Sidney Sarkin - Sam Hart & Company

1925 - 1925
437 Mayor

Born in Vilkomir, Lithuania, to a wealthy family in 1903, Sidney Sarkin became a prominent union organizer and executive member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America after moving to Montreal in 1920. It was en route to Montreal, in Berlin, that he experienced first hand the power of a general strike when German workers put an end to the Kapp Putsch, an attempted military coup. Desiring to “become a proletarian” in the workers’ movement, Sarkin had to resist the wishes of his family – who wanted him to get an education – in order to enter the needle trades as a sweeper in his cousins’ shop. An active communist (and one who stumped for Fred Rose), Sarkin was interred in Camp Petawawa for several months during World War II, one of many trade union leaders who were targeted by the Canadian government, the RCMP and Quebec’s communist-targeting ‘Red Squad’ under the War Measures Act. One of Sidney Sarkin’s places of work was the Sam Hart & Company located in the Sommer Building on Mayor.

Sarkin retired as a master tailor’s cutter in 1967; he went on to publish his memoirs in Yiddish and gained recognition for his intricate wood sculptures.

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

Finally, after three months of being without work, I started at Samuel Hart’s in the trimming room. This was by now the beginning of 1925. In this shop there was a large cutting room employing some twenty-five men. Within the first few weeks I felt I couldn’t breathe. I felt cramped and suffocated. No one bothered me in my work. After three weeks or a month, the general manager of Samuel Hart called the workers together to hear a speech, the sum total of which was that times were hard and that none of them should be surprised to find in their pay envelopes, comes Friday, a cut in wages … five dollars [less]. He explained that this was happening in union shops and, after all, they must be competitive. Well, I nearly busted where I heard his speech. I couldn’t swallow the self-rule of the open shop, where workers could not express an opinion about the conditions. So I went to the back of the trimming room and told the foreman, who was a nice fellow and I had nothing against him, that he should accept my resignation. The foreman said, What the hell is the matter with you? You have not been touched. And this was true. I had not been given a cut in wages. When I received my envelope my pay was intact. But I couldn’t look at myself. You know what it means? I’m favoured in the shop because I’m the boss’s cousin. (69)

Organizing the unorganized was not the easiest way to make a living in the 1920s and 1930s. The Canadian government and the Canadian people were afraid of the spread of the October Revolution, the Russian Revolution. The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike had thrown a deadly fear into the government to the extent that every capitalist and every bourgeoisie in Canada was looking under his bed to make sure there wasn’t a Bolshevik there! Consequently, every form of binding, spreading, broadening the trade union movement, organizing the unorganized, was looked upon by the federal, provincial, and civic administrations as revolution. Not what you have today, the right of organization, that all you have to do is call upon a labour board to take a vote in a shop – who is for and who is against! In those days it was just the opposite. The might of the whole state, the police, all kinds of intimidation, arrests, charges of conspiracy, were the order of the day. And you never knew when you were going to be picked up. We were picked up upteen [sic] times. We were thrown into police headquarters and that is my own experience. No such thing as a cell, but a general room with a few cots and you had, pardon me, the urinal running right through the middle! Some of us were beaten up as well. (70)

Compiled by Sarah Woolf and Seemah C. Berson.

Links

Liens

"Engaging Nonfiction Reading" by Cynthia Ramsay - Jewish Independent
"Retired Tailor Carves Out Past With Knife" - Ottawa Citizen
A Balcony Under Threat in Balconville - Third Solitude Series
Camp Petawawa - Socialist History Project
Guide to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Records 1914-1980 - Kheel Center
I Have a Story to Tell You - Seemah Berson
Padlock Act - Canada's Human Rights History
Parti communiste du Québec - Wikipédia
RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part II, 1935 - Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whiitaker
Sidney Sarkin : un destin juif canadien par Régine Robin (abstract)
Sommer Building Brochure - Gestion Rester
UNITE HERE Historical Timeline

Sources

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

*Images courtesy of Seemah C. Berson and Wilfred Laurier University Press, Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Canadian Committee on Labour History, Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds. The RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part II, 1935 and Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

Media

Media