Benjamin Gold (1898–1985) was an American labor leader and Communist Party member who was president of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union (IFLWU) from 1937 to 1955.
Early life
Ben Gold was born September 8, 1898, to Israel and Sarah (Droll) Gold, Jews living in Bessarabia, a province of the Russian Empire. His father was a jeweler, active in the revolutionary movement and a member of the local Jewish self-defense corps, institutions which existed in many towns as a precaution against pogroms launched by anti-semitic Black Hundreds groups.
The Golds emigrated to the United States in 1910, where 12-year-old Ben took a variety of jobs to help support his family, working in box factories, making pocketbooks, and working in millinery shops. He eventually became an operator in a fur shop. In 1912, the 14-year-old joined the Furriers Union of the United States and Canada, which changed its name a year later to the International Fur Workers Union of the United States and Canada (IFWU). He attended Manhattan Preparatory School at night to complete his education, intending to go to law school.
The same year he joined the Furriers Union, the 14-year-old Gold was elected assistant shop chairman by his local union during the first furriers' strike in the United States.
Politically active, Gold joined the Socialist Party of America in 1916.
In 1919, at the age of 21, Gold was elected to the New York Furriers' Joint Board, a council of furriers' unions whose jurisdiction covered all of New York City. In September of that year, he joined a group which broke away from the Socialist Party to form the Communist Labor Party of America.
Communism and early trade union career
Gold's adherence to Communism and trade unionism intertwined to shape much of his career as a labor leader. He was an occasional political candidate of the Communist movement, running for U.S. Congress in the 23rd Congressional District of New York in 1928.
In 1924, Gold was suspended from the Furriers for engaging in dual unionism because of his activities on behalf of the Communist Party of America (with which the Communist Labor Party had merged in 1921). He was reinstated in 1925, and appointed manager of the New York Furriers' Joint Board.
1926 strike
In 1926, Gold led a massive furriers' strike in New York City. The Joint Board's contract with the city's furriers expired on January 31, 1926. Among the union's demands were a reduction in working hours to the five-day, 40-hour work week; union inspection of shops; a 25 percent wage increase; an employer contribution of 3 percent of each workers' salary to an unemployment insurance fund; a single paid holiday; and equal division of work among employees (to eliminate favoritism). The employer's association refused to negotiate over the work week, unemployment fund or equal division of work, but agreed to seek a settlement on the other terms if the union would withdraw the other three demands. Led by Gold, the Joint Board was on the verge of doing so when IFWU President Oizer Shachtman accused the Joint Board of being infiltrated by communists. The Joint Board made its recommendation to the employers all the same, who—aware of Shachtman's opposition—promptly rejected it. The employers then instituted a lockout of 8,500 workers on February 11, 1926. The union responded by calling a general strike of all 12,000 fur workers in the city on February 16, 1926.
The strike quickly turned violent. On February 19, New York City police attacked a picket line of striking workers and arrested 200 workers. On March 8, Gold called out 10,000 workers for mass picketing throughout the furriers' district. Police used clubs to beat hundreds of strikers, and then drove cars at high speed into the crowd to try to break up the pickets. Only when Gold ordered the picket to break up were law enforcement authorities able to regain control; 125 workers arrested. The police response was so brutal that a city magistrate later excoriated the police department for "undue coercion" against the striking workers.
As the strike commenced, President Shachtman went into hiding, leaving Vice President Isidor Winnick to take over as Acting President. Shachtman's disappearance significantly hindered the Joint Board's ability to stop furriers outside New York City from engaging in strikebreaking.