At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a significant rise in Jewish immigration to the United States from Europe. Many Jews fled Europe in order to seek greater economic opportunity, escape pogroms, and to escape restrictions on education, residence, and occupation in a time when many Jews had been displaced by industrialization. New York was an appealing destination for many immigrants because of access to employment and jobs with upward mobility, housing, food in abundance, free education, freedom of thought and religious life, and the right to vote (for men only). Between 1880 and 1920, twenty three million immigrants entered the United States, two and a half million of whom were Eastern European Jews. Eighty five percent of Eastern European Jewish immigrants immigrated to New York, and seventy five percent settled in the Upper East Side. These immigrants lived in tenements, which were large buildings with small units that would each house anywhere from three to twelve people. Some families were still forced to take in boarders in order to support themselves. Space was so limited, some people had to sleep in shifts. Interior rooms did not have windows, and therefore completely lacked natural light and air.
Between 1840 and 1850, one-third of Jewish wage earners in New York were peddlers. At first, there was little ready-made clothing, so peddlers peddled secondhand clothing, much of which was supplied by Jewish New York suppliers. As industrialization increased, clothing manufacturing in New York also increased 600 percent. New York’s growth in manufacturing was contributed to by its proximity to New England textile factories and the delivery of European textiles to the port of New York. Close to half of all immigrants sewed clothed in hundreds of small-scale sweatshops in one of the country’s most important industries. Factory owners were attracted to New York for many reasons, such as cheap and plentiful labor, the growing consumer and retail market, and access to the financial sector and banks. Many Jewish immigrants, especially women, were employed in these factories. Between 1914 and 1915, thirty seven percent of working papers in New York were issued to Jewish teenagers aged fourteen or above. These factories were rife with unfair labor practices: not being allowed to speak, being fined for speaking, paying rent for work materials, crowded working conditions, losing half a day’s pay for being a minute late, low pay, no overtime, having to report to work even when no paid work was available, dirty bathrooms, lack of time to use the bathroom, little opportunity for women to advance, women being paid half as much as men, being beaten for attempting to unionize, being cheated out of pay with no way to retaliate, and harassment of women workers by men. In November of 1909, there was a strike to protest working conditions in garment factories. The strike lasted for eleven weeks, and though the workers did not achieve many of their goals, they did make some progress on the issues of pay and worker safety. The strike brought to the public’s attention the terrible conditions under which these women worked, and the strike strengthened the struggling International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Though the events of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the activism work of Jewish women and the labor movement as a whole led to stronger laws protecting workers and more stringent safety regulations, there is still much work to be done to protect the health and safety of factory workers today. On Wednesday April 23, 2013, more than 650 workers in a factory located in Savar, Bangladesh were killed when the factory floor collapsed. The day before the collapse, workers noticed big cracks in the wall. The four upper floors of the building, it would later be shown, had been added illegally, and the building’s foundation was substandard. When the cracks were discovered, the stores and bank on the lower floors of the building were closed immediately. But the owners of the garment factories on the upper floors ordered their employees to come to work on Wednesday. Among the stores for which those factories were making clothes were Walmart and Benetton.
The Torah provides guidance on how workers should be treated, but rabbis and Jewish leaders today are still concerned with the same subject. Using traditional Jewish texts as a starting point, they are formulating new suggestions and rulings about the obligations of Jewish employers and employees. The Conservative movement passed a teshuvah—a written legal text—by Rabbi Jill Jacobs requiring Jewish employers to treat workers with dignity and respect, to pay them fairly, to provide safe working conditions, and so on.
