#garment worker

This is Jean Schwartz, a New York dress finisher who has been out of a job for 18 weeks, December 27, 1937. She appeared at the Central Post Office to fill out her application for unemployment insurance, something nearly a million in the state were expected to do before the end of 1938. A staff of 4,000 was hired to handle the applications.

Feat:

Pic 1: Mamono World chao shirt

All pics: chain necklace by Hard Jewelry

Garment worker

(Alfred Eisenstaedt. n.d.)

Original Observer photography

Covid-19, Black Lives Matter and poetry – the best photography commissioned by the Observer in June 2020.

Garment worker Akhi Akter at her home in Ashulia, Bangladesh, photographed for an Observer feature about the clothing industry workers who have seen their factories closed as global retailers cancel orders in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Garment Worker sculpture in the Garment District, New York City; 2011. x

Judith Weller, a Jewish Israeli sculptor who immigrated to the United States in 1960, completed the Garment Worker sculpture in 1984 to honor the thousands of Jewish people who worked in the garment industry in New York in the early 1900′s.  An estimated 60% of the Jewish community of New York worked in the garment industry while 75% of the garment companies were owned by Jewish people.  Tens of thousands of primarily poor Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe came to New York at the turn of the century and would contribute enormously to the creation of an American style.  Said Abraham Cahan; a Lithuanian Jewish person, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, and novelist, in 1917: 

“Foreigners ourselves, and mostly unable to speak English, we had Americanized the system of providing clothes for the American woman of moderate or humble means. The average American woman is the best-dressed woman in the world, and the Russian Jew has had a good deal to do with making her one.”

Garment Worker - Judith Weller (b. 1937, Tel Aviv)

555 7th Avenue, New York City, March 2016

-kgshepard