In July two attempts were made, on behalf of the cloak makers, by the State Board of Arbitration to induce the manufacturers to meet the Union members and to arbitrate with them.  These attempts failed because the Union insisted on the question of the closed shop as essential.  The manufacturers refused to arbitrate the question of the closed shop.

At this juncture a public-spirited retailer of Boston, Mr. Lincoln Filene, entered the controversy.  Mr. Filene resolved that, as a large consumer, he and his class had no right to shirk their responsibility by passively acquiescing in sweat-shop conditions.  As an intermediary between the wholesaler and the public, the retailer had an important part in the conflict, not only because he suffered directly from the temporary paralysis of the industry, but also because his indifference to the claims of the worker for a just wage, sanitary factory conditions, abolition of home work, and for a decent working-day was equivalent to an active complicity in the guilt of the manufacturer.  Through Mr. Filene’s intervention, the manufacturers and the Union officials agreed to confer, and to request Mr. Louis Brandeis of Boston to act as chairman.

Mr. Brandeis had, at the outset, the confidence of both parties.  Each side recognized in him that combination of wide legal learning and a social economic sense which had made him an effective participant in the development of the progressive political and industrial policies of the nation.  The employers welcomed Mr. Brandeis because they had faith in his sense of fairness.  The cloak makers welcomed him because of his brilliant and signal service to the entire trade-union movement and to American working women in securing from the United States Supreme Court the decision which declared constitutional the ten-hour law for the women laundry workers of Oregon.

The conference that was to have determined the industrial fortunes of more than 40,000 New York workers for the following year opened on Thursday morning, July 28, in a small room in the Metropolitan Life Building.  Mr. Brandeis was in the chair.  On one side of a long table sat the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a member of the Vorwaerts staff, and the Secretary of the International Garment Workers’ Union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly Americanized; and three older men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to “scabs,” a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop—­a subject which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed