This text is a part of Missed, a sequence of obituaries about outstanding folks whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Occasions.
It was in northeastern Pennsylvania that Min Matheson earned her status for fearlessness. Over her 20 years as director of the Worldwide Women’ Garment Staff’ Union there, she repeatedly confronted down mobsters in her battle for honest wages and secure situations for ladies employees.
In a single incident, she confronted a number of menacing “robust guys,” as she known as them, in Pittston, Pa., the place she was marching on a picket line alongside different ladies.
She instructed them, “You rotten hoodlums! What are you doing on this city?” she recalled in an oral historical past interview. “You don’t reside right here. We reside right here. That is our city, not yours.”
Close by householders opened their home windows to look at the ruckus. “There are witnesses to something you suppose you will do,” Matheson instructed the thugs. They slinked away.
“These males nearly 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?”
5-foot-two and with appreciable charisma, Matheson had large success as a union organizer starting within the mid-Forties, when she grew to become head of the I.L.G.W.U.’s northeastern Pennsylvania area.
On the time, many attire producers had been transferring their operations there from New York’s garment district, the place wages had risen. The anthracite coal trade that had fueled the area’s financial system was in decline, and arranged crime performed a significant function in working the attire trade, even proudly owning many factories. With males shedding their jobs within the mines, the factories provided their wives employment and alternatives to assist their households.
When Matheson arrived, solely six of the realm’s attire factories and 650 employees had been unionized. By the point she left, in 1963, 168 factories with greater than 11,000 employees had been unionized.
At first, most of the factories had 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 lavatory besides throughout sanctioned breaks. Many factories provided 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 remedy for the employees. And her union created free night courses, a cell well being care unit and a scholarship program for employees’ youngsters.
She additionally sought to shake up the mob-dominated establishment, and the mobsters pushed again, menacingly. She had tense confrontations with them — on the road close to the union’s workplaces, outdoors factories when she talked to employees, or throughout strikes.
“Her life was threatened many instances, 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 entire 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 trade employee and a labor activist who took Min alongside to union conferences. After cigar corporations blacklisted him for pushing to unionize, he scraped by as a junk peddler.
Min dropped out of college within the ninth grade and took a job as a secretary. When she was 19 she met Invoice Matheson, a union activist. They moved east in 1932 to affix 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, changing into the top 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 Invoice married the identical yr. Their second daughter, Betty, was born in 1943. The subsequent yr, Min and Invoice moved to Kingston, in northeastern Pennsylvania, after I.L.G.W.U. leaders instructed them to “clear up the mess down there.”
For Matheson, fearlessness was a household custom. A number of 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 had been indicted however by no means convicted.
“What occurred to her father and brother gave her additional motivation to battle for the union and battle in opposition to organized crime,” mentioned Robert Wolensky, who, alongside along 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 entire life is wasted, my brother’s entire life is wasted, and my life is wasted.’”
Her battle concerned impassioned speeches and tireless dedication; many mornings she left residence for picket strains earlier than her daughters wakened. “The employees noticed her as somebody who was utterly 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 instructed her that she ought to deliver her “weakling husband” there and see how lengthy he would final. Her husband was the union’s training director for japanese Pennsylvania.
Matheson then walked over to a person standing close by: Russell Bufalino, the area’s high crime boss. “I don’t have to deliver Invoice right here, Russ,” she instructed him, in line with oral historical past interviews with her and different employees, “as a result of I’m twice the person you’ll ever be.”
A technique the mob sought to keep up management was by stopping ladies within the space from voting, so Matheson accompanied a feminine employee to a polling place to verify she voted.
“Every thing 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 set up employees, Matheson’s union constructed sturdy group ties. It joined charity drives and arrange a refrain, a publication and a radio present.
Matheson took a realistic method, not desirous to drive outlets out of enterprise and trigger employees to lose their jobs.
“She was honest to the homeowners of the gown 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 are able to’t ask for a similar stuff you ask for. We now have to be honest.’ The manufacturing unit homeowners got here to understand 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 “Search for the Union Label” jingle.
Matheson noticed unions as pivotal to empowering common employees. She mentioned, “If you happen to don’t have a labor union otherwise you don’t have a corporation to signify 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 yr, arriving a number of months earlier than Hurricane Agnes destroyed or broken hundreds of properties there. She based the Flood Victims Motion Council, which pushed for catastrophe reduction. She additionally made nationwide headlines when she confronted George Romney, the U.S. secretary of Housing and City Improvement, 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 reside 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 larger within the I.L.G.W.U. “There have been no ladies within the union’s nationwide management workforce,” she mentioned. “She would have stepped proper as much as the highest of the ladder if she had been given the chance.”
