The offices of union boss Bruce Raynor were, until recently, a physical testament to the Jewish labor movement’s enduring power. Raynor, president of the historically Jewish garment unions, worked from an executive suite in Manhattan’s garment district, in a storied building that had been purchased with the dues of countless seamstresses and furriers and milliners…
Nearly six years after the housekeepers and dishwashers at the Congress Plaza Hotel first went on strike, the enormous hotel here on Chicago’s lakefront shows the marks of being a battle zone in America’s labor wars. Outside, the workers who went on strike in 2003 have kept up a nearly constant picket line in front…
Recent controversies about labor issues in the Jewish community have often become battles between non-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews. At the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago, this paradigm seems to hold, with rabbis from more liberal denominations protesting the Orthodox Jewish owners of the hotel. But in Chicago, the standard mold is broken by Rabbi Asher…
Since retiring from his position as CEO of Home Depot, Bernard Marcus has become one of this country’s most vocal opponents of organized labor, criticizing unions in the media and on Capitol Hill. That is a long way from Marcus’s beginnings in a Newark, N.J., tenement some 80 years ago. Marcus’s parents were immigrants from…
If you want to see the movers and shakers behind the tumult in today’s labor movement, the place to be is Stephen Lerner and Marilyn Sneiderman’s modest home in Washington after sunset concludes Judaism’s holiest day of the year. For nearly 20 years now, the two longtime union officials have been holding an annual Yom…
The annual commemoration of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire has long been a chance for the leaders of the old Jewish garment unions to come out and memorialize the Jewish roots of the labor movement. The commemoration went ahead as scheduled on March 27 — with the names of the 147 fire victims being read…
Listen to a podcast featuring Andy Stern speaking about his Jewish and labor roots:
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