Jennie Matyas and the National Dollar Stores Factory Strike in San Francisco Chinatown (Interview‪)‬

This essay was excerpted from Jennie Matyas and the I.L.G.W.U., which was a transcript of a series of interviews with labor leader Jennie Matyas by Corinne L. Gilb in 1957 for the University of California Institute of Industrial Relations Oral History Project in Berkeley. Jennie Matyas came to America by steerage and spent her childhood in New York's Lower East Side. She left school at 14 to help support her family and became at that tender age one of the most ardent workers in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and in the Socialist Party. But she could accept neither the philosophy nor the tactics of the Communists who invaded both union and party after the First World War, so she retreated to private life. Then she regained hope in the era of the New Deal, fought the battle of the picket line throughout the 1930s, and became a vice president of the ILGWU in 1941.--HML