Clara Lemlich.

The Clara Lemlich Awards for Social Activism are here.

On November 22, 1909, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish immigrant garment worker from Russia named Clara Lemlich sat in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. She listened with hundreds of fellow shirtwaist workers as Samuel Gompers and others debated whether their union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, should call a general strike. Suddenly she raced to the platform and, speaking in Yiddish, she said: “I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared–now!”

The crowd went wild. When the chairman finally restored order, he asked for someone to second the motion. The entire assemblage shouted its response.

For thirteen weeks that winter, 20,000 strikers, most of them young Jewish and Italian women, walked the picket line and beat off employer thugs. The settlement improved working conditions, though the union was only recognized in some shops.

The strike of 1909 was closely followed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a tragedy that should have been prevented.

Read more about the history of organizing and the ILGWU in the exhibit The ILGWU: Social Unionism in Action.