Rose Esterson - ILGWU

1933 - 1954
395-397 Ste-Catherine O.

Rose Esterson’s immigration to Montreal was impelled by the extraordinary number of loved ones she lost to violent deaths in Eastern Europe. Her father, brother and many others had been killed in the Kiev pogroms of 1919–1920; her husband died of a heart attack after being beaten by Bolsheviks during their four years in Poland. In 1925, 28-year-old Esterson – née Raizel Pekelis – became a garment worker in Montreal, providing for her mother and three daughters on as little as $1 a week.

A self-described “big fighter”, Esterson was active in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) as a member of its Montreal Joint Board. Equally likely to confront a boss or a union business agent, she developed a reputation as a feisty worker and protestor. At the time of her interview, Esterson was receiving $75 a month from her former union, the ILGWU, proud that her pension demonstrated that she had never worked as a scab. The office of the ILGWU was located on Ste-Catherine west of Bleury.

These excerpts of her oral history appear in Seemah C. Berson’s I Have a Story to Tell You (WLU Press, 2010):

. . . the workers used to slave from seven in the morning to ten at night, and got paid fifty cents for two dresses, can you believe? Once I worked for this boss who says to me that I should go the next day and have dinner in a [charity] kitchen for twenty-five cents. I said, Why should I go there? He said, Mrs. Esterson, I gave them a donation of twenty-five dollars, so you can go and eat there with your children. I told him, If you didn’t pay me twenty cents for two dresses I wouldn’t need to go eat in that kitchen. But you give twenty-five-dollar donation and it says on the wall: Mr. So-and-so give twenty-five dollars donation. I wouldn’t go there to eat! (166)

I used to work in a shop and one time, when you are supposed to be in at seven in the morning and if you come in five minutes past seven, the boss took off fifteen minutes of your salary for himself. So, you know what I used to do? You wouldn’t believe me. I used to come in maybe a little early and I would run to the window and sit at the window; and when the boss told me, Why you didn’t go to the machine? I would say, That’s my time. When I see 7:15 then I go to work. (167)

In 1939 came up Hitler’s war and at the time they start to organize the union. The French girls, the Ukrainian girls were afraid to go to the union. I took the girls to the meetings and I took union books. Some days later my boss comes out from his office and he says, Whoever has a union card cannot work in my place! I opened my purse—because, honest to God, I made the damage, you know—so I opened my purse and I said, Here, Jack, here is my union book, send me home. He started laughing and went in his office. The girls teased me. I say, Don’t tease me. I made the damage and I take the damage! After, we organized the union and we were striking for six months. Six months! (166–167)

Compiled by Sarah Woolf and Seemah C. Berson.

Links

Liens

I Have a Story to Tell You - Seemah Berson
Shedding Light on the Rag Trade - CBC Digital Archives
Strike! - Jewish Montreal of Yesterday - JPL-A
The Esterson, Gildengers and Miller Roots
The Kheel Center ILGWU Collection

Sources

Berson, Seemah C. (ed.) I Have a Story to Tell You. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010.

*Images courtesy of Michael Goldstein, Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec, Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Jewish Public Library and Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal. .

Media

Media