Jay Mazur, Zealous Advocate for Garment Workers, Dies at 92

Jay Mazur, a blunt-speaking, Bronx-born labor leader who was president of American garment workers’ unions in the 1980s and ’90s, a tumultuous time when clothing makers led the flight of American factories overseas and garment unions hemorrhaged members, died on Jan. 14 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Marc, said.

The son of a presser in a clothes factory, Mr. Mazur (pronounced MAY-zur) joined the staff of the storied International Ladies Garment Workers Union at 18. He spent his 51-year career militantly championing a largely female immigrant work force — historically Jewish and Italian, then Chinese and Hispanic — and fiercely opposing free trade and globalization.

He was loud, effusive and held the room, whether it was a convention hall or a closed-door summit of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“He was a Jewish, working-class, colorful character,” Jo-Ann Mort, who served as his communications director, said in an interview. “He loved the union like a family.”

Mr. Mazur became president of the I.L.G.W.U. in 1986 and then, in 1995, led his members, who made mostly women’s clothing, into a merger with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, which represented men’s wear workers. He was president of the merged Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, known as Unite, from 1995 to 2001.

Mr. Mazur led a historic 1982 strike in Chinatown and, in 1986, was one of the first labor leaders to endorse legalizing undocumented immigrants, when most unions saw them as an enemy threatening Americans’ jobs.