were always up to the best in the industry. Nevertheless, once the union was admitted—and cheerfully—I found a new spirit undermining the old sense of co–operation. Hard feelings for me were encouraged as a deliberate policy. If a cutter did a good day’s work—as some bewildered old–fashioned workers reported—new employees approached him with warnings that he was setting too high a standard of work for the rest.

The first time I heard myself depicted as an enemy of the workers I laughed. I was a worker myself, and always had been. But it was no laughing matter I soon learned.

When a check-up revealed that, paying the same wages and working the same hours as previously, we had fallen far off our production schedule since signing up with the union—in some departments we were getting only sixty per cent of the quota of work—it was time to call a halt…“Either get the other manufacturers to sign up,” I insisted to the union leaders, “so that our labor costs are equalized, or I will have to dispense with the union myself!”

Source: Friedman, Harold. The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht As Told to Harold Friedman. G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1942. pp. 309–310