INTERNATIONAL LADIES’ GARMENT WORKERS’ UNION: with Dr. Nick Juravich on labor and union history, and the role of the ILGWU in garment worker organizing.

S4 Ep17 INTERNATIONAL LADIES’ GARMENT WORKERS’ UNION: with Dr. Nick Juravich on labor and union history, and the role of the ILGWU in garment worker organizing.

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Pre-Loved Podcast: International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union 

This show is for all my fellow history-lovers out there, and it’s one I have wanted to do for ages. It’s about the International Ladies Garment Workers Union -- vintage lovers will know, we hunt for those ILGWU tags!

Today I’m joined by Dr. Nick Juravich, who is an Assistant Professor of History and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Professor Juravich’s research interests include labor history, public history, urban history, the history of education, and the history of social movements in the twentieth-century United States. He teaches courses on labor and working-class history, public history and public memory, the history of public schooling, and the history of Greater Boston.

Before coming to UMass Boston, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, where he curated the exhibition Ladies Garments, Women’s Work, Women’s Activism, which exhibited in 2019, and that’s how I came across his work, and why I asked him to join me on this episode. 

In this episode, we talk about the role of the ILGWU in labor history, and how it revolutionized garment work in the United States. We discuss why consumers were trained to “look for the union label” and Nick shares some of the amazing stories he discovered researching the exhibition. We close out with a discussion of labor movements and activism today. Thanks, Nick, for coming on. Listeners, I think you’re really going to enjoy this one.

All the Episode Links:

• @NickJuravich
• Center for Women’s History - New York Historical Society

• Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure book