The ILGWU Archives are located at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives at Cornell University, and we are grateful to Curtis Lyons, Barbara Morley and her staff for their unfailing help in locating images, and for permission to reproduce those images in the exhibit. We are grateful as well to Michael Nash, Erika Gottfired and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives/Tamiment Library at New York University for ongoing assistance and support of Labor Arts, and for permission to reproduce images.

Front page image: "Our City, Our Union," ILGWU, 1940. Tamiment Library, New York University.


For more information consult the ILGWU Archives at the Kheel Center, Cornell University and particularly their extraordinary online exhibit about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

There is also a one hundred and seven page (!) bibliography of books and articles and other resources about the history of the garment industry in New York City, prepared for the Gotham Center's Garment Industry History Initiative.

A select few of the works consulted for this exhibit include:

Asian/Pacific/American Studies, New York University, "From Sweatshops to Unions: Wing Fong Chin." Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University. http://www.apa.nyu.edu/mapping/wingfong/1.html

Xiaolan Bao. Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948 - 1992. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Jon Bloom. “The Kellwood Strike of 1966-1967: an Unknown Civil Rights Victory.” New York Labor History Association News Service, 1988.

Margaret May Chin, "Sewing Women: Immigrants in the New York City Garment Industry," Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation 1998.

Nancy Green. "Blacks, Jews, and the 'Natural Alliance': Labor Cohabitation and the ILGWU." Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture and Society 4 (1997).

Gilbert Jonas. Freedom’s Sword. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Daniel Katz. "A Union of Many Cultures: Yiddish Socialism and Interracial Organizing in the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, 1913-1941." PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2003.

Peter Liebhold and Harry Rubenstein. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: a History of American Sweatshops, 1820--Present. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1999.

Robert Parmet. The Master of Seventh Avenue, David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement, New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Yevette Richards. Conversations with Maida Springer. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2004.

Yevette Richards. Maida Springer. Pan Africanist and International Labor Leader. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2008.

Diego Rivera & Bertram D Wolf. Portrait of America. New York: Covice Friede, 1934.

Andrew Ross. No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso Books, 1997.
Leon Stein, Editor. Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977.

Gus Tyler. Look for the Union Label: A History of the ILGWU. New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1995.



Henry Foner, Evelyn Jones Rich and Rachel Bernstein, the principles of Labor Arts, prepared this exhibit (as we have prepared all of the Labor Arts exhibits) with our web designer Ami Palombo, and with the generous help of many outside experts.

The list of people who lent their materials, their stories and their historical perspectives to this ILGWU exhibit is particularly long and no doubt incomplete. Our sincere thanks to everyone who helped us over the long course of this project.

We would like to thank:

Kathy Andrade
Jean Appleton
Jon Bloom
Sandra Bourdier
May Chen
Muzaffar Chisti
Esther Cohen
George Colon
Marcelo Coronel
Lidia Correa
Maria de Cartajena
Marie Elena Durazo
Erika Gottfried
Sherry Kane
Bob Lazar
Wanda Marzan
Jay Mazur
Martin Morand
Barbara Morley
Michael Nash
Nilda Naterpaul
Dr. Karen Nelson
Robert Parmet
Frances Pohl
Katie Quan
Ralph Reuter
Pansy Royal
Cristina Vasquez