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Sewn in Coal Country - An Oral History of the Ladies’ Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995 (Hardcover)
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Sewn in Coal Country - An Oral History of the Ladies’ Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995 (Hardcover)
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By the mid-1930s, Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal industry was
facing a steady decline. Mining areas such as the Wyoming Valley
around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Pittston were full of willing
workers (including women) who proved irresistibly attractive to New
York City’s “runaway shops”—ladies’ apparel factories
seeking lower labor and other costs. The International Ladies’
Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) soon followed, and the Valley
became a thriving hub of clothing production and union activity.
This volume tells the story of the area’s apparel industry
through the voices of men and women who lived it. Drawing from an
archive of over sixty audio-recorded interviews within the
Northeastern Pennsylvania Oral and Life History Collection, Sewn in
Coal Country showcases sixteen stories told by workers, shop
owners, union leaders, and others. The interview subjects recount
the ILGWU-led movement to organize the shops, the conflicts between
the district union and the national office in New York, the
solidarity unionism approach of leader Min Matheson, the role of
organized crime within the business, and the failed efforts to save
the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Robert P. Wolensky places the
narratives in the larger context of American clothing manufacturing
during the period and highlights their broader implications for the
study of labor, gender, the working class, and oral history. Highly
readable and thoroughly enlightening, this significant contribution
to the study of labor history and women’s history will appeal to
anyone interested in the relationships among workers, unions,
management, and community; the effects of economic change on an
area and its residents; the role of organized crime within the
industry; and Pennsylvania history—especially the social history
of industrialization and deindustrialization during the twentieth
century.
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