HOCHMAN, JULIUS

HOCHMAN, JULIUS (1892–1970), U.S. labor leader. Hochman was born in Bessarabia, the son of a tailor. At the age of 11 he was apprenticed to a tailor. Two years later he participated in an unsuccessful strike and decided to become a socialist. Immigrating to America at 15, Hochman worked as a skirt- and dressmaker in New York, and attended evening high school, the Rand School of Social Science, and Brookwood Labor College. In his early twenties Hochman became an effective International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union organizer of the Chicago, Boston, Toronto, and Montreal dress markets, and in 1925 was elected a vice president of the ilgwu. During the ensuing intra-union conflict between the left and right, Hochman sided with the anticommunist Sigman group. His most important service to the union was in formulating programs for the stabilization of the garment industry. In 1929, appointed manager of the newly constituted New York Dress Joint Board, he was able to effect many of his ideas including piece-rate and time studies, which cemented labor-management cooperation aimed at increasing industrial efficiency. Hochman devoted his efforts to maintain New York as the nation's dominant dressmaking center. In 1941, through an agreement with dress manufacturers, he accomplished some of his most cherished objectives: obligatory standards of efficiency, an industry-wide planning program, and the establishment of the New York Dress Institute to make New York the world's fashion center. He wrote Why This Strike (1936) and Industry Planning Through Collective Bargaining (1941).

[Melvyn Dubofsky]