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THE UNION
In February of 1916, men in the stitching department organized a union.
Throughout the course of the strike, the local papers referred to it only as "the stitchers union" but one small Daily News article a year before the strike would identify it as the Embroidery Stitchers Benefit Society. (In a lawsuit to end picketing in October, the group would be called the "Stitchers Sick Benefits Association".)Representing a small portion of employees, the stitchers appear to have been primarily men of Russian origin. A number of Swiss men had immigrated to South River to work as embroiderers for Herrmann, Aukam & Co. and later many started their own small shops. It's possible that the Russian immigrants then took their places as skilled embroiderers or "stitchers" (that designation appears in the NJ 1915 census as an occupation and probably refers to heavy embroidery of the type done on military insignias, etc.) It should be noted that just before the strike, automatic embroidery machines had been installed by the firm.
WANT AD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 1916 STRIKE
The Stitchers' Union was not affiliated with any national union. The American Federation of Labor, many of whose member unions tended to not admit foreign born workers, also contained the most obvious affiliate, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
The ILGWU organized in New York City where foreign born workers dominated the industry. The ILGWU had an Embroidery Workers Union, Local 6, which had conducted a strike in Fishkill, New York in 1915 which was similar in some respects to the Herrmann, Aukam strike. ILGWU publications of the time also note the existence of a Local 5 in NJ, described as a "Swiss embroiderers" local in contemporary union publications.
The ILGWU would organize most of the South River garment factories in 1933 with the coming of FDR's New Deal.
The AFL's other union in the clothing industry was the United Garment Workers, a relatively weak union whose main strength lay in the work clothing segment (which would include Herrmann, Aukam due to their bandanna market). The UGW, however, did not actively organize the foreign born. It's independent offshoot, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, would have been a more likely union to be involved in an ethnic area like South River except for it's concentration in the men's clothing segment of the industry.
The radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had conducted garment and textile industry strikes that gained national attention in Lawrence, Mass. (1912) and Paterson, NJ (1913) and was noted for welcoming all workers and uniting those of various ethnic origins. There was a vague implication of IWW involvement in the New York Times account of the strike which noted that "authorities" claimed that some of the Herrmann, Aukam strikers were also involved in the 1915 strike at the Williams & Clark Fertilizer factory in what is now Carteret (contemporary accounts call the town Chrome or Roosevelt). In that strike of chemical workers, New Jersey's bloodiest (6 dead and 28 wounded), the IWW played only a small role but their involvement was stressed in most in newspaper accounts at the time.
(It should be noted that members of the IWW were the “outside agitators” of choice for most newspapers at the time, though with the coming Russian Revolution and the near total destruction of the IWW after would War I, Communists/Bolsheviks or, the more generic, “reds” would soon serve that role for the next 50 years.)
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