Booklet cover from “Pins and Needles Vocal Selections,” containing songs from the musical, with words and music written by Harold Rome in 1937. The ILGWU’s musical revue ran on Broadway for four years, and traveled to a command performance for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. The original cast was made up of cutters, basters, and sewing machine operators who played their parts on weekends and went back to the shops Monday morning.

This image is featured in one of the bronze historical plaques installed in Union Square to commemorate the history of labor in the square.  See our exhibit on Union Square.

See La Nostra Divisa, an illustration from the fifteenth anniversary journal of the Italian Dressmakers’ Union, Local 89 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’s Union, 1934.  

See also the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union exhibit: The ILGWU: Social Unionism in Action. 

Photograph from UNITE Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University.