This newsletter is a part of Lost sight of, a line of obituaries about impressive society whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Occasions.
It was once in northeastern Pennsylvania that Min Matheson earned her popularity for fearlessness. Over her twenty years as director of the World Girls’ Garment Employees’ Union there, she again and again confronted i’m sick mobsters in her combat for honest wages and defend situations for girls employees.
In a single incident, she faced a number of menacing “tough guys,” as she known as them, in Pittston, Pa., the place she was once marching on a wood order along alternative girls.
She instructed them, “You rotten hoodlums! What are you doing in this town?” she recalled in an oral historical past interview. “You don’t live here. We live here. This is our town, not yours.”
Close by house owners opened their home windows to observe the ruckus. “There are witnesses to anything you think you are going to do,” Matheson instructed the thugs. They slinked away.
“These men almost went crazy,” she mentioned after. “It was like, my God, how can you do anything with a bunch of crazy women like that?”
5-foot-two and with really extensive air of secrecy, Matheson had plethora good fortune as a union organizer starting within the mid-Forties, when she changed into head of the I.L.G.W.U.’s northeastern Pennsylvania patch.
On the life, many attire manufacturers have been shifting their operations there from Unused York’s garment district, the place wages had risen. The anthracite coal trade that had fueled the patch’s economic system was once in lessen, and arranged crime performed a significant function in operating the attire trade, even proudly owning many factories. With males shedding their jobs within the mines, the factories presented their other halves office and alternatives to assistance their households.
When Matheson arrived, simplest six of the section’s attire factories and 650 employees have been unionized. Through the life she left, in 1963, 168 factories with greater than 11,000 employees have been unionized.
In the beginning, lots of the factories have been grimy, dreary and cramped, with girls hunched over stitching machines. The bosses screamed and belittled them and would bar them from getting to the toilet with the exception of all through sanctioned breaks. Many factories presented low charges according to piece and cheated employees by way of undercounting what number of clothes they labored on.
Matheson gained raises and condition advantages, maternity advantages, demise advantages and higher remedy for the employees. And her union created separate night time categories, a cellular condition aid unit and a scholarship program for staff’ kids.
She additionally wanted to shake up the mob-dominated situation quo, and the mobsters driven again, menacingly. She had demanding confrontations with them — in the street close the union’s workplaces, out of doors factories when she talked to employees, or all through moves.
“Her life was threatened many times, but she never gave in,” Matheson’s daughter Betty Matheson Greenberg mentioned in an interview. “They threw a red paint bomb at our house. It could have been a real bomb. The whole neighborhood wanted us to get the hell out.”
Minnie Hindy Lurye was once born on Jan. 19, 1909, in Chicago to Max and Anna (Kahn) Lurye, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her mom raised Min and her seven siblings, one in every of whom died as a toddler. Her father was once a cigar trade assistant and a exertions activist who took Min alongside to union conferences. Then cigar corporations blacklisted him for pushing to unionize, he scraped by way of as a junk peddler.
Min dropped out of college within the 9th grade and took a role as a secretary. When she was once 19 she met Invoice Matheson, a union activist. They moved east in 1932 to secured a textile employees’ hit in Paterson, N.J.
She labored for a number of years as a garment assistant in Big apple, with the hope of touchdown a role with the I.L.G.W.U. She did, turning into the pinnacle of a 32,000-member I.L.G.W.U. native in Unused York in 1937.
In 1941, Min had a daughter, Marianne; she and Invoice married the similar past. Their 2nd daughter, Betty, was once born in 1943. The nearest past, Min and Invoice moved to Kingston, in northeastern Pennsylvania, nearest I.L.G.W.U. leaders instructed them to “clean up the mess down there.”
For Matheson, fearlessness was once a nation custom. A number of days nearest her father spoke out at a gathering in opposition to Al Capone’s efforts to muscle in at the junk sellers’ trade, a gangster shot him thrice within the groin. He survived.
Her brother William Lurye, who was once additionally an I.L.G.W.U. organizer, was once stabbed to demise in a telephone sales space in Big apple in 1949 presen operating to unionize a number of mob-affiliated factories. His funeral procession attracted 100,000 society. Two males have been indicted however by no means convicted.
“What happened to her father and brother gave her extra motivation to fight for the union and fight against organized crime,” mentioned Robert Wolensky, who, along side his brother, Kenneth, has written widely about Matheson. “She realized that ‘if I don’t do this, if we let these bastards win, then my father’s whole life is wasted, my brother’s whole life is wasted, and my life is wasted.’”
Her combat concerned impassioned speeches and tireless determination; many mornings she left house for wood strains ahead of her daughters aroused from sleep. “The workers saw her as someone who was completely committed to the cause,” mentioned David Scott Witwer, a Penn Situation Harrisburg schoolmaster of American research who has written about Matheson. “She was utterly fearless on the picket line.”
A mobster as soon as approached Matheson presen she was once picketing and instructed her that she will have to convey her “weakling husband” there and notice how lengthy he would extreme. Her husband was once the union’s training director for jap Pennsylvania.
Matheson next walked over to a person status within reach: Russell Bufalino, the patch’s supremacy crime boss. “I don’t need to bring Bill here, Russ,” she instructed him, in keeping with oral historical past interviews along with her and alternative employees, “because I’m twice the man you’ll ever be.”
A method the mob wanted to preserve keep watch over was once by way of combating girls within the section from vote casting, so Matheson accompanied a feminine assistant to a polling playground to create certain she voted.
“Everything she did for the union was to elevate women in society,” mentioned Catherine Rios, a Penn Situation Harrisburg schoolmaster of humanities who has written about Matheson.
To backup arrange employees, Matheson’s union constructed sturdy population ties. It joined treasure drives and arrange a refrain, a publication and a radio display.
Matheson took a realistic method, no longer short of to force retail outlets into bankruptcy and purpose employees to lose their jobs.
“She was fair to the owners of the dress shops,” her daughter Marianne Kaufman mentioned in an interview. “She knew that they had to make a living. She would get some flak from New York headquarters, saying she wasn’t setting her sights high enough in negotiations. She would tell them: ‘This isn’t New York. We can’t ask for the same things you ask for. We have to be fair.’ The factory owners came to realize she just wanted a decent wage and good working conditions for the women.”
In 1963, David Dubinsky, the union’s president, transferred Matheson to Big apple to move the Union Label segment, which steered shoppers to shop for attire that had an I.L.G.W.U. label. The segment evolved the prevalent “Look for the Union Label” jingle.
Matheson noticed unions as pivotal to empowering reasonable employees. She mentioned, “If you don’t have a labor union or you don’t have an organization to represent you on the job, you’re really being denied your rights, your democratic rights.”
Matheson retired in 1972, and she or he and her husband moved again to northeastern Pennsylvania that past, arriving a number of months ahead of Typhoon Agnes destroyed or broken hundreds of houses there. She based the Overspill Sufferers Motion Council, which driven for catastrophe peace. She additionally made nationwide headlines when she faced George Romney, the U.S. secretary of Housing and City Construction, at a information convention, shoving a photograph of the spillage devastation in his face and announcing, “You don’t give a damn whether we live or die.”
Matheson died on Dec. 8, 1992, in a clinic in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was once 83.
Rios mentioned somebody as gifted as Matheson will have to have risen upper within the I.L.G.W.U. “There were no women in the union’s national leadership team,” she mentioned. “She would have stepped right up to the top of the ladder if she had been given the opportunity.”
