http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05780.html
ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY 
The ILGWU was founded in New York City in 1900 by Jewish, Italian, and some Scots-Irish and Irish immigrants. The Union sought to unite the various crafts in its rapidly growing industry to increase their mutual strength. There was early resistance to the ILGWU from the garment manufacturers with whom they collectively bargained. There were also challenges to the Union's domination of the trade by the Industrial Workers of the World and by Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance. 
By 1917, the ILGWU had defeated its rivals. Through a combination of militant and impassioned work stoppages lead by its more radical members and vigorous organizing and negotiation, the Union had also consolidated its power, greatly improved working conditions for its members and created the mechanism for arbitrating disputes and grievances under a labor-management agreement known as the Protocol of Peace. In 1919, the ILGWU became the first American union to negotiate an unemployment compensation fund that was contributed to by its employers. 
The momentum of the previous two decades, however, was nearly lost to politically inspired intraunion warfare in the 1920's. Under its newly elected President Morris Sigman, the Union's General Executive Board disbanded left-wing groups within the Union in 1923, charging that they were communist cells. The radicals within the Union formed the Joint Action Committee to coordinate their battle with the parent Union. The issue came to a head in 1926 during a bitter and costly Cloakmaker's strike. Mismanaged by the communist leadership in the local, the strike plunged the International eight hundred thousand dollars into debt. The chaos caused by the strike and the subsequent expulsion of communists from the Union left it greatly weakened. Sigman resigned in 1928 and was succeeded by Benjamin Schlesinger, who had previously lead the Union between 1914-1923. He remained as President until a fatal illness forced him to resign in 1932. 
Despite the political turmoil during the 1920's, the ILGWU pioneered in the establishment of an extremely progressive health care program for its members which included not only regional Union Health Centers but the establishment of a resort for union workers first located in Massachusetts, later in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, known as Unity House. The Union also had an imaginative and pioneering Education Department which not only trained workers in traditional union techniques, but provided courses in continuation education in such basic skills as citizenship and the English language. The ILGWU also offered its members a forum for their social activities--sponsoring such activities as sports teams and even a mandolin orchestra. 
In 1932, David Dubinsky was elected President of the ILGWU. Dubinsky and the ILGWU (then 200,000 strong) were to play an important role in fostering industrial unionism in the United States by encouraging the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization. The Union would be an important political force in New York City and State politics and in the Democratic Party and Liberal Party as well. Dubinsky and his union were also instrumental in the decade-long effort to bring the plight of European Jews suffering under Nazi persecution to the attention of the world through the efforts of the Jewish Labor Committee. The ILGWU leadership included a number of significant figures in labor history in addition to Dubinsky. Among these were former presidents Benjamin Schlesinger, Morris Sigman, Louis Stulberg, and Sol Chaikin. The names of many of the union's other officials such as Luigi Antonini, Charles Zimmerman, Rose Pesotta, Frederick F. Umhey, Julius Hochman, Fannia M. Cohn, Isidore Nagler, Gus Tyler, and Leon Stein, are also well known to historians. In the period following the Second World War, the union suffered a decline in membership due to the movement of shops from the urban centers in the northeast to the south to avoid unionization and to take advantage of less expensive labor. The ethnic and racial character of the ILGWU also changed as European immigrants were supplanted by Asians, Latin Americans and immigrants from the Caribbean. 
The Union's African-American membership was also to greatly grow during this period. In recent years, despite vigorous efforts by union activists to limit such activities, garment manufacturers were to export their manufacturing abroad, taking advantage of cheap third world labor supplies and further cutting the membership base of the union. 
In July 1995 the ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) at a joint convention, forming UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). At the time the new union had a membership of about 250,000 in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.