Agnes Nestor was an American labor leader and reformer. She was a founder and officer of the International Glove Workers Union of America and president of the Chicago Women's Trade Union League.
Background
Agnes Nestor was born on June 24, 1880 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States. She was the second daughter and third of four children of Thomas and Anna (McEwen) Nestor. Her mother, born in upper New York state and orphaned as a child, had worked as a cotton mill operator and shopgirl. Her father, a native of County Galway, Ireland, had immigrated to the United States as a boy, had become a machinist, and, when Agnes was born, was operating a grocery store. Entering politics, he achieved local prominence as alderman and city treasurer. Agnes grew up in comfortable circumstances.
In the depression of the 1890's Thomas Nestor lost his bid for the sheriff's office. Having earlier sold his grocery store and not finding suitable employment in Grand Rapids, he moved to Chicago in late 1896, hoping for work as a machinist. His family joined him the following spring. "Childhood was over, " Agnes wrote in her autobiography, "soon I, too, would be at work. "
Education
Agnes attended the local grammar school and then a Catholic parochial school. In 1929 she received an honorary Legum Doctor from Loyola University in Chicago.
Career
Agnes found a job in the Eisendrath Glove Company and soon became a skilled glove operator. There was much unrest among the girls in her shop, especially because they had to pay for the power for their machines and supply their own needles and machine oil. In the spring of 1898 the girls rebelled, encouraged by the recently organized male cutters. Agnes Nestor emerged as a leader. After ten days, the girls won their demands, including the union shop.
In 1902 Nestor contrived to separate the female glove workers from the male glove-cutters' union. She became president of the new all-female local. That same year, she went as its delegate to the founding convention of the International Glove Workers Union in Washington, D. C. , and the following year she became a national vice-president.
The crucial opportunity came in 1906, when she was elected secretary-treasurer, for this was a paid, full-time position. Ill health had forced her to stop work several months before, and she never returned to the factory. "That convention changed the whole course of my life, " she later wrote.
Already thoroughly experienced, Nestor now perfected the arts of the professional trade union leader; as negotiator fully knowledgeable of the technical aspects of the glove industry; as speaker, organizer, and administrator; and as defender of the institutional integrity of her union.
For the rest of her life, she was never without a national post in the Glove Workers Union. But Agnes Nestor was not destined for the conventional career of a trade union functionary. The crucial fact was that she was a woman in a labor system and union movement dominated by men.
First coming in contact with the women's trade union movement in 1904, Nestor developed a lifelong association with the Chicago league (president from 1913 to 1948) and with the national league (executive board from 1907 on). The Women's Trade Union League not only provided a means to do union work among women on a wider scope, but also broadened Nestor's horizons still farther, for it brought her into contact with such progressives as Mary McDowell, Jane Addams, and Raymond and Margaret Dreier Robins. She moved, too, within the stream of labor progressivism, which then ran strongly in Chicago under the leadership of John Fitzpatrick.
Much of her time was spent in Springfield working for social legislation, above all for a maximum-hours law for women.
Only in 1937, after many defeats, were her efforts for an eight-hour maximum crowned with success. Meanwhile, Nestor participated in major strikes and organizing drives among women in many trades in Chicago and elsewhere, including the great garment workers' strikes of 1909 and 1910-1911. She also was an eloquent advocate of the cause of women workers before middle-class audiences. These activities, plus her unique position as a female national-union leader, opened up wider opportunities for public service.
In 1914 she was appointed to the National Commission on Vocational Education.
During World War I, she served on the Woman's Committee of the United States Council of National Defense and participated in a goodwill mission to England and France.
In 1928 she campaigned unsuccessfully (as a dry) for the Democratic nomination to a seat in the Illinois state legislature.
During the depression she sat on the Illinois Commission on Unemployment and Relief, as well as on the board of trustees of the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition (1933 - 1934).
Despite the larger field in which she moved, Nestor remained firmly rooted in the labor movement and, notwithstanding her own progressive inclination, loyal to the movement as she had known it in pre-World War I days. When part of the Glove Workers Union developed a sympathy for the CIO in 1937 and joined the Amalgamated Clothing Workers led by Sidney Hillman, she held the loyal elements together and, with A. F. of L. help, rebuilt the Glove Workers Union into a stronger organization than it had been before the secession.
Nestor's health began to decline in 1946 from what was subsequently diagnosed as miliary tuberculosis. She underwent an operation for a breast abscess in October 1948 in St. Luke's Hospital, Chicago, and died of uremia that December. She was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Cook County, Illinois.
Views
While Nestor never minimized the importance of collective bargaining, she saw too the great need for social legislation for women and children. And while her first obligation was to the glove workers, she recognized a responsibility to help working women in all fields.
Personality
Never robust physically, slight for her age and quiet in manner, Nestor was quick-witted, articulate, and endowed with a spark of leadership that made her the natural spokesman for her fellow workers. She was, moreover, well-schooled in the principles of trade unionism by her father, a fervent union man of long standing.