Celebrating Bessie Abramowitz Hillman
March 22, 2016 - This Women's History Month, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs are celebrating the life and achievements of a woman who made great contributions to both workers' rights and civil rights, Bessie Abramowitz. She was a fighter for worker's rights the moment she started working her first factory job in the garment industry, back in the early 1900s.
Bas Sheva Abramowitz was born May 15th, 1887 in a small village, Linoveh, near the Grodno, a city in Russia. She grew up in a family of 10 children and spoke only Yiddish and Russian. At the age of eighteen, she made the decision to emigrate with an older cousin to the United States to avoid the fate of many her age, arranged marriage. And so, in 1905, she moved to the United States, and lived in Chicago, in a boardinghouse owned by distant relatives. Her first job was sewing buttons at a Hart, Shaffner, and Marx garment factory. During the day she worked and at night she was enrolled in the Hull House night school; she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1913.
Abramowitz's first job did not last long: in 1908, shortly after she organized a shop committee to protest working conditions and pay of three dollars for a sixty-hour week, she was fired. This incident led her to be blacklisted as a labor agitator. She eventually again found work at Hart, Shaffner, and Marx using a pseudonym. But being blacklisted would not stop her on her quest for decent working conditions and better pay.
On September 22, 1910, she formed a walkout with 16 other employees to protest a cut in the piece rate. The walkout quickly gained support. By October, around 8,000 factory workers had joined the strike, including future labor leader - and future husband - Sidney Hillman. The strike eventually gained support of Jane Addams of Hull House and the Women's Trade Union League, and Abramowitz was hired as a WTUL organizer.
The success of the strike she organized led her to gain other roles in the labor movement, including in the newly-formed Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. In 1915, Abramowitz was elected to the general executive board of the ACWA. She continued her organizing efforts well beyond Chicago, organizing workers in Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Ohio, Connecticut, and elsewhere. Her organizing also led to her being involved in civil rights when she became the education director of ACWA's Laundry Workers Joint Board in 1937. At the Laundry Workers, her work with many nonwhite workers that inspired her to become involved in civil rights.
When World War II broke out, Abramowitz became director of Amalgamated's War Activities Department, supervising a massive blood drive as well as savings bond sales and clothing and scrap collection drives. She and her husband became involved in the fight against Nazi Germany's attempt to wipe out the Jewish people
Through their help with the union's war efforts they were able to form strong political and labor bonds with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This in turn led to Abramowitz's being named by New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman to the advisory board of the New York Office of Price Administration. She protested vigorously against the Nazis, among whose victims were some of her closest family members. In 1947, she traveled to Europe on a union-sponsored mission to help with the massive crisis of displaced persons in the immediate post-Holocaust years.
In a political career lasting many decades, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman served with many organizations to continue the fight for both workers rights and civil rights, including the civil rights committees of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the AFL-CIO, the CIO Community Services Committee, the National Consumers League, the American Labor Education Service, Inc., the Committee on Protective Labor Legislation, the American Association for the United Nations, and more.
She remained passionate and active in labor activities, for the rest of her life. "Bessie" passed away on December 23rd 1970. Her courage and activism as a strong, progressive, secular American Jewish woman is a precious legacy that still lives on today