Labor of Love

The American gift for giving is well known abroad; enormous grants from the Federal Government and from wealthy individuals or their foundations are taken for granted by foreigners. But there is another kind of U.S. philanthropy that could make a sharper impression: the gifts of U.S. labor unions. That kind of charity makes some points of its own; it proves that U.S. labor is far from the puny marionette on the knee of U.S. capital that Communist propaganda makes it out to be, and it calls attention to the breadth and depth of the U.S.'s concern with the people of other lands. Last week David Dubinsky, boss of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, announced a handsome gift for the citizens of Beersheba, Israel: a cool $1,000,000 to build a hospital, the city's first.

The garment workers' building fund, the biggest single charity gift ever made by a labor union, will come both from the I.L.G.W.U.'s own bank account and from contributions by union members. Total cost of the 200-bed hospital will be approximately $1,500,000, and Dubinsky confidently hoped (out loud) that the 440,000 I.L.G.W.U. members will make up the $500,000 difference.

The idea for the hospital grew out of a trip Dubinsky made to Israel last June. In Beersheba he was shocked to learn that the city (pop. 22,000) has no hospital, and that whenever a Beersheban needs hospital care he must travel nearly 50 miles to Rehovot, which is more than a quarter of the way to Dan at the other end of the country. Dubinsky came home determined to do something.

Foreign aid is not a new field for the I.L.G.W.U., which has many foreign-born members. Over the years, the union has handed out a generous $25 million to various philanthropic projects, many of them in other countries. One project is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Maritime Trades Institute, a boys' orphanage near Palermo, Sicily, which the I.L.G.W.U. has supported to the tune of $600,000 over the past eight years. Other labor unions (notably the steelworkers and the carpenters) have been lavish, too. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America has contributed $600,000 to Israel, $500,000 to eight Italian Boys Towns and to day nurseries over the past decade.

The I.L.G.W.U.'s hospital will not leave the union threadbare. It still has a bank balance of nearly $200 million.

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