Photo:American Socialist Congressman Meyer London Speaking At A Union Square Rally For Striking Street Car Workers, 1916

[Donkees]

Meyer London, American Socialist Congressman, speaking at a rally of striking Brooklyn streetcar workers, 1916.
Date 15 July 1916

London was active in the 1910 New York Cloakmakers strike, during which the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) brought out 50,000 in a successful struggle for higher wages and better work conditions against their employers. In his capacity as counsel for the ILGWU, London drew up and published a communique in the name of the strike committee.[11] In this manifesto, London declared:

We charge the employers with ruining the great trade built up by the industrious immigrants. We charge them with having corrupted the morale of thousands employed in the cloak trade. ... Treachery, slavishness and espionage are encouraged by the employers as great virtues of the cloakmakers. This general strike is greater than any union. It is an irresistible movement of the people. It is a protest against conditions that can no longer be tolerated. This is the first great attempt to regulate conditions in the trade, to do away with that anarchy and chaos which keeps some of the men working sixteen hours a day during the hottest months of the year while thousands of others have no employment whatever. ... We appeal to the people of America to assist us in our struggle.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_London

Meyer London (1871-1926), the first Russian-Jewish immigrant in the House of Representatives and the first socialist from the East Coast (Victor Berger, the other Jewish socialist in Congress, hailed from Wisconsin), served for three terms representing the Lower East Side. He introduced legislation for social insurance — health, unemployment, disability and old age — in 1916. He cast the lone vote against the war with Austria-Hungary in 1917. He was an ardent fighter for unrestricted immigration, and trade unions. ... If London had lived longer, he would have seen many of his proposals put into practice in the New Deal.

https://jewishcurrents.org/a-socialist-felon-in-congress-my-great-uncle-meyer-london