Jay Mazur, a blunt-speaking, Bronx-born labor leader who was president of American garment workers’ unions in the 1980s and ’90s, a tumultuous time when clothing makers led the flight of American factories overseas and garment unions hemorrhaged members, died on Jan. 14 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Marc, said.
The son of a presser in a clothes factory, Mr. Mazur (pronounced MAY-zur) joined the staff of the storied International Ladies Garment Workers Union at 18. He spent his 51-year career militantly championing a largely female immigrant work force — historically Jewish and Italian, then Chinese and Hispanic — and fiercely opposing free trade and globalization.
He was loud, effusive and held the room, whether it was a convention hall or a closed-door summit of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“He was a Jewish, working-class, colorful character,” Jo-Ann Mort, who served as his communications director, said in an interview. “He loved the union like a family.”
Mr. Mazur became president of the I.L.G.W.U. in 1986 and then, in 1995, led his members, who made mostly women’s clothing, into a merger with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which represented men’s wear workers. He was president of the merged Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, known as Unite, from 1995 to 2001.
Mr. Mazur led a historic 1982 strike in Chinatown and, in 1986, was one of the first labor leaders to endorse legalizing undocumented immigrants, when most unions saw them as an enemy threatening Americans’ jobs.
His impassioned warnings that globalization would decimate U.S. blue-collar employment were brushed aside by many of labor’s traditional allies in the Democratic Party, who, beginning in the 1980s, under President Bill Clinton, joined Republicans in promoting free trade.
“The rules of this new global economy have been rigged against workers,” Mr. Mazur thundered at a rally in Seattle in 1999 protesting a meeting of the World Trade Organization that Mr. Clinton had envisioned as showcasing American leadership on trade. The city was engulfed by demonstrators, and the National Guard was called in.
In a private meeting in Washington in 2000, at which leading Congressional Democrats informed union leaders that they would vote to grant China permanent normal trade relations — opening the floodgates to cheaply made imports — Mr. Mazur grew livid.
He turned to Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, the influential congressman from Harlem, and told him, “Charlie, our members expect you to have their interests,” recalled Mark Levinson, an aide to Mr. Mazur who was present.
“Rangel says angrily, ‘You know what your members want? My autograph,’” Mr. Levinson continued, in an interview. “Jay jumped up and was ready to fight.” Another union official physically restrained him.
The enormous U.S. job losses that union officials had warned would follow the liberalization of trade with China — which included permanently lowering tariffs and admitting China to the World Trade Organization in 2001 — came to pass. Some economists estimate that over the ensuing decade this “China shock” resulted in the loss of nearly a million American factory jobs.
When Mr. Mazur took over as president of the I.L.G.W.U., its membership had already declined to half its 1968 peak, as garment factories — easy to pick up and move — relocated to nonunion Southern states or foreign shores. After the merger with its sister union to form Unite, the combined membership continued to fall: to 240,000 in 2001, from 300,000 in 1995.
Mr. Mazur was thrust into the unhappy position of managing the decline of a renowned union, known familiarly as the I.L.G., that had helped lead the push for a five-day workweek, a minimum wage and employer-financed health insurance, and had established clout in the Democratic Party thanks to decades of growth.
He did, however, play a pivotal role in persuading U.S. industrial unions to adopt a welcoming position toward immigrants. In 1986, the I.L.G. endorsed extending amnesty to millions of undocumented workers through immigration reform signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. The union helped 3,000 of its members gain legal status, escorting them to interviews with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
“The I.L.G.W.U. was the first major union within the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to endorse amnesty for illegal people,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former I.L.G.W.U. immigration lawyer, said in an interview.
“It was driven by the Jewish ethos,” he added. “Jews who came to the garment industry, many of them were refugees.”
Under Mr. Mazur, the union offered legal services to immigrant members, as well as English language classes and day care for children.
It would be another 14 years before the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in 2000, called for a blanket amnesty for undocumented immigrants. By then, there was no longer a consensus in Washington that undocumented workers should be legalized.
In 2004, three years after Mr. Mazur’s retirement, Unite merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (Here) to form Unite Here. Garment workers later left the union to form a new group, Workers United, but garment jobs continued to disappear. According to government data, U.S. apparel and textile jobs fell to 334,000 in 2019, from 1.7 million in 1990.
Although Mr. Mazur had set his sights on increasing membership by organizing nonunion workers in garment manufacturing and other industries, his efforts were largely futile. Labor experts said the trend was inevitable: The global economy was moving in the opposite direction.
“There was no way he or anybody else could have stopped it,” Ruth Milkman, who teaches labor studies at the City University of New York, said in an interview. “All the industrial unions were in the same position. Garments was sort of a preview of capital flight.”
Jay Mazur was born on May 21, 1932, in the East Bronx to Simon Mazur, who immigrated from Poland in 1922, and Molly Mazur, his father’s second cousin, who died when Jay was 11. Left to raise four children, his father encouraged them to take odd jobs selling newspapers and shopping bags and running errands for neighbors.
“My father’s attitude was we had to earn our way,” Mr. Mazur told The New York Times in 1986.
Although he went to work for the union just out of Theodore Roosevelt High School, he later earned a bachelor’s degree from CUNY and a master’s from Rutgers University.
Besides his son, Marc, he is survived by his wife, Connie (Moak) Mazur; his daughter, Ilana Mazur; four grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; a sister, Bobbie Krolick; and a brother, Bernard Mazur.
An earlier marriage to Barbara Vogel, the mother of his children, ended in divorce.
Before he became president of the I.L.G.W.U., Mr. Mazur was the manager of its largest branch, Local 23-25, whose members included thousands of immigrant Chinese women working in small factories in Lower Manhattan.
In 1982, when contractors in Chinatown tried to break their contracts and oust the I.L.G., the conventional wisdom was that the workers would not fight because ethnic loyalty to their employers would outweigh any allegiance to the union. But Mr. Mazur disregarded those expectations and called a strike.
Some 20,000 workers rallied at Columbus Park in Chinatown, and the employers backed down.
“People would say there’s never been a more pro-union activity by Chinese workers anywhere in the world,” Mr. Chishti, the immigration scholar, said.
