Born in Lozd, Poland, in 1910, Sol Stetin migrated to the United States at the age 10, and later became a key figure in the labor movement as president of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA). He began his career in the textile industry and labor unions in 1930 when he took a job at a dye shop and became active in the nationwide textile strike of 1934. He started as a shop steward for the TWUA. Later Stetin became the organizer and director of the TWUA's mid-Atlantic region and served secretary-treasurer on the union's board before becoming TWUA's president in 1972. He continued as its president until its merger with the larger Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in 1976, which he engineered. During his tenure, Stetin led the 17-year campaign to organize the J.P. Stevens textile company in the anti-union South. He retired in 1982, but continued an active labor-union-related life, helping to establish the American Labor Museum, teaching labor studies and union organizing at William Paterson College and Rutgers University, in New Jersey, where he became the first labor leader in residence. Stetin died on May 24, 2005, from complications of leukemia in St. Louis, Missouri, at the age of 95.
The TWUA was an industrial union of textile workers established by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1939. In 1976 it merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to become the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). As a leading organization in the CIO's "Operation Dixie," it led numerous organizing campaigns in the union-resistant South, aiming to help textile workers achieve higher wages, health insurance and other benefits, and to ensure fair labor practices. The TWUA was able to organize new plants and revive some moribund organizations, but it was unable to achieve a breakthrough win which would organize the whole industry. In 1995, the TWUA's textile locals became part of UNITE/HERE, a manufacturing and hospitality workers union.
From the guide to the Sol Stetin Photographs., 1940s-1980s; undated, (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive)
