In the May 15, 1931 issue of the Militant, a Trotskyist newspaper published at the time by the Communist League of America out of an office on 84 East Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, an article appeared entitled “The Unemployed Cutters Rebel.” Written by a little-known radical named Abraham Blecher under the pseudonym Albert Orland, it was no doubt overshadowed by a longer and more ambitious piece appearing three pages previous called “The Question of Trade Unity,” written by Trotsky himself.

Blecher’s piece details the struggle of unemployed members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Local 4 of New York, against “the rotten methods of their officials who are responsible for their misery and destitution.” After making clear the depths of this destitution (“Some of them have been unemployed for years and their families have been starving”), Blecher proceeds to outline the demands of the unemployed clothing cutters. Among these demands are the immediate establishment of a 40-hour workweek with 44-hour pay (soon to be reduced to 36 so that the extra four hours can be distributed among the unemployed), the equal division of work, the end to an unemployment insurance scheme that benefits the union bosses at the expense of the unemployed, and “the immediate abolition of temporary cards.”

Later in the article, Blecher exhorts those clothing cutters with steady employment to aid their jobless fellow union workers: “The employed should therefore come to the assistance of the unemployed in their struggle to secure the 40-hour week and the abolition of the temporary jobs.”