NYT: Overlooked No More: Min Matheson, Labor Leader Who Faced Down Mobsters

As director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, she fought for better working wages and conditions while wresting control from the mob.



Min Matheson in an undated photograph. She frequently confronted “tough guys” while marching in picket lines.Credit...via Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation
and Archives, Cornell University Library

By Steven Greenhouse

Steven Greenhouse was the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2014 and is author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor” (2019).

Published May 3, 2024 Updated May 4, 2024

It was in northeastern Pennsylvania that Min Matheson earned her reputation for fearlessness. Over her 20 years as director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union there, she repeatedly faced down mobsters in her fight for fair wages and safe conditions for women workers.

In one incident, she confronted several menacing “tough guys,” as she called them, in Pittston, Pa., where she was marching on a picket line alongside other women.

She told them, “You rotten hoodlums! What are you doing in this town?” she recalled in an oral history interview. “You don’t live here. We live here. This is our town, not yours.”

Nearby homeowners opened their windows to watch the ruckus. “There are witnesses to anything you think you are going to do,” Matheson told the thugs. They slinked away.

FULL story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/business/min-matheson-overlooked.html