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This article is a part of Overlooked, a collection of obituaries about exceptional folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It was in northeastern Pennsylvania that Min Matheson earned her status for fearlessness. Over her 20 years as director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union there, she repeatedly confronted down mobsters in her struggle for truthful wages and secure situations for girls employees.
In one incident, she confronted a number of menacing “powerful guys,” as she known as them, in Pittston, Pa., the place she was marching on a picket line alongside different ladies.
She advised them, “You rotten hoodlums! What are you doing on this city?” she recalled in an oral historical past interview. “You don’t stay right here. We stay right here. This is our city, not yours.”
Nearby owners opened their home windows to look at the ruckus. “There are witnesses to something you suppose you’re going to do,” Matheson advised the thugs. They slinked away.
“These males virtually went loopy,” she mentioned later. “It was like, my God, how are you going to do something with a bunch of loopy ladies like that?”
Five-foot-two and with appreciable charisma, Matheson had enormous success as a union organizer starting within the mid-Nineteen Forties, when she turned head of the I.L.G.W.U.’s northeastern Pennsylvania area.
At the time, many attire producers have been shifting their operations there from New York’s garment district, the place wages had risen. The anthracite coal business that had fueled the area’s economic system was in decline, and arranged crime performed a serious position in operating the attire business, even proudly owning many factories. With males dropping their jobs within the mines, the factories supplied their wives employment and alternatives to assist their households.
When Matheson arrived, solely six of the realm’s attire factories and 650 employees have been unionized. By the time she left, in 1963, 168 factories with greater than 11,000 employees have been unionized.
At first, most of the factories have been soiled, dreary and cramped, with ladies hunched over stitching machines. The bosses screamed and belittled them and would bar them from going to the toilet besides throughout sanctioned breaks. Many factories supplied low charges per piece and cheated employees by undercounting what number of clothes they labored on.
Matheson gained raises and well being advantages, maternity advantages, loss of life advantages and higher therapy for the employees. And her union created free night lessons, a cellular well being care unit and a scholarship program for employees’ youngsters.
She additionally sought to shake up the mob-dominated established order, and the mobsters pushed again, menacingly. She had tense confrontations with them — on the road close to the union’s places of work, outdoors factories when she talked to employees, or throughout strikes.
“Her life was threatened many occasions, however she by no means gave in,” Matheson’s daughter Betty Matheson Greenberg mentioned in an interview. “They threw a purple paint bomb at our home. It may have been an actual bomb. The complete neighborhood needed us to get the hell out.”
Minnie Hindy Lurye was born on Jan. 19, 1909, in Chicago to Max and Anna (Kahn) Lurye, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her mom raised Min and her seven siblings, one in all whom died as a child. Her father was a cigar business employee and a labor activist who took Min alongside to union conferences. After cigar firms blacklisted him for pushing to unionize, he scraped by as a junk peddler.
Min dropped out of faculty within the ninth grade and took a job as a secretary. When she was 19 she met Bill Matheson, a union activist. They moved east in 1932 to hitch a textile employees’ strike in Paterson, N.J.
She labored for a number of years as a garment employee in Manhattan, with the hope of touchdown a job with the I.L.G.W.U. She did, turning into the pinnacle of a 32,000-member I.L.G.W.U. native in New York in 1937.
In 1941, Min had a daughter, Marianne; she and Bill married the identical 12 months. Their second daughter, Betty, was born in 1943. The subsequent 12 months, Min and Bill moved to Kingston, in northeastern Pennsylvania, after I.L.G.W.U. leaders advised them to “clear up the mess down there.”
For Matheson, fearlessness was a household custom. Several days after her father spoke out at a gathering in opposition to Al Capone’s efforts to muscle in on the junk sellers’ enterprise, a gangster shot him 3 times within the groin. He survived.
Her brother William Lurye, who was additionally an I.L.G.W.U. organizer, was stabbed to loss of life in a telephone sales space in Manhattan in 1949 whereas working to unionize a number of mob-affiliated factories. His funeral procession attracted 100,000 folks. Two males have been indicted however by no means convicted.
“What occurred to her father and brother gave her additional motivation to struggle for the union and struggle in opposition to organized crime,” mentioned Robert Wolensky, who, alongside together with his brother, Kenneth, has written extensively about Matheson. “She realized that ‘if I don’t do that, if we let these bastards win, then my father’s complete life is wasted, my brother’s complete life is wasted, and my life is wasted.’”
Her struggle concerned impassioned speeches and tireless dedication; many mornings she left dwelling for picket strains earlier than her daughters wakened. “The employees noticed her as somebody who was fully dedicated to the trigger,” mentioned David Scott Witwer, a Penn State Harrisburg professor of American research who has written about Matheson. “She was completely fearless on the picket line.”
A mobster as soon as approached Matheson whereas she was picketing and advised her that she ought to deliver her “weakling husband” there and see how lengthy he would final. Her husband was the union’s schooling director for jap Pennsylvania.
Matheson then walked over to a person standing close by: Russell Bufalino, the area’s prime crime boss. “I don’t have to deliver Bill right here, Russ,” she advised him, in accordance with oral historical past interviews together with her and different employees, “as a result of I’m twice the person you’ll ever be.”
One method the mob sought to take care of management was by stopping ladies within the space from voting, so Matheson accompanied a feminine employee to a polling place to verify she voted.
“Everything she did for the union was to raise ladies in society,” mentioned Catherine Rios, a Penn State Harrisburg professor of humanities who has written about Matheson.
To assist manage employees, Matheson’s union constructed robust group ties. It joined charity drives and arrange a refrain, a publication and a radio present.
Matheson took a realistic strategy, not eager to drive outlets out of enterprise and trigger employees to lose their jobs.
“She was truthful to the house owners of the costume outlets,” her daughter Marianne Kaufman mentioned in an interview. “She knew that they needed to make a residing. She would get some flak from New York headquarters, saying she wasn’t setting her sights excessive sufficient in negotiations. She would inform them: ‘This isn’t New York. We can’t ask for a similar stuff you ask for. We must be truthful.’ The manufacturing unit house owners got here to appreciate she simply needed a good wage and good working situations for the ladies.”
In 1963, David Dubinsky, the union’s president, transferred Matheson to Manhattan to move the Union Label division, which urged shoppers to purchase attire that had an I.L.G.W.U. label. The division developed the favored “Look for the Union Label” jingle.
Matheson noticed unions as pivotal to empowering common employees. She mentioned, “If you don’t have a labor union otherwise you don’t have a company to characterize you on the job, you’re actually being denied your rights, your democratic rights.”
Matheson retired in 1972, and she or he and her husband moved again to northeastern Pennsylvania that 12 months, arriving a number of months earlier than Hurricane Agnes destroyed or broken hundreds of properties there. She based the Flood Victims Action Council, which pushed for catastrophe aid. She additionally made nationwide headlines when she confronted George Romney, the U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, at a information convention, shoving a photograph of the flood destruction in his face and saying, “You don’t give a rattling whether or not we stay or die.”
Matheson died on Dec. 8, 1992, in a hospital in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was 83.
Rios mentioned somebody as proficient as Matheson ought to have risen increased within the I.L.G.W.U. “There have been no ladies within the union’s nationwide management group,” she mentioned. “She would have stepped proper as much as the highest of the ladder if she had been given the chance.”
