Two Biggest U.S. Apparel Unions Will Join Forces : Labor: Merger will create a 355,000-member organization as industry fights shrinking job base, foreign competition.

In a marriage that says less about the partners’ attraction for each other than about the size of the threat they face from foreign competition and domestic politics, the nation’s two top apparel unions announced Monday that they will merge.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union said they will combine to form a 355,000-member organization, with large concentrations in the clothing industry of greater New York and the textile industry in the Southeast.

The ILGWU’s top California official said the merger will strengthen his union’s efforts to organize Southern California’s sprawling garment industry, where union penetration is less than 10% and where violations of minimum wage and health and safety regulations are rife.

“Whatever unions can do to pool their strength against foreign competition, they must do now, as they try to defend a shrinking job base,” said Lawrence Kahn, a professor of labor and collective bargaining at Cornell University.

The new union--to be named UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees--will be formed after a ratification vote of both unions’ memberships in Miami Beach in June. The general executive boards of the two unions agreed to the merger last Thursday and announced it Monday during the annual winter meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council in Bal Harbor, Fla.

UNITE will be launched with a $10-million organizing drive to counter “the re-emergence of sweatshops and the unbridled union-busting of countless employers, large and small, in recent years,” Jay Mazur, ILGWU president, said in a statement Monday.

The Los Angeles area is home to a huge garment and textile industry which, unlike many other economic sectors in California, was at least holding steady if not growing in employment during the state’s recent economic downtown.

A union official put the number of apparel and textile jobs in Los Angeles County alone at 100,000--and that’s not counting the underground economy that employs perhaps one-third more workers. But the ILGWU has only 4,000 to 5,000 members in the western states, the official said.

A study last fall by Mayor Richard Riordan’s office spotlighted textiles as an economic sector--along with biomedicine, entertainment and software--that had helped to create almost as many jobs in Los Angeles since 1980 as had been lost by cutbacks in the aerospace and computer hardware industries.

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Noting that the two unions helped push for the 40-hour workweek, national unemployment insurance and the minimum wage, Amalgamated President Jack Sheinkman said: “We now face a Republican Congress that seeks to replace 60 years of social gains with a future in which corporations call the shots and workers are pushed back. That’s why now is the moment to come together under one banner to fight for a more just society.”

Both organizations are rich in history and--as Sheinkman put it Monday--are “cut from the same cloth.” The ILGWU was formed in 1900, the Amalgamated in 1914.

Leaders of the two unions, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated, rose to positions of great political power in the 1930s and ‘40s but became bitter enemies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt purportedly referred to Hillman when he told party leaders choosing a vice presidential candidate in 1944 to “clear it with Sidney.”

Unlike their predecessors, Mazur and Sheinkman see eye to eye. Mazur will be the combined union’s first president, and Sheinkman will retire after the merger. The No. 2 position, secretary-treasurer, will be taken by Arthur R. Loevy of Chicago, who now holds that title with Amalgamated. Executive vice presidents will be Bruce S. Raynor of the Amalgamated and Edgar Romney of the ILGWU.

The unions have lost about half their membership over the last 20 years as garment manufacturers have moved many of their operations to cheap-labor countries.

The Amalgamated has about 200,000 members, mainly in men’s apparel and textiles but with some representation in auto parts and auto supply, shoes, laundry and tanning, as well as all 7,000 Xerox manufacturing workers in the United States and Canada. The ILGWU has 155,000 workers in women’s and children’s apparel, down from a peak of 457,000 members in 1968.

“Part of coming together was an attempt to stabilize membership loss,” Mazur told reporters as the announcement was made Monday. “It will give us increased presence--if you want to call it power I will accept that--in the legislative arena, the political arena, with the industry,” he said.

Steve Nutter, the international vice president who heads the ILGWU’s western region, said that trying to organize large employers “is a full-court press and the more players you have on the floor, the better your press.”

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Times wire services also contributed to this story.

* WORD FROM GORE

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