Tariffs are a national conversation with shifting edicts coming almost daily from the White House. Pundits, free trade “globalists,” and MAGA nationalists contend full-time on cable television. The debate extends to the labor movement, with United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain supporting Donald Trump’s tariffs in the auto industry while opposing the rest of the MAGA agenda.

My own experience in the men’s clothing industry in the 1970s sheds some light on this issue. In this decade, I was a presser in a large suit shop, active in a broad-based union rank-and-file movement, and a member of the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), part of the New Communist Movement.

The garment industry was one of the most protected by tariffs in the nation. The union in men’s clothing, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), joined the employers in lobbying for tariffs and ran its own “Buy American” campaign aimed at consumers. Such collaboration had a long history. By establishing a floor for wages and working conditions, the union had been a source of stability in a labor-intensive industry dominated by small shops and intense competition, a fact that the employers came to appreciate.

 Philadelphia was the largest center of the industry after New York, and the Philadelphia Joint Board of the ACWA was the city’s largest union. The woolen goods division consisting of tailor shops, which made suits, dominated the local industry. A much smaller cotton goods sector made work- and sportswear. Workers were stratified by race, sex, and ethnicity, divisions that were carried over in the union’s hybrid structure that included both craft and industrial locals.

My own shop, Joseph Cohen’s, later Botany 500, illustrates this diversity. It was housed in a ten-story factory at the intersection of Broad and Lehigh that was built to make Ford cars. On the top floor were the cutters, highly skilled and well-paid Jewish and Italian men who turned rolls of fabrics into the pieces that make up coats and pants. Below were floors of sewing machine operators — largely women, Southern European immigrants, Latinas from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and African Americans — who attached these pieces together. Pressers, mostly Italian men, both new immigrants and older generations, transformed the sewn coat into its familiar shape. Pay, fixed by the rate per piece, varied greatly depending on the operation. A contingent of inspectors, warehousemen, and janitorial staff rounded out the process. There were two thousand workers all told at the height of production; it was the largest facility of its kind in the country.

The Philadelphia Joint Board created a union-run health clinic and an apartment house for retirees. But its main activity was to help the employers reduce labor costs by cutting piece rates and enforcing labor discipline on the shop floor. This required a bureaucratic regime that maintained control by restricting democracy. In most shops, stewards were appointed by business agents. Contracts were not subject to ratification by the membership.

Deteriorating conditions in the shops generated a rank-and-file revolt. In 1971, in response to a contract that allowed the introduction of new technology that would eliminate jobs in the cutting room, the center of the most skilled jobs, an eight-day wildcat strike shut down the city’s coat shops. The strike was led by the cutters, the most privileged, craft-minded stratum of the workforce. But it was quickly embraced by the broad ranks.

Mass meetings were held, and a rank-and-file committee was selected to negotiate. The strike was settled after the contract was modified to drop the concessions around technology. The strike leadership established an ongoing organization, the ACWA Rank & File Committee, that would fight for democratic reforms and for better wages and working conditions.

Over the rest of the decade, the committee fought many battles to stop the accelerating erosion of jobs, wages, and working conditions. Its newsletter was distributed regularly at dozens of shops. It was translated into multiple languages, Spanish and Italian regularly and less frequently other tongues spoken by the workers. It ran candidates for union office, challenging undemocratic bylaws like the requirement that a candidate’s nomination had to be seconded at a union meeting by 25 percent of those present.

The committee constantly agitated about the worsening economic situation of clothing workers and raised a series of demands, including replacing piecework with an incentive system with a guaranteed wage (constant revision of piece rates was the way the employer sped up work and cut wages), a program for combating racial and sexual discrimination, and a shorter workweek with no cut in pay in response to laborsaving technology.

In 1974, the committee met with union members in other cities and leafletted shops in these cities about the need for a fair national contract. The response to this initiative was positive, but workers were not organized outside of Philadelphia. Nevertheless, rank-and-file rumblings figured prominently in the decision of the national ACWA leadership to call the first national strike in over fifty years. Workers were out for ten days and won a small wage increase.

In the following year, on the eve of the anticipated wage hike, the leadership announced that the health insurance fund, administered by the union but maintained by employer contributions, was bankrupt. Their solution was to take the scheduled wage increase and cost-of-living increase and divert it into the insurance fund for at least fifteen weeks. What followed was a broad rank-and-file revolt, the high point of the Philadelphia committee’s decade-long fight.

The national leadership had to secure legal permission to unilaterally amend the contract to allow this move and thus called on local Joint Boards to vote on the proposed measure. In Philadelphia, several hundred angry members attended the Joint Board meeting and were eventually ejected. The Joint Board endorsed the insurance bailout and wage cut by a vote of forty-eight to thirty-two, but it did agree to hold a membership vote on the proposal at both the union hall and the shops. Unemployed union members were to be included, and the vote was to be by secret ballot. The result was an overwhelming rejection of the proposal by a two-to-one vote.

Workers in other cities petitioned against it as well. And where a vote by the membership was allowed — Philadelphia, Buffalo, New Bedford, and the Lehigh Valley — the measure was soundly defeated. But elsewhere, including the huge New York market, the Joint Boards voted for the membership. In some cases, the bureaucratic local leaders went to great length to avoid membership involvement.

The Baltimore Joint Board, after rebuffing a loud picket line by union members, moved two hundred miles away to vote to endorse the proposal and deny a membership referendum. The measure was adopted by a vote of 63,015 “yes” to 16,072 “no” — not that 63,015 members had individually voted “yes” and 16,072 “no,” but rather that the Joint Boards members voted and then simply listed all the membership as having voted the way the Joint Boards did. The Committee took a bus of members to the New York headquarters to make a final protest and sing a song written by a member that described the “Vote No” campaign.

Characteristically, the ACWA Rank & File Committee rejected a false choice between a needed wage increase and equally necessary health insurance. The committee demanded that the insurance fund crisis be addressed by increasing employer contributions and taking this to arbitration if they refused. Political action on health insurance was also raised.

Unfortunately, by the time this national contract expired, the writing for the industry was pretty much on the wall. The movement of shops to the right-to-work South and then increasingly to the Global South was well underway. The union merged with the textile workers in 1976, but this could not replace the bargaining power or the political weight of the old Amalgamated. The Rank & File Committee soldiered on and sought to develop a contract campaign around an advanced set of proposals. But shrunken numbers and the sagging morale in the shops cut against having an impact.

Tariff protection clearly did not prevent the shrinkage and ultimate demise of this industry. It may have slowed the pace of the decline. While bureaucratic union leadership, anxious to avoid struggle with the employers, loudly cheered for protection, there is little indication that the union membership shared this view. On April 14, 1977, the union held a rally at Independence Hall to urge President Jimmy Carter to impose import quotas on clothing and textiles. Union workers were given the day off by employers and encouraged to attend. Union officials estimated the crowd at two thousand; skeptical rank and file activists said it was half that, and largely union officials and staff.

The dominant attitude among workers about tariffs was probably cynicism. They mostly benefited the employer, and the union supported them mainly to avoid fighting. This was the lived experience of many who were told by bosses on the shop floor that they better go along with rate cuts or see their jobs get exported while union officials stood by with folded hands.

The Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee and leftists in the shops did agitate against protectionism in their literature and independent activity. The essential argument was that the source of the threat to jobs and living standards was the drive of the corporations to maximize profits by moving operations to places where labor was cheap and unions weak or unavailable.

By this time, the Global South was replacing the right-to-work domestic states as the place of choice for runaway shops. To challenge this, the PWOC called for a range of measures including a tax on the returns from exported capital, minimum wage and union rights in the target countries, and a prohibition for relocating in countries with anti-labor dictatorships. This agitation was part of a broader anti-imperialist politics that had currency on the Left in the wake of the war in Vietnam.

Within the rank-and-file movement, there was some discussion of these measures. But the dominant sentiment opposed making this kind of critique of protectionism part of the messaging. Some of this was rooted in a fear that this would lead to the branding of the committee as unpatriotic or “communistic.” The steering committee charged with reviewing the newsletter did endorse some articles that echoed this spirit. One called for requiring runaway shops to honor the terms of their contracts in their new locations. But faced with so many other challenges, there was not any eagerness to take up a campaign that would challenge the union position in any substantive way.

Obviously, things are different today. But the spirit of these old proposals is important and needs to be replicated. Other countries didn’t steal our jobs and industry. American capital, including the very crowd that now is ensconced in the White House and Congress, exported them to make bigger profits. Now we are told that they will bring their capital back and invest it here behind a sturdy tariff wall. This is not likely, but it’s an even more remote possibility that this will automatically recreate good-paying union jobs that resemble those of our industrial past.