Willa Needham | March 3, 2025

In honor of Women’s History Month 2025, the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) recognizes two trailblazing women founders of early University of California labor programs, Sadie Goodman and Rose Pesotta. These women, both immigrant garment workers and union organizers, helped launch a UC-sponsored summer school for workers that laid the foundation for the Institute more than a decade before it was established.    

At the turn of the twentieth century when most adults only attained an elementary education, programs and institutes for working people began to emerge [1]. The schools taught workers in urban areas throughout the Midwest and Eastern United States theoretical frameworks, organizing techniques and leadership skills. The programs provided a more defined structure for working peoples’ intellectual lives which were otherwise stimulated by daily routines of reading and social debates. 

Inspired by the success and popularity of these daytime educational programs for workers, the first residential iteration, Brookwood Labor College, was founded in New York in 1921. That same year, members of the YWCA and the Women’s Trade Union League organized the Summer School for Women in Industry on the campus of Bryn Mawr College [2]. 

It was in these programs that Sadie Goodman and Rose Pesotta received training that would define their careers as organizers and educators. Goodman and Pesotta went on to be instrumental in the establishment of one of the first residential workers’ education programs on the West Coast in collaboration with the UC called the Pacific Coast Labor School, which can be considered a precursor to the IRLE. 

Sadie Goodman

Sadie Goodman was born to a Russian-Polish Jewish family in England and immigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen. Shortly after her arrival, she began working in garment factories in Rochester, New York before becoming a rank-and-file organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) [3]. Garment workers’ unions were among the first groups to promote workers’ education to enrich the lives of their members, especially women. Unions like the ACWA and The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) represented mostly women, many of them Jewish immigrants who were denied access to education in their birth countries. 

As a young woman between 1921-1925, Goodman attended Brookwood Labor College and the inaugural Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women in Industry, where she enthusiastically engaged with the curriculum and her peers. At the Wisconsin School for Workers, which Goodman attended in 1927, her instructors deemed her influence on her classmates “instructive and commendable” [4]. Goodman continued traveling around the U.S. to attend other labor programs and organize garment workers in Philadelphia, Chicago and, eventually, Los Angeles. 

Goodman migrated to California with a group of her women colleagues in the garment industry in the early 1930s. She believed in the transformative nature of education and its potential to build power for working people, so she continued to raise money to send members of her expanding network to labor summer schools across the country. The students’ long journeys proved to be costly, however, so Goodman resolved to open a similar program on the West Coast [5].

Goodman leveraged her connections with leaders across the labor and women’s movements in the U.S. to organize one of the first residential labor colleges on the West Coast in 1933, the Western Summer School for Workers– later known as the Pacific Coast Labor School. One of Goodman’s collaborators in this venture was Rose Pesotta, a fellow garment worker and organizer who made a name for herself in Los Angeles as a transformative leader. 

Rose Pesotta

Rose Pesotta was born to a Jewish family in Russian-Ukraine in 1896. She immigrated to New York City as a young woman in 1913 to forge a path for herself removed from her family’s expectations for her to marry. She began working in shirtwaist factories while taking English language classes by night and eventually joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) Local 25, which was led by women. She benefited from the union’s educational program and received a scholarship to Bryn Mawr’s Summer School for Workers in 1922 [6]. The leadership development aspect of the school led to Pesotta to become the first woman elected to the ILGWU’s General Executive Board. She went on to attend Brookwood Labor College from 1924 to 1926, perhaps where she first encountered Sadie Goodman.

Pesotta traveled to Los Angeles in 1931 and began sending correspondences to her mentor at Brookwood Labor College, A. J. Muste, on the state of labor in the city. She shared Goodman’s sentiments that Los Angeles was in need of a strong labor college. In a letter to Muste, she lamented, “This burg really needs some honest-to-goodness place where people could get a fair education” [7]. Pesotta made connections with allies in the garment industry in Los Angeles that would prove to be consequential before departing to New York to consult with the leaders of her union. 

She returned to Los Angeles in 1933 to lead a monumental strike that won rights for Mexican and Mexican American garment workers. Pesotta recognized the importance of organizing this often ignored group, writing to her ILGWU colleagues that these workers had the potential to be “the backbone of our union on the West Coast” [8]. Pesotta spearheaded efforts to distribute Spanish language educational resources to workers, including establishing a Spanish broadcast radio station. The Dressmakers General Strike, as it came to be known, was a pivotal  action in Los Angeles labor history. The strike demonstrated that the city’s garment workers– 75% of which were Mexican and Mexican American– could be excellent organizers when given the opportunity to lead. The action established a new ILGWU local, Local 96, with majority Mexican and Jewish women elected leaders, and secured workers a minimum wage and 35 hour work week [9].

Pesotta continued to emphasize the importance of education and diversity to the labor movement in her efforts to establish a worker college on the West Coast with Goodman and her colleagues. She viewed workers’ education as essential to the labor movement and advocated for programs prioritize inclusion in their teachings and outreach efforts. 

The Pacific Coast Labor School

The Pacific Coast Labor School operated under various names between 1933 and 1941 co-sponsored by the UC Extension program. The program educated hundreds of rank-and-file union members in Southern and Northern California in summer sessions featuring courses on a variety of subjects including labor economics, class consciousness, European social movements, English and dramatic arts. Many students benefited directly from skills and knowledge they gained in the programs and went on to assume leadership roles in their organizations. 

Conclusion

The Pacific Coast Labor School and associated labor programs were indispensable to the development of UCLA IRLE and its units including the Labor Studies Program and Labor Center. It is thanks to the work of the women founders of the Pacific Coast Labor School–Sadie Goodman, Rose Pesotta and their colleagues–that the first UC-associated labor programs were established. Women’s leadership has continued to shape the trajectory of the IRLE in the ensuing decades of its history, with women holding prominent positions as directors and program leaders. 

Read more about Ruth Milkman, IRLE’s first woman director from 2001-2008, and Jackie Leavitt, co-director of the Community Scholars Program at the IRLE here. 

Read a profile of Saba Waheed, Director of the UCLA Labor Center, here. 

Read more about Jennifer Jihye Chun, IRLE Associate Director, here. 

Read about Ana-Christina Ramón, Director of the Entertainment & Media Research Initiative, here. 

Notes 

1. “A Half-Century of Learning: Historical Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000,” U.S. Census Bureau, April 6, 2006, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2000/dec/phc-t-41.html 
2. Tobias Higbie, “Reform, Radicalism, and Workers’ Education,” in Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
3. Tobias Higbie, “In the Shadow of the University,” in Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
4. Don D. Lescohier to Clara Kaiser, December 15, 1927, 18/5/37, box 1, SWR., quoted in Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
5. Tobias Higbie, “In the Shadow of the University,” in Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
6. Rose Pesotta, “Flight to the West,” in Bread upon the Waters (1944).
7. Pesotta to A. J. Muste, April 7, 1932; and Pesotta to A. J. Muste, June 2, 1932, Brookwood Labor College Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, quoted in Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
8. Rose Pesotta, “California Here We Come!,” in Bread upon the Waters (1944).
9. Clementina Durón, “Mexican Women and Labor Conflict in Los Angeles: The ILGWU Dressmakers’ Strike of 1933,” Aztlán 15, no. 1 (1984).

Bibliography

“A Half-Century of Learning: Historical Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000.” United States Census Bureau. April 6, 2006. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2000/dec/phc-t-41.html  

Durón, Clementina. “Mexican Women and Labor Conflict in Los Angeles: The ILGWU Dressmakers’ Strike of 1933,” Aztlán 15, no. 1 (1984).

Higbie, Tobias. Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life. University of Illinois Press, 2019. 

Pesotta, Rose. Bread upon the Waters. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1944.