Background
He was born on November 16, 1894 in Radomyshl, (now Ukraine), the son of Simon and Rebecca Potofsky. His father managed a glass factory in Kiev before the family immigrated to the United States in 1905.
He was born on November 16, 1894 in Radomyshl, (now Ukraine), the son of Simon and Rebecca Potofsky. His father managed a glass factory in Kiev before the family immigrated to the United States in 1905.
Potofsky continued his elementary education in Chicago, where the family settled. At age fourteen he left school to join his father at work in the garment industry. Laboring by day, he attended the Chicago Hebrew Institute at night, seeking the knowledge to become what one historian has characterized as a "half-intellectual. "
After school he became a floor boy performing odd tasks for the firm of Hart, Schaffner and Marx.
In 1910 he participated in a dramatic strike against Hart, Schaffner and Marx, an industrial conflict that reshaped unionism in the garment trades and spawned a new immigrant generation of labor leaders. Partly as a result of the 1910 strike and the socialist unionism represented by Chicago's immigrant clothing workers and garment union members in other cities, the United Garment Workers of America (UGW) split. Dissatisfied with the policies and practices of the UGW and unable to make their influence felt effectively, the immigrant workers formed their own union in 1914, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW), with Sidney Hillman as president. Although barely into his twenties, Potofsky had experience as a shop secretary and treasurer of his pantsmakers' local.
In 1916, Hillman invited Potofsky to New York to assist in establishing the ACW's national headquarters and to serve as the union's assistant general secretary-treasurer, a position he held for eighteen years. For three decades (1916 - 1946) Potofsky served as Hillman's lieutenant, doing "whatever needed to be done in the union. " In 1934 he became assistant president of the ACW, a position he held until 1940.
The New Deal years saw Potofsky's role in the labor movement grow, and his politics and philosophy shift. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor policies brightened the prospects for unionism, Potofsky organized the nonunion shirtmakers in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and the textile workers in southern Appalachia. When Hillman and the ACW in 1935 joined John L. Lewis in forming the Committee for Industrial Organization within the American Federation of Labor, Potofsky became a key leader in the new organization, serving as a member of the first executive board of the CIO when it became the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938.
In 1940, Hillman chose Potofsky to serve as general secretary-treasurer of the ACW, a position of great importance because Hillman devoted himself to serving Roosevelt as a wartime labor adviser. When Hillman died in 1946, the ACW members turned to Potofsky as his successor. He was the president of the ACW from 1946 until his retirement in 1972. Potofsky broke with the majority of his colleagues on the AFL-CIO executive council over the war in Vietnam, linking himself and his union to the antiwar movement between 1970 and his retirement in 1972.
Potofsky died in New York City.
Jacob Samuel Potofsky was well-known as the second president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, who led the union during a period of hard times for the labor movement. Through his aggressive administration, the ACW added more than 100, 000 new members to the union, including many southern textile workers and many African-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-American garment workers. Under Potofsky's leadership, the ACW remained dedicated to social unionism, funding health centers and cooperative housing for members as well as supporting the movement for civil rights. Potofsky exemplified the amalgamation of Yiddish culture, secular socialist unionism, labor Zionism, and labor Americanism into what became an American version of social democracy.
Like many of his Russian-Jewish immigrant peers, Potofsky developed an interest in trade unionism, joining Pantsmakers' Local 144 of the United Garment Workers of America (UGW). He and his immigrant cohort exemplified a type of unionism that sought to organize all workers, regardless of skill, nationality, or gender, and that merged political and economic action.
Later, as a part of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) Potofsky helped to create what rapidly became known as the "new unionism. " Potofsky and his union endorsed socialism and independent labor politics; stood almost alone in defending the Soviet Union; and built its own small welfare state for members based on union-operated banks, cooperative housing developments, health plans, and educational and recreational programs.
To sum up, politically, Potofsky moved away from his socialist roots, first deserting the Socialist party in 1936 for the New York-based American Labor party and then drifting into the Liberal party (1948) and finally the Democratic party. By the end of the 1930's, Potofsky had committed himself to the New Deal Democratic welfare state, and he worked closely with Hillman to link the CIO's Political Action Committee to the Democratic national party. Also like Hillman and other Jewish-American labor leaders who had once thought of themselves as secular internationalists, Potofsky during the 1930's, in response to the rising threat of Nazism, grew increasingly involved in Jewish community affairs and in the cause of labor Zionism.
Quotations: Potofsky remarked later in life, that what lies at the core of unionism is "its heart and soul, not its money. "
He was nearly six feet tall, with aquiline features and a small Van Dyke beard that made him appear an intellectual.
Quotes from others about the person
President Jimmy Carter recognized Potofsky as "one of the giants of the labor movement".
In 1934, Potofsky married Callie Taylor, a former clothing worker; they had three children. In 1946, Potofsky's wife died. In 1951 he married Blanche Lydia Zetland, the widow of a Brazilian exporter.
