Look for the Union Label

Union labels began to appear on clothing goods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following cigar manufacturers and other companies of consumer goods. Shortly after its founding in 1900, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), issued their own label to mark products made in unionized shops, although this was done sporadically and on the local level.

Workers’ efforts to educate consumers regarding how their clothes were made received a boost in the early 20th century from the National Consumers League (NCL), and its “white label” campaign. This women-led reform organization called on middle-class women to use their buying power to bring an end to the exploitive and hazardous conditions in the garment industry. “Consumers . . . can, if they will, enforce a claim to have all that they buy free from the taint of cruelty,” Florence Kelley, the head of the NCL, argued in 1914. Kelley sought to build solidarity not only across class lines, but also by gender, appealing mainly to women, who as the main consumers and producers of clothes, could use collaboration with each other to promote their rights.

By the mid-20th century, as clothing was increasingly imported from overseas and the domestic industry shifted factories to the anti-union Southern states, the ILGWU once again sought to mobilize the middle class in the service of the labor movement. It instigated a new label campaign to educate consumers for the benefit of organized work.

Launched in 1959, the “Look for the Union Label” campaign was an industry-wide effort that sought to build support for the ILGWU and appeal to patriotic sentiments. The label — designed by the newly established Union Label Department — contained a unique design with numbers and letters that was intended to provide a system for record keeping and easy identification of the employers involved. It was, the union proclaimed, a “symbol of decency, fair labor standards, and the American way of life.”

To publicize the effort, the ILGWU sponsored media events with wives of prominent politicians, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Mary Rockefeller, the wife of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. The ILGWU also printed advertisements in prominent magazines, encouraging women to “look for the union label” when they went out shopping. Like in the beginning of the 20th century, the campaign sought to create solidarity between women who comprised both the majority of ILGWU workers and of shoppers of clothing goods.