Jay Mazur, jealous defender of clothing workers, dies at 92

Jay Mazur, a Labor leader born in Bronx, blunt speech, who was president of the American clothing workers unions in the 1980s and 90s, a tumultuous moment in which clothing manufacturers led the flight of US factories in the Foreigner and hemorrified unions died. January 14 at his home in Manhattan. I was 92 years old.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Marc.

Son of a presuctioner in a clothing factory, Mr. Mazur (pronounced May-Zur) joined the staff of the famous International Union of Workers of Ladies of Ladies at 18. He spent his 51-year career defending militarily a force Labor of immigrants to a large extent, historically Jewish and Italian, then Chinese and Hispanic, and fiercely opposing free trade and globalization.

It was strong, effusive and kept the room, whether a convention room or a closed doorser legislators in Capitol Hill.

“He was a Jewish character, of working and colorful class,” said Jo-Ann Mort, who served as communications director, in an interview. “He loved union as a family.”

Mr. Mazur became president of the ILGWU in 1986 and then, in 1995, he took its members, who mainly converted women’s clothing, a fusion with the union of textile workers and amalgamada clothing, which represented male clothing workers. He was president of the Mergenada Union, industrial and textile employees, known as UNITE, from 1995 to 2001.

Mr. Mazur directed a 1982 historical strike in Chinatown and, in 1986, he was one of the first labor leaders to support the legalization of undocumented immigrants, when most unions saw them as an enemy that threatened the works of the Americans .

His passionate warnings that globalization would decim Republicans to promote free trade.

“The rules of this new global economy have been handled against workers,” Mr. Mazur tronó in a Seattle demonstration in 1999 that protested by a meeting of the World Trade Organization that Mr. Clinton had imagined that he showed the leadership American in El Comercio. The city was wrapped by protesters, and the National Guard was called.

In a private meeting in Washington in 2000, in which the main Democrats of Congress informed the union leaders that Vote to Grant China Permanent normal commercial relations: open the gates to imports made at a low price – Mr. Mazur became furious.

He addressed the representative Charles B. Rangel in New York, Harlem’s influential congressman, and said: “Charlie, our members hope he has their interests,” said Mark Levinson, an assistant to Mr. Mazur who was present.

“Rangel says angry: ‘Do you know what your members want? My autograph, ‘”Mr. Levinson continued, in an interview. “Jay jumped and was ready to fight.” Another union officer physically restricted him.

The enormous losses of employment in the United States that trade union officials had warned would follow the liberalization of trade with China, which included the permanent reduction of tariffs and the admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, were approved. Some economists estimate that during the following decade this “Chinese clash” resulted in The loss of almost one million American factory jobs.

When Mr. Mazur assumed the position of President of Ilgwu, his membership had already decreased by half of his peak of 1968, since the clothing factories, easy to collect and move, moved to the southern states without union or The foreign coasts. After the merger with its sister union to form Unite, the combined membership continued to fall: 240,000 in 2001, 300,000 in 1995.

Mr. Mazur was pushed to the unhappy position of managing the decline of a renowned union, familiarly known as the ILG, which had helped lead the impulse of a five -day work week, a minimum wage and a funded health insurance by the employer, and had established influence in the Democratic party thanks to decades of growth.

However, he played a fundamental role in persuading the United States industrial unions to adopt a cozy position towards immigrants. In 1986, the ILG supported the extension of the amnesty to millions of undocumented workers through the immigration reform signed by President Ronald Reagan. The union helped 3,000 of its members to obtain legal status, escorting them to interviews with the immigration and naturalization service.

“The ILGWU was the first important union within AFL-Ci in supporting amnesty for illegal people.” Muzaffar ChishtiMember of the Institute of Migration Policy and former Imigration Lawyer of Ilgwu, he said in an interview.

“It was driven by the Jewish spirit,” he added. “Jews who came to the clothing industry, many of them were refugees.”

According to Mr. Mazur, the union offered legal services to immigrant members, as well as English classes and childcare centers.

It would be another 14 years before AFL-CI, in 2000, asked for an amnesty of the blanket For undocumented immigrants. By then, there was no consensus in Washington that undocumented workers should be legalized.

In 2004, three years after the retirement of Mr. Mazur, Unite merged with the hotel employees and the restaurant employees union (here) to form Unité here. The preparation workers then left the union to form a new group, World United, but the work of the preparation continued to disappear. According government dataThe US clothes and textile works fell to 334,000 in 2019, from 1.7 million in 1990.

Although Mr. Mazur had noticed the membership by organizing non -union workers in the manufacture of clothing and other industries, their efforts were largely useless. Labor experts said the trend was inevitable: the global economy was moving in the opposite direction.

“There was no way that he or any other person could have stopped it,” RuthmanHe teaches labor studies at New York City University, he said in an interview. “All industrial unions were in the same position. The garment was a kind of prior view of the capital flight. “

Jay Mazur was born on May 21, 1932 at the East Bronx by Simon Mazur, who emigrated from Poland in 1922, and Molly Mazur, the second cousin of her father, who died when Jay was 11 years old. He left to raise four children, his father encouraged them to take strange jobs selling newspapers and shopping bags and sending for neighbors.

“My father’s attitude was that we had to win the way,” Mr. Mazur said The New York Times in 1986.

Although he went to work for the union just outside Theodore Roosevelt High School, he later obtained a degree of Cuny and a master’s degree from the University of Rutgers.

In addition to his son, Marc, his wife survives, Connie (Moak) Mazur; his daughter, Ilana Mazur; four grandchildren; three great -grandchildren; a sister, Krolick Bobbie; and a brother, Bernard Mazur.

A previous marriage to Barbara Vogel, the mother of her children, ended in divorce.

Before becoming president of Ilgwu, Mr. Mazur was the manager of his largest, 23-25 ​​local branch, whose members included thousands of immigrant Chinese women who worked in small factories in the low Manhattan.

In 1982, when contractors in Chinatown tried to break their contracts and expel the ILG, conventional wisdom was that workers would not fight because ethnic loyalty to their employers would overcome any loyalty to the union. But Mr. Mazur ignored those expectations and called a strike.

Some 20,000 workers gathered in Columbus Park in Chinatown, and employers retreated.

“People would say that there have never been a more pro-syndicalist activity by Chinese workers nowhere in the world,” said Mr. ChoShti, the scholar of immigration.