Angela Bambace
Angela Bambace, a tireless union worker, became the first female officer of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) when she was elected vice president in 1957. Bambace was born on February 14, 1898 in Santos, Brazil, to Giuseppina Calabrese and Antonio Bambace, immigrants from Leonforte, Sicily. The family migrated to New York City in 1901 and settled in East Harlem. As teenagers, Angela and her sister Marie followed their mother into garment work, like most Italian immigrant women in New York City. She first became a member of the Italian Waist and Dressmakers’ Local 89 in 1917 and served as a key organizer in the dressmakers’ strike of 1919. Before joining the ILGWU, Bambace worked as an organizer for the …show more content…
Throughout his life, he was a major force in the music world. In the 1960s he was head of the Union’s Civil Rights Division, which saw to the desegregation of the local unions and anywhere musicians played. His most famous actions were banning all commercial recordings by union members from 1942 to 1944 and again in 1948 to pressure record companies to give better royalty deals to musicians. These were known as the Petrillo Bans. This fight is still regarded as a watershed effort to protect a measure of gains from new technologies for workers. Petrillo made his boldest move in 1942, taking union musicians out of the nation’s recording studios and demanding a royalty on every record sold. President Roosevelt asked him to relent and although the strike was ordered to cease by the War Production Board, Petrillo refused to comply. After twenty-seven months, the big record companies gave in and agreed to pay royalties of 1 to 2-1/2 cents per record to the union. This fund is called the Music Performance Trust Fund and is Petrillo’s lasting legacy to the participants in the music