David Dubinsky (; born David Isaac Dobnievski; February 22, 1892 – September 17, 1982) was a Belarusian-born American labor leader and politician. He served as president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) between 1932 and 1966, took part in the creation of the CIO, and was one of the founders of the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party of New York.
Early life and career in Russia
thumb|left|175px|Dubinsky as a young man in [[Lodz, Poland, 1900s]]
David Isaac Dobnievski was born February 22, 1892, in Brest, in what was then the Russian Empire (and is now Belarus), as the youngest of five boys and three girls. Dubinsky and his family moved to Łódź, Poland, shortly before he turned three. David's father, Bezalel Dobnievski, a religious Jew, owned a bakery, but limited himself to administrative tasks related to the enterprise. David's mother Shaina Wyshengrad died when he was eight, with his father remarrying a year and a half later. David worked from early childhood delivering bread from his father's bakery to local shops, while attending a Hebrew school, where he studied Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. He was later forced to leave a semi-private school he attended to take work in his father's bakery to replace a brother who had left abruptly.
Early union activity, arrest, and emigration to United States
During the 1905 Russian Revolution, Dubinsky attended a mass meeting which led to his kinship, if not actual membership, with the General Jewish Labor Bund, a Jewish socialist labor organization. He joined the bakers' union, which was controlled by the Bund, and owing to his superior education and fluency in several languages, was elected assistant secretary within the union by 1906. By age 15, he was leader of the local labor union.
In 1906 or 1907, Dubinsky was arrested by the Okhrana, and was held for 18 months in prison before being sentenced to hard labor in Chelyabinsk, Siberia upon reaching the age of 16. On the way to Chelyabinsk, however, he escaped containment and fled to the United States, landing in New York City in 1911, at the age of 19.
Within the ILGWU, Dubinsky's rise was swift, and he became president and general manager of Local 10 by 1921. The next year, he became a member of the ILGWU's General Executive Board, before becoming General Secretary-Treasurer in 1929. retaining the position of Secretary-Treasurer in order to avoid the sort of internecine battles that previous officers had waged in the past. He held the Presidency until 1966, while remaining Secretary-Treasurer until 1959.
Dubinsky proved to be far more durable than his predecessors. He did not brook dissent within the union and insisted that every employee of the International first submit an undated letter of resignation, to be used should Dubinsky choose to fire him later. He also acquired the power to appoint key officers throughout the union. As he explained his position at one of the union's conventions: "We have a democratic union – but they know who's boss."
Under his leadership the union, more than three fourths of whose members were women, continued to be led almost exclusively by men. Rose Pesotta, a longtime ILGWU activist and organizer, complained to Dubinsky that she had the same uncomfortable feeling of being the token woman on the ILGWU's executive board that Dubinsky had complained about when he was the only Jew on the AFL's board. The union did not, however, make any significant efforts to bring women into leadership positions during Dubinsky's tenure.
Organizing during the Great Depression
thumb|right|Dubinsky with [[Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 3, 1938]]
As weak as the ILGWU was in the aftermath of the 1926 strike, it was nearly destroyed by the Great Depression. Its dues-paying membership slipped to 25,000 in 1932 as unionized garment shops shut, abandoned unions, or stopped abiding by their union contracts.
The union recovered, however, after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised to protect workers' right to organize. As in the case in other industries with a history of organizing, that promise alone was enough to bring thousands of workers who had never been union members in the past to the union; when the union called a strike of dressmakers in New York on August 16, 1933, more than 70,000 workers joined in it – twice the number that the union had hoped for. It did not hurt, moreover, that the local leader of the NRA was quoted as saying – without any basis in fact – that President Roosevelt had authorized the strike. The union rebounded to more than 200,000 members by 1934, increasing to roughly 300,000 by the end of the Depression.
As one of the few industrial unions within the AFL, the ILGWU was eager to advance the cause of organizing employees in the steel, automobile and other mass production industries that employed millions of workers, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, at low wages. The ILGWU was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial Organization, the group that John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers formed within the AFL in 1935 to organize industrial workers, and provided key financial support and assistance; Rose Pesotta played a key role in early organizing drives in the rubber and steel industries.
Dubinsky was unwilling, on the other hand, to split the AFL into two competing federations and did not follow Lewis and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) when they formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival to, rather than a part of, the AFL. Dubinsky also had personality differences with Lewis, whom he resented as high-handed.
In addition, Dubinsky was alarmed by the presence of Communist Party members on the payroll of the CIO and the fledgling unions it had sponsored. Dubinsky was opposed to any form of collaboration with communists and had offered financial support to Homer Martin, the controversial president of the United Auto Workers, who was being advised by Jay Lovestone, a former leader of the Communist Party turned anti-communist. Lewis, by contrast, was unconcerned with the number of communists working for the CIO; as he told Dubinsky, when asked about the communists on the staff of the United Steelworkers, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?"
The ILGWU began reducing its support for the CIO and, after a few years in which it attempted to be allies with both sides, reaffiliated with the AFL in 1940. Dubinsky regained his former positions as a vice president and member of the executive council of the AFL in 1945. He was the most visible supporter within the AFL of demands to clean house by ousting corrupt union leaders; the AFL-CIO ultimately adopted many of his demands when it established codes of conduct for its affiliates in 1957.
Electoral politics
thumb|right|[[Sidney Hillman, John L. Lewis, Dubinsky, and Baruch Charney Vladeck at an American Labor Party rally]]
Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, leader of the ACWA, helped found the American Labor Party in 1936. At the time Dubinsky and Hillman were both nominal members of the Socialist Party, although Dubinsky had, by his own admission, allowed his membership to lapse during the factional fighting of the 1920s. The Labor Party served as a halfway house for socialists and other leftists who were willing to vote for liberal Democratic politicians such as Roosevelt or Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, but who were not prepared to join the Democratic Party itself.
The new party was subject to many of the same fissures that divided much of the left in the late 1930s. For a while after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Communists within the ALP condemned Roosevelt as a warmonger because of his support for Britain. At one particularly stormy meeting Dubinsky and the other leaders were only able to hold their vote endorsing Roosevelt after moving from room to room and calling the police to arrest those who had disrupted the meeting.
thumb|left|Dubinsky with [[Harry S. Truman]]
Dubinsky ultimately left the ALP in 1944 after a dispute with Hillman over whether labor leaders in New York, such as Mike Quill, who either were members of the Communist Party or were seen as sympathetic to it, should be given any role in the ALP. When Hillman prevailed, Dubinsky and his allies left to form the Liberal Party of New York. Nearly three years after his retirement, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 20, 1969, from President Richard Nixon. He died September 17, 1982, in New York City.
Dubinsky had a profound impact on the development of workers' rights, both in the garments industry and in general: among his achievements were the first garment industry pact for a 35-hour week, the first employer-contributed fund for worker vacations, affordable housing for workers, and initiatives in workers' health and training.