Salvatore Ninfo

20th-century labor leader

Salvatore Ninfo


Acting President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
In office January 1923 – February 1923
Vice President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
In office 1916–1923
Member of the New York City Council
In office January 1, 1938 – January 1, 1944

Personal details
Born	1883 Sicily, Italy
Died	1960 (aged 77) New York City, New York
Political party	American Labor
Occupation	Labor leader

Salvatore Ninfo (1883-1960) was a union organizer and officer for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU).

Biography

Born in Sicily, Ninfo immigrated to the United States in 1899. For the next decade, Ninfo worked to organize Italian workers and lead in the garment industry's major early strikes. Except for a period (1903-1906) when he worked to organize Italian craft workers in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Ninfo worked with the ILGWU.

In 1902, Ninfo joined Local 9, the New York Cloak Finishers' and Tailors' Union. In 1906, when he returned from organizing for the AFL, he served as a member of the executive board of Local 9, and in 1908, he was both a delegate to the Cloak Joint Board and a general organizer for the ILGWU. Ninfo was deeply involved in the dressmakers' strike (1909) and the cloakmakers' strike (1910), also known as the "Uprising of the 20,000" and "The Great Revolt," and after the Protocol of Peace, he served as a business agent for the New York Cloak Joint Board and manager of Local 48.

Ninfo was elected vice president (1916) and then for a brief period of about four months, between Benjamin Schlesinger's resignation and Morris Sigman's election, he served as Acting President of the ILGWU (1923). After Sigman's election, Ninfo became first vice president (1923-1934) and later (1936), manager of Local 145 in Passaic, New Jersey.

Ninfo left the ILGWU when he was elected to the New York City Council on the American Labor Party ticket in 1937. He served on the city council until 1943.

In 1939, just days after the outbreak of World War II, Ninfo's 29-year-old son Ralph was convicted of "inciting to a breach of the peace" by making sidewalk speeches calling for all American Jews to be killed. The elder Ninfo said he hoped his son would be "put in jail for the rest of his life," adding that he had washed his hands of his son. Ralph Ninfo said he had joined the Coughlinite Christian Citizens Committee.^[1]

References

^ "Councilman's Son Guilty of 'Inciting,' " New York Times, 21 September 1939. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/09/21/93963020.html?pageNumber=28