Garment workers strike, New York City, 1910. The poster in the window reads “Help the garment workers in their fight for bread and freedom,” in English and Yiddish.

Sixty thousand cloakmakers, most of them men, went on strike in the spring of 1910, just five months after a thirteen week strike of 20,000 shirtwaist makers, most of them young Jewish and Italian women.

The striking cloakmakers won a settlement that became known as the Protocol of Peace, a landmark agreement requiring employers to give preference to union members if they were equally qualified for a job, abolished home work, established a six-day work week of fifty-four hours, and created the machinery for arbitrating disputes and grievances.

Photograph from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union Archives, photographer unknown.

See our International Ladies Garment Workers Union exhibit, The ILGWU Social Unionism in Action. And our Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire exhibit.