THE CLOTHING TRADE: INDUSTRIAL POLITICAL VIEWS. SEPTEMBER, 1919.

Mayer Shoenfeld of the United Brotherhood of Tailors led a strike of tailors in 1896. On the inside cover, Shoenfeld writes "This booklet is not on sale. I am talking to be heard: not for hire. Read this and pass it on. It is merely a prologue - The rest to follow". This treatise was written soon after the end of the First World War which, together with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, had taken a toll on the U.S. "A snapshot of the causes of the high cost of living necessities will show that its solution does not lie in good hearts. It lies in clear thinking. In the past five years, about eighteen million producers were either killed or disabled. About six billion dollars' worth of property, industrial and farm implements, cattle, and other machineries for production, were destroyed. About five million human beings were incurably diseased and incapable of work...." Shoenfeld suggests solutions to rebuilding the country which would take both labor and industries' needs into consideration as the needs of the workers to now earn enough to make ends meet would inevitably lead to strikes "...the present upheavals are of such vaster importance and development than they were in the French Revolution, that they give all evidences of terminating in a world catastrophe that would make the recent war a mere sore on the body of the earth." Among other things, he calls on Congress to "enact laws for uniform work days throughout the country, effective immediately and terminating with it shall decide that the normal days have reappeared and the aforementioned economic ills have been cured".

A RARE labor item.