Abstract
Robert "Buzz" Rosenfeld talks about his experiences as a lawyer in the garment industry in Cleveland. He negotiated with unions for the companies for many years as did his father. He shares his experiences in the industry: negotiations with unions, how some of the factories worked, technology, and comments on its decline in the Cleveland area. He talked briefly about driving the mayor of University Heights in parades.
Loading...
Interviewee
Rosenfeld, Robert (interviewee)
Interviewer
Frisch, Marc (interviewer); Martin, Sean (interviewer); Smith, Kelsey (interviewer)
Project
Garment Industry
Date
6-19-2012
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
74 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Robert Rosenfeld Interview, 2012" (2012). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 211001.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/385
Transcript
Robert Rosenfeld [00:00:02] Robert Rosenfeld.
Marc Frisch [00:00:04] Today is June 19, 2012. We’re here at the home of Robert Rosenfeld, who is a retired attorney, and he had a lot of experience in labor law with a lot of manufacturers.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:00:24] Where do you want me to begin?
Marc Frisch [00:00:26] Well, why don’t you give us a little background about yourself?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:00:29] Okay. I left the labor board, the National Labor Relations Board, in 1962, and joined my father, who had represented some of the apparel industry in Cleveland for, at that time, 25 years, or close to 25 years or so in the late 30s. He represented them primarily as a labor attorney and primarily as a negotiator, not in the legal framework of corporate business, although he did represent Bobbie Brooks initially in the corporate world. And they switched over to Han Loesure, and my dad just did the labor work after that. The industry in Cleveland was highly organized in terms of union. The coat and suit industry, in which my father did a great deal of work. The sportswear was. Was primarily Bobbie Brooks, which started in about 1939. Two men, Maurice Saltzman and Max Reiter. Yeah. There was also Dalton. It wasn’t as large as it would become. Dalton was Dalton Knitwear, Dalton Industries. I can’t remember.
Marc Frisch [00:02:45] Excelsior.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:02:47] Excelsior Knitting, yes. And then it was founded by Arthur Derry. And then he lived a ripe old age, and his three sons were in the business. Kenny, Jimmy and Bobby. I ended up- Let’s see, I went to work with my dad in ’62, in the summer of ’62. And then we. He died in ’67. And after that, I was negotiating the knitwear agreement because Bobbie Brooks had bought Lampel Sportswear, and they did not have anybody other than, I want to say, Al Siegel did the negotiating, and nobody had a lot of faith in him. So I kind of took it over and represented the knitwear industry as a group to negotiate with the union. And then I started representing Dalton, which was a very large company located first at about 65th and Euclid and later out in Willoughby. Willoughby, right about a little. Maybe a mile east of Sahm center and Route 20. It was a very large factory. And they also had a subsidiary factory down in Asheville, North Carolina, that went by the name of Hadley Sportswear. And Hadley made primarily, I think, jackets and bottoms for Dalton, for up in Cleveland. They. Hadley had been a cashmere house, as was Dalton. And every girl always dreamed of a Hadley Cashmere or a Dalton Cashmere. And also in that time, Bobby had brought. Had bought not only Lampel Sportswear, but Frisch Knitting that Mark and his brother Jerry had And that became part of the fold. And I represented them. What do I want to tell you about all of this? The union? I’ll give you an example of the relationship with the union. We were negotiating with David Dubinsky, the president of the union. And Bobbie Brooks was the first company in First Union, ILG International Heavy Garment Workers Union Company that negotiated a master agreement covering all of the factories, Bobbie Brooks, at one time, that is, all of them had a common date. And they were all negotiated as part of one agreement. There was a master agreement with individual supplements setting forth the economics for each of these subsidiary factories of Bobbie Brooks. And there were many of them. They grew like topsy over the years. We were negotiating with Dubinsky and either my dad or I said, you know, Dubinsky, you keep this up, you’re murdering us. You’re killing us. He says, yeah, I know, but we’re Jewish murderers. We’ll feel it. That was the relationship. Another time we had made an offer and Dubinsky says he was a little Polish cutter and had risen to the heights of uniondom. And the union bought the Ford New York headquarters of Ford, the whole building, lock, stock and barrel, including the furniture. And nothing gave him greater pleasure than to know he was sitting at the desk of Edsel Ford, this Polish cutter from wherever. And at one point we had made an offer. And he says, I’ll take my people, we’ll talk. And he gets to the door and my dad says, Dubinsky, remember that offer contains this other clause. He looks at him, he says, Rosenfeld, mein balls. You’ve already got the other little thing. You’ll leave me I please need it. It was a different sort of thing. We had to settle because the industry really couldn’t take a strike. Any manufacturer, there’s no such thing as a loyal buyer of merchandise in any department store anywhere. They’re loyal as long as you make delivery at the right price and that that will sell. But if you don’t make delivery, they’re going to find somebody to fill those running feet of space that they have available. And so you can’t strike because you can’t make delivery. And if you can’t make delivery, you’ll never get back in. So the union knew that, and they would push until they thought that they couldn’t push anymore. And then they would settle. Cleveland, we had Prince Biederman was a nice size coat and suit house. We had Marion Sue, which was a maternity ware that was run by Howard Miller. We had a little funny guy, Euclid Sportswear, I can’t remember the owner, but the owner was not Bert. No, Layton was workwear.
Marc Frisch [00:10:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I know.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:10:20] But I remember I had to defend him once in an arbitration. He was in his 90s and he was accused of hitting this 6 foot 5 guy and he couldn’t clear 5 feet. And he was 90 years old, but he. He was a character. I’m. I’m rambling. You want to get me more focused? Where do you want me to be?
Marc Frisch [00:10:45] Were there any hot issues between the union and manufacturers? Anything? Anything?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:10:53] There was almost a strike in the late. In about ’47, ’46, ’47, ’45, ’46, something like that, the union wanted to create a health and welfare plan. And this was before the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. And the- My father insisted on having- Unlike the New York health and welfare funds, which were run by the union, my father insisted that this one be jointly managed by a board of trustees, half union and half company. He also insisted that there be, if in the event of a tie vote between the board members on any issue, that it would go to binding arbitration before a judge appointed by- I can’t remember whether it was the chief judge of the U.S. District Court or the chief judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeal or Common Pleas court. In any event, it was not going to be Dabinsky show. It was going to be a board of trustees split in half. And then the employers would fund the welfare fund with contributions based on a percent of payroll. 2%. I think it was 2 or 2 and a half percent. And Cleveland became one of the star attractions within that health and welfare because they took their headquarters at 30, about 33rd and Euclid. It was an old mansion next door to a motel that was I think the downtown YWCA, if I’m not mistaken. I think it was. There was a hotel in there, a motel. In any event, the- Where was I going? Oh, the union started their own clinic within that building and the second floor was a medical clinic. And they had countless examples of discovering TB among the workers who got a free annual checkup and including an X-ray. And that was highly unusual except in this socialist union atmosphere. And the employers went along with it. My dad later got a letter from Senator Taft or his office, and Senator Taft authored the Taft-Hartley Act. As part of the Taft-Hartley Act, besides some various unfair labor practices that came about against unions at that time, secondary boycotts and those things, there was a provision in the Taft-Hartley Act for how a welfare fund or pension fund to which employer contributions are made, how that had to be structured. And it copied almost word for word the Cleveland health and welfare plan. And the letter was that we were the only plan in the country. And we submitted this plan to Congress to review it. And we were the only plan in the country that had everything that Taft thought should be in there. It was kind of an interesting and unique situation. Bobbie Brooks kept was probably the bellwether for the industry in terms of negotiations with the union. Whatever they settled for pretty much set up the pattern for the sportswear industry not within Greater Cleveland, Ohio. Jerry was the general counsel, but Al Borowitz and Gene Friedheim were the outside counsel. I was the labor council. And we had Bobbie Brooks had a plant in Cleveland, two plants really. They had a sewing factory at 38th and Kelly. And then they had another one on Superior. Then they had a factory in Middletown, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. And then they had north of Cincinnati or Dayton, I think it’s Cincinnati, it’s up almost into Indiana. And then they had another one on the Ohio river in Bel Air, Ohio. And that plant had been a district 50. United Mine Workers had taken that plant over when Bobbie Brooks. I don’t remember whether they bought it or opened it. I think they opened it raw. I don’t think that they bought a going factory from somebody. And the union had a clause in it that almost led to a strike, but Saltzman agreed to settle it that any company owned or operated by the company, Bobbie Brooks, would become union regardless of what the people wanted. There would be no vote. And that was legal under an amendment to the Taft-Hartley Act that was passed in the ’50s. In ’58, I believe, and damned if I- It was the Labor Management Relations- Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1958. And it got rid of the non-communist affidavit. In those days, union officials had to sign an affidavit that they were not and had not been a member of the Communist Party. So it was a holdover from what’s his name up in Wisconsin, McCarthy. And so it was legal for the union, for the garment workers to require that. And they did. And so we opened up factories and they had to go union. There was no two ways about it. And I want to say that Frisch was non union when we bought it. And as a result of Bobbie Brooks buying Frisch, it had to become union.
Marc Frisch [00:19:13] Can I insert something?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:19:14] Of course.
Marc Frisch [00:19:15] In 1967 we were doing three quarters of our business with Bobbie Brooks. And I think that’s the time that that whole union thing was coming about. They didn’t own us. We were independent. And they came back and said, you have to join the union or we can’t do business with you anymore.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:19:37] Yeah.
Marc Frisch [00:19:37] And Jerry and I decided that we’re not going to go along with that. And we said, no, we’re not going to join. And January 30th, I think it was November, but the 30th of that year, January 30th, we were completely cut off. They pulled out everything because that was the beginning of that.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:20:00] It was unique to that class clause requiring contractors. Bearing in mind that there are relatively few manufacturers in the apparel industry, it is done primarily by use of contractors. And I’m speaking back then; today it’s done by Orientals somewhere. But back then it was done by contractors like Frisch Knitting and other contractors that were over on 6th Street, Lee Wall Sportswear and Winter Sportswear. And they were contract shops. They didn’t produce anything of under their own label. They made bottoms or tops or jackets for the jobber. And it was generally a second. It was generally a violation of the Taft-Hartley Act to require people to go union, except the apparel industry got an exception. And this was interesting sidelight. It was due to an unholy alliance between Barry Goldwater, the archconservative, and John Kennedy, the archliberal. And the two of them, as senators, had passed that act back in the ’50s, in the late ’50s. And that’s where it came from. And how those two ever got together to do that, I don’t know. But they did. And that is how it came about. What else can I tell you, Sam?
Marc Frisch [00:22:01] Janis, was he in power?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:22:04] Well, there was, in Cleveland there was. The first name I know of was Louis Stulberg. Louis Stulberg became the president of the International after Dubinsky died. He was secretary-treasurer of the union, a very high-ranking office in New York. But he was head of the Cleveland Joint, what was called the Cleveland Joint Board of the ILGWU. And then a guy named Abe Kotovsky took over. And my father told the story of negotiating with him. And he opened his desk, my dad opened his desk and took out a pill. Kotovsky. And Dan says, here, I want you to have one of these. Kotovsky says, what’s that? He said, It’s a vitamin B12. That’s going to calm my nerves and I don’t want to have an unfair advantage over you, so I want you to take one. It’s craziness. After Kotovsky died, Sam Janis came in. He had been, you know, I think he was running New Jersey, but not the eastern region. He worked for Eddie Kramer, who was running the eastern region of the union. And Sam got a promotion to run Cleveland. And Sam was okay. Sam, he may still be alive to my knowledge.
Marc Frisch [00:23:57] This is my apartment building. He used to-
Robert Rosenfeld [00:24:00] Where over- Yes. Now, I have never seen or heard of his death, but he- If he is alive, he’s well into his 90s. And problem with Sam, he took over at a time when the industry was not particularly flourishing. And he and his daughter Barbara, who took over from Sam, watched the demise of the industry. Today there’s virtually no sewing here except Hugo Boss for what’s the Joseph J. And F. Yeah, I can’t. You know, I’ve got a client down in Kent that’s a specialty sewing things like clean room uniforms or coats, you know, lab coats, that kind of thing. Gloves that will protect you from something or other. It’s all specialty. It’s all relatively small run. And there’s another one over on Broadway, I think. I think there’s- He had a sewing factory over there. A contractor that the Kent factory used. Euclid. Euclid Garment. No, that Larry is Ed Davis Partners.
Marc Frisch [00:26:03] Yes, was Eddie’s brother.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:26:07] Okay. And they- Oh, all right. Yeah, that was at Broadway.
Marc Frisch [00:26:11] Yeah, right.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:26:13] That’s gone. Okay. So to my knowledge, JNF is about the only game in town today. But over the years, I. I represented Dalton, Bobbie Brooks, all the knitwear. There’s a very large Ohio Knitting, Ohio Knitting and Frisch. I did Bamberger Rheinfall and then Steve Ross had Rossmor that was knit hockey caps out in Twinsburg. And I went to Washington. The union asked me to. If I would come to Washington and testify because all of the union contracts prohibited homework. And the law, the regulations rather of the U.S. department of labor prohibited homework in the knitted outerwear industry. So there were some women in Vermont who were knitting hockey caps, hand knit on knitting individual knitting machines. And so they asked me to go and testify and I testified on behalf of Bobbie Brooks and Jonathan Logan and Leslie Fay and all these very, very large companies. And Rossmor in Twinsburg that made hockey caps under a union contract. And you don’t realize, I didn’t know that the- It was being filmed. My testimony was being filmed by CBS or whoever Walter Cronkite broadcast for. And that night, there I am testifying against all these poor little old ladies in Vermont who wanted to knit. And I was getting calls from all over the country from people who knew me. One guy calls from Wilmington, Delaware. He says, my wife wants to knit me a sweater. Can she do that tonight? That sort of thing. It was wonderful. Of course, the regulations were reversed and they are now knitting hockey caps in Vermont. But I represented Leslie Fay, which was a very large manufacturer that had a huge complex of about nine factories around Wilkes Barrel. And give you an example of this industry for years, the cutters who are the hoi polloi of the union, they’re the ones and they’re highly skilled. I don’t take anything away from them. Their ability to lay out a pattern with the goal of using the least amount of cloth to make this pattern. And a pattern will consist of the sleeves and the collars and the pockets and the front and the back and all of that all on one sheet. And then they lay it out. And then with a knife, they. A reciprocal, reciprocating knife blade goes up and down and they would slice out the patterns. There was a new machine that Bobbie Brooks had, and we had no trouble installing it. But Leslie Fay tried for years, literally to get that machine into their cutting room. And they couldn’t do it. The union wouldn’t let them. And finally there was a. I don’t know, like a Memorial Day holiday or something. And they tore out the wall to the cutting room and they put in the machine and put the wall back over the weekend. And they had the computerized marker, because the markers were getting fortunes for arranging these patterns on the cloth and then plotting it out. Well, now there was a computer, and if you saw it at work, it was shuffling these pieces until you put in how much you wanted, how much percentage you wanted covered of that cloth. 80%, 85%, 88%. And it would keep arranging until it hit that number or it would go out infinitely item because it was impossible to hit the number. So then you’d scale it back and it looked like this mass of jigsaw puzzling. And that’s what it was. It was the ability to put together a jigsaw puzzle. But that was part of the mechanization, the automation of the industry. Bobbie Brooks was a lead in that, in the country with surging machines that would automatically sew the side seam on pants and that sort of thing. They had a research department that, you know, with engineers who. That’s what they did was to try and figure out how to do things, automation. Because labor was a very high percentage of the selling price that they could get of the wholesale selling price. You get the fabric and you had labor and labor was a very intensive part of it. So that was a problem. You’ve asked how did I get into it? I think I said earlier, my father had something to do with the NRA codes. There were code authorities, and he somehow got into the millinery code authority. And I haven’t figured out quite how, but it had to do something with an uncle down in Richmond where he worked for a brief period of time who had a department store and sold hats or something. I don’t quite understand that. But anyhow, there were. Under the National Recovery Act of Roosevelt, there were code authorities for various industries and the millinery industry had one. And that kind of put him in touch with apparel. And they came to my dad in the ’30s, the apparel industry, and particularly the coat and suit industry. And they asked him to negotiate to cut down the piecework rate. Because all of the whole industry was on piecework except this guy down in Kent whose father or great grandfather started the business in the 1850s, honest to God. So it was all piecework. And my dad, according to my dad, he said, no, I. I will not negotiate to cut rates. I won’t do that. He said, I always believed in a fair wage, and if people make money, some of it will rub off on me. So that was his attitude. They came back a year later and he said, I told you no last year because of. I didn’t want to cut the rate. What do you want this year? And they said, we would like peace. When we set a rate, we want it done. And it’s when we negotiate. Because in those days, rates were negotiated in most factories. And. And he said, when we set a rate, we want it done. We want. That’s the rate, whether it’s 2 cents, 3 cents, 5 cents, that’s the rate. And until that garment is finished for the season, that’s the rate. And we keep getting stoppages because they don’t think it’s enough and that sort of thing. We want peace. He said, that’ll do. And so he started representing the industry in about the late ’30s. And then Bobbie Brooks was born and he negotiated with them. And then I joined him in ’62. I had finished up at the Labor Board. I had had four years there. And somebody told me, when you can write the affidavit of a witness before you talk to them, it’s time to leave. So I did, and I joined my dad and we worked together for five years until he died. And fortunately for me, the industry retained me and kept me on and expanded my representation because my dad didn’t have Dalton, but I did. And I worked with Bert Levy and Rocco Scrunchy [phonetic], one on the knitting side, one on the sewing side. And Bert just died a couple years ago, but he, he was in charge of cut and sew there, and Rocco was in charge of knitting. We negotiated together for that. That’s how I, how I got into it. And, you know, I had worked with the Labor Board for four years trying cases and investigating. And so I knew something of what I was talking about. And then my dad was a fabulous teacher. And so I had a master’s name, William, William H. And so I had the privilege of working with him. And it was fun. We were the soft goods attorneys in town. We represented Fabric Centers, the Joann, they’re now Joann fabric shops. We represented the apparel industry. We didn’t represent any menswear, except we represented Campus Sportswear. But they were non union. And all they had here was, was a sewing factory. I mean, a warehouse. They had three. They had a big warehouse where the 30th, 30th and Euclid, 36th and Euclid, where the Welfare Department is today. That was the campus warehouse and shipping. And they had three factories. Campus was Campus Sweater and Sportswear. And it was owned by a couple of guys, Sam Kaufman and Loren Weber. And they were a very large manufacturer. And they had three factories in Uniontown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. Indiana, Pennsylvania. And not Newcastle, but someplace right outside of, right over the border. Name escapes me at the moment. There was a knitting mill, so the sweater. So they had those three factories, and then they had other contractors, but the three factories were amalgamated. And I negotiated those contracts. But we always had something going on down there. The Pennsylvania people were different. They would wildcat at the drop of a hat, they’d have a wildcat strike. They were tough. They would demand much different than the rest of the world. And they were joined by their sisters in Bel Air, Ohio. They were equally rough to deal with. I don’t know. The-
Marc Frisch [00:39:49] Want to talk about your car collection?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:39:55] [laughs] Well, that doesn’t have much to do with the apparel industry, except representing them allowed me to get into it. I had some cars at one point in time. I am carless now, Collector carless. Sold my last one. When you’re down to your last Rolls, you know it’s time. Time to go. I used to drive the mayor of University Heights in her parade every year. And she had term limits thrust upon her. And she was 80. She was about 82 when she retired. Been mayor for 32 years. So I went to her retirement dinner, about 800 people in the hall. And I asked to have- There was a video of her life as a mayor. And the Rolls kept showing up frequently in the video because it was, you know, very flashy. And she would stand on the front seat and wave and we’d throw candy. I gotta tell you this story. We had the, sitting in one year, sitting in the back seat was a monsignor, president of John Carroll. And he’s in his makeup, his collar and robe. And the two- There was, I think Beryl’s husband or my wife was sitting in the back. And the two of them, the president and the wife, her husband would throw out candy. And as we passed the Orthodox enclaves in University Heights, here’s the monsignor throwing the candy out. It’s okay, it’s kosher! And here’s this guy with his collar and robe, and he’s yelling, it’s kosher. [laughs] And these women are looking at it and they don’t know whether to give it to their kids or not. I was just wondering. So I got up at the retirement dinner and I said. I said, I’m here to alleviate the guilt that those of you may have who voted for term limits. I alleviate it because Beryl did not retire because of term limits, nor did she retire because of her age. She retired because I sold the Rolls-Royce and she was damned if she was going to walk in the parade. [laughs] The interesting thing- Oh, I know something that is important. The apparel industry in New York always had an impartial chairman as a master arbitrator. The first one settling, I think the shirt makers strike of 19, something. 1901 or ’02, something like that. Louis Brandeis was the first impartial chairman in the apparel industry. Since that date, they have always had an impartial in the coat and suit industry of New York, the sportswear industry of New York and the dress industry. And those were three totally separate. Similar. Similar skills, similar conditions, but different people. And they had never had an impartial chairman in the manufacturers like a Bobbie Brooks or a Dalton. They had, you know, a group. The industry literally would be 75 or 100 or 150 or 200 manufacturers who negotiated as a group. So Dubinsky said to us in negotiations, he said, I want an impartial chairman. He said, I don’t like that you should fire somebody, or we got a problem and you got to go look everywhere to go find an arbitrator. I want an impartial chairman. So Stan Marshall at that time was head of manufacturing for Bobbie Brooks. And my dad and I were there, and Stan said, who you got in mind? He said, it’s somebody you couldn’t say no to no matter what. I said, Dubinsky, that person died 2,000 years ago. [laughs] He said, well, no, no, no. And he named three individuals to be, any one of which he would accept. It was Clark Kerr, I think he’s head of the California schools, colleges. I don’t know what you’d call him, but he was head of all of the state universities. And then there were presidents of each one. Clark Kerr, I forget. And David Cole. David Cole was Harry Truman’s first appointment after the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act created the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. And David Cole was the first chairman of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. He had since retired from that, and he went into private practice of being an arbitrator. He was a Harvard graduate. And as I found out a little about him, he was right. It was a person you could not say no to. And so we retained him. And we were the first manufacturer in the country in the apparel industry that had a named impartial chairman. And he had the authority to issue injunctions if there was a wildcat strike or violation of the contract. He could appoint a substitute if he couldn’t handle something quickly enough. And, you know, he was, when he sat at the end of the table in an arbitration, you really thought that God was there. He had that kind of presence. He was just- He was fabulous. And he had done equally well as head of the Federal Mediation with the- I recall was the miners, miners strike, I think it was. And it may have been. I don’t think it was a steel strike during the war. I’m sorry. Yeah, there was- And it was John L. And he- And Truman and Cole and Truman had- What’s his name? Lewis. John L. Lewis in the White House to try and get it done. And he told the story of playing up to Lewis’s love of history, that this was the table on which Lincoln signed the Proclamation, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc. And as Cole described it, he fondled the table and then turned to Lewis and turned to Truman and said, The miners will be back tomorrow morning. Interesting sideline. But anyhow, that was David Cole. And we had him as the impartial chairman. And then I don’t know that he died or he asked- He stopped doing it or something. And we replaced him with Howard Gamser. And that was a very unusual thing. It was fitting because Bobbie Brooks was the first master agreement in the country. And then there were others that followed. Jonathan Logan was a very large. You’re too young to know these companies, but Bobbie Brooks used to make. We had a double-knit factory down in Hialeah, Florida, and another one in Coamo, Puerto Rico, and I represented them and then I represented Bowdoin Apparel in Miami. So I kind of traveled.
Sean Martin [00:50:02] If I could ask a few questions. I have the impression that much of what you’ve talked about, really, you’ve given us some examples from the ’40s and the ’50s. Could you say, or perhaps give more examples of your experience in, let’s say in the ’60s and ’70s, later period? Is there anything about that later period that’s especially-
Robert Rosenfeld [00:50:26] Well, it doesn’t go much beyond 1982 when Bobbie Brooks went under and not too long after that. I don’t remember precisely when that Dalton went out. I mean, all of them, virtually all of them have gone out of business at one time or another. And really what I did was nothing different than what I did in the ’60s and ’70s, except I was doing it with less people, you know, for instance, in the ’70s, I believe - I’m almost sure it was the ’70s - the workers at Bowdoin Apparel went on strike for recognition. They had gone on strike, not for recognition. The workers had gone on strike at Bowdoin Apparel in Hialeah, Florida, for they were complaining about some grievances and they were out on the street. I don’t remember now what the grievances were, but the head of the union from Atlanta, Nick Bonanno, got on a plane, went down, sat on the picket line with him and said, as long as you’re out here, how about signing a union card? So he got a majority of people signed up and they called off the strike. When Bowdoin signed a recognition agreement that the union would be recognized, well, then they asked, Bowdoin called me and asked me if I could send them a copy of the, I don’t know, the Dalton contract or the Bobbie Brooks contract or something. So instead of mailing it, flew down with it, and they liked that. And so they hired me to negotiate the Bowdoin contract. And I had these two knitting mills that must have employed a couple thousand workers in Hialeah, Florida. There was my retirement. They’re both gone, both out. But they lasted for a while, but not, not unduly long. And, and I honestly can’t, I can’t blame the union for it. Nobody was making big bucks on this the workers, they had a pension for many, many years. I think it was painful. Something like 30 or $50 a month. You know, it was peanuts for the pension. The health plan did not include very much hospitalization at all until I want to say, probably it was into the, it was into the ’70s that they got hospitalization. We boosted our contribution here from 2% to 5% and we shaved the wage increase by something in order to make it come out right. And the union welfare fund purchased Blue Cross insurance. But you know, for a highly organized industry, the health plan until then really sucked. And the same was true in New York. You know, they did things, but in small ways. They had a pension plan, but it was so minuscule that it was almost meaningless. And the same with the health plan. And the wages weren’t anything spectacular at all. Not for a highly organized setup of employers. You know, there weren’t. There was some non-union competition, but not a lot.
Marc Frisch [00:55:33] [inaudible]
Robert Rosenfeld [00:55:37] That’s- Yeah, I think you’re right. I know you’re right. But-
Marc Frisch [00:55:43] They weren’t big, they were very small.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:55:45] Yeah. And you know, Lion Tailoring, they, I think those were, I think amalgam, I know they were amalgamated.
Sean Martin [00:55:59] I understand that you represented your clients, these different manufacturing companies, but you’ve mentioned a lot that you were asked by the union to testify or in some sense represent them on different occasions. Can you say more about when you represented the industry, the companies themselves, and when you might have worked, represented unions? [inaudible]
Robert Rosenfeld [00:56:26] Well, I never represented the union, the garment workers’ union. I never represented them for which a charge was made that I never charged a fee for it. I was, in going to Washington to testify at that Department of Labor hearing, I was helping out my client in Twinsburg that made hockey caps. And I decided in order to make some noise, I should be able to tell them how large a client base I could generate. So I called Richard Schwartz from Jonathan Logan, who was the second largest of the largest apparel company in the country and got his permission to use his company name that I represented him. And Leslie Fay I already represented and you know, it just kind of. I did that, but that was- That- That was not representing the union per se.
Sean Martin [00:57:37] That’s not your, that was not your standard work.
Robert Rosenfeld [00:57:41] No, I personally have represented unions, teamsters, a couple Teamster Locals, represented a couple of times the UAW. I represented an independent, a large independent union down in Youngstown. And that company’s not in business. I was riding bike once on the Towpath. I don’t know if you’ve done that. Oh yeah, okay. You come around a corner and there is there, at least there was the last time I was on the Towpath, there was this rusted out skeleton of a factory.
Marc Frisch [00:58:30] Which way we going?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:58:31] Doesn’t matter. It’s there. It’s on the Towpath. Whether I’m coming up or going down, it’s-
Sean Martin [00:58:41] Where is that exactly?
Robert Rosenfeld [00:58:43] I don’t know. It’s-
Marc Frisch: It’s the paper mill.
Robert Rosenfeld: Maybe that was a paper mill. I think it was paper mill. You may be right.
Marc Frisch [00:58:51] Is that going south towards Akron from Peninsula or is it going to-
Robert Rosenfeld [00:58:55] No, you’re- It’s- It’s north of Peninsula. It’s between- It’s between Rockside and Peninsula. I’m riding with another labor lawyer and we go past it and he says, well, you can always see another buzz client. And my dad always had a very good relationship with unions. We represented Sealy Mattress, but he drafted the will of the head of the union for Sealy Mattress. You know, Ben Schauss. We just had a, we didn’t have a hard, confrontational attitude. We, we- I was taught by him to try and get along, not give away the store, but to, you know, be nice. And there are- There are people who take this horrible attitude and I can’t tell you that I haven’t- Wait here for one second. This is a captain of the Mansfield police force. This is a UAW worker who had no business being there because this was a different union. This was steel workers union. This is the factory Ideal Electric. They had dragged a car, an old junk car onto the property and set it on fire. And they called out on a statewide alert. And they had 300 police from all over the state on this strike. This guy had grabbed a broom from the owner. This is the owner of the company, Mike, and they had grabbed a broom. This guy had grabbed the broom from him and said, I’ll show you how to clean up. Because there were tacks all over to give people flat tires. So he grabs the broom and this is the captain of the police force and he is sweeping. And then he comes between the legs of the captain and jams the broom up. And the captain stopped it. Check. Just in time.
Sean Martin [01:01:48] Oh, man.
Robert Rosenfeld [01:01:50] I had four flat tires out of this. No, this was just one flat tire on this side in the back. Later I had four flat tires. We went to dinner and some guy came out. Some guy followed us downtown and flattened four tires.
Sean Martin [01:02:15] Wow.
Marc Frisch [01:02:15] What was the company?
Robert Rosenfeld [01:02:17] Ideal Electric. The strike had gone on for about four months and it got on national- This and this had put it on national television on Labor Day weekend. And the director, the national director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation got on the phone to the director of the Cleveland office which included Mansfield and said what is going on with that strike? And the guy says I don’t know anything. Well, there was a board, an FMCS agent that had been assigned but he had kind of retired two years before that. But he didn’t tell anyone. So he just didn’t do anything, you know, and his boss in Cleveland didn’t really know what was going on down there and. And then his director really chewed him a new rear end. So he called me on Sunday and he said this is the regional director. Yeah, we’ve known each other for years. He says, Buzz, you will be in my office at 9 o’ clock tomorrow morning with your people. Yes sir. And we settled it that day. That was funny, but that’s the only time I’ve represented management for over 50 years and I’ve had this strike and another one and the other one was run by a communist who had gone to jail for lying on his non communist affidavit. So I don’t- He never, he never had a contract that he didn’t settle with a strike. So I don’t count that. So I’ve had one strike in about 50 years. One authorized strike. There were some wildcats here and there.
Sean Martin [01:04:49] But just, I really just have one last question. So to what do you attribute the decline of the industry? How do you explain the decline of the apparel industry?
Robert Rosenfeld [01:05:05] Well, obviously people aren’t going naked, they’re still buying clothes. They just don’t want to pay more than somebody else is selling it for. So when you have the Walmarts of the world that had no hesitation in going out overseas and request– and the overseas market became much better quality than it had been. It wasn’t like the little Japanese tinker toys of the late ’40s and ’50s. The quality of the apparel was much, much better and not necessarily better than what we could produce here, but it was good quality and as a result of good quality with a price that we couldn’t match. So it went. And when you were only dealing with a warehouse, the union was pretty much powerless. What could they do? You know, they could only require if there were contractors, but the contractors were getting shut out by the manufacturers who were going overseas. And it, or there were the competition like in Dalton. It wasn’t that they were going overseas, it was the people weren’t buying their stuff anymore. It was probably too high priced and the styling, unfortunately, was given to Elsie Dairy to if it, if it looked all right on Elsie, then it was okay. But Elsie was in her 80s. True, true. And so, you know, some of it was their own making. That is, they went out of business because they weren’t selling and it wasn’t a matter of price. Well.
Marc Frisch [01:07:34] There was a tendency for a lot of the eastern people to start going overseas. Who was the competition of Bobbie Brooks? And slowly each one would go step by step by step because you couldn’t compete domestically against imports.
Robert Rosenfeld [01:07:53] I was part of, I know. Oh, God, all those containers. And now I represent a company that hauls the containers. But I, I think to a great extent they, some of them put themselves out of business, you know. Now Dalton still had very high quality, but the styling sucked. And as time went on, it caught up with him. I represented, you know, I had a national practice and you ask why the union would call me because I represented some of the largest in the business. I had Junior JH collectible up in Milwaukee for their negotiations. So. And they were, they began life as a competitor, Bobbie Brooks when they were Junior House. And then they changed it to JH Collectible. And it was beautiful, relatively high priced sportswear. I remember Vivian had a leather skirt that they made really nice. And my kids, they didn’t reject JH collectible. Bobbie Brooks they could reject, but not JH Collectible.
Marc Frisch [01:09:52] Also there was a change with Dalton and the family situation taking over.
Robert Rosenfeld [01:09:59] Well…
Marc Frisch [01:10:01] That became a problem.
Robert Rosenfeld [01:10:03] Yeah, the boys were not- The boys were not Arthur.
Marc Frisch [01:10:08] One of the things in the total industry is that most of the people that originated the industry had, I believe, a great passion for the industry. And Arthur Derry was Joe Lampo, even my brother Jerry, they had a passion. So if it shifted from that person or became a corporation, became big or this and that and the other thing, that core of passion, when that died out, that affected the life of the business.
Robert Rosenfeld [01:10:51] I would give that credence. You know, I had free access to the building. The guards never stopped me or asked me where I was going. And I was really part of it. I was a guest at two or three weddings in the manufacturing group. I remember one night, the vice president of manufacturing at that time was Phil Grodel and he died a little while ago. And we had just finished a brutal day with Wilbur Daniels, who was the union negotiator. He was head of their master agreement department and he had beaten us up pretty good. And we were walking on, I forget what street, and we pass Galatoire’s or La? No, La Caravelle Restaurant. Big time in New York. And we pass it, and Phil says, screw it, they owe me. And we went in and had dinner. It was probably $150 or something. When Phil had appendicitis, I had said to the waiter, I said, this glass, it was a wine glass with a sailing ship etched into the Caravelle is a style of sailing ship, a model of a sailing ship. And I said, how much for this glass? Oh, monsieur, we do not sell these things. No, no, no. I said, look, either give me a price or I’ll steal it. So I don’t know, half hour, 45 minutes later, he comes back with a box. So I took it home, and Phil was in the hospital. Maybe 10 years later, he was in the hospital for appendicitis. And I stuck some dirt in the glass and put an ivy in it. And I took it to him. He was so thrilled, he remembered where it came from. Anyhow, he was my boss. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. The interesting- You know where that West 6th Street building is that had the Bradley building? Not the Bradley- Zweig was it where Winter was and what’s there? Johnny’s Downtown is in that building. And my wife’s first husband’s family owned it. Owned the building? Zweig. But it was several different sewing contractors. Anyhow, okay.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
