Unity House: The Labor Movement's Resort

For seventy years, from nineteen nineteen to nineteen eighty-nine, Unity House in the Pocono Mountains served as a vacation and education retreat for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Each year it welcomed several thousand visitors, including union members, retirees, and public officials, offering cultural programming, lectures, and rest in a setting that said clearly: working people deserve beauty and leisure too. Unity House closed in nineteen eighty-nine as employment in the domestic apparel industry declined and union membership shrank. What it represented during its long run was something rarer than it sounds: a place where organized labor built its own alternative to the exclusive resorts of the wealthy, and opened it to the people who made the clothes.