for a single day work stoppage on August 10, 1925. As the union leadership battled internally, the manufacturers hired gangsters to break the long 1926 general strike on the part of a New York local led by Communist Party members. This ended negotiations with the employers and kept the strike going another four months, at the end of which the union was nearly bankrupt and the left-wing leadership almost fully discredited. Morris Sigman took over negotiations, settled the strike and then proceeded to prevent the Communist Party from obtaining any positions of influence within the ILGWU. Morris Sigman then called for a truce in the internal dispute with the rallied left-wing members. The agreement followed up with a reform of the ILGWU's internal governance system, which gave proportional influence to locals based on the sizes of their memberships, despite the left-wing of the union growing increasingly stronger. With the election at the 1925 convention, Sigman increasingly relied on the support of David Duninsky's cutters union, Italian locals, and many ‘out-of-town’ locals’ to hold on to his presidency. He declared that elections by the membership at this time would be undesirable, although he stated in reply to a question that he had favored the idea in principle at the Philadelphia convention. "What the workers of New York want," Sigman claimed, "is bread, not referenda. What they want are jobs, not referenda." Sigman also attributed the decreasing union standards in New York to not be from ILGWU officials, but instead a result of general industrial depression complicated by Communists. In addition, Sigman alleged that it was the duty of the New York Joint Board, which his opponents control, to improve conditions, secure the jobs for workers and protect union standards. Sigman announced his intention to be a candidate for re-election, marking the first time in his association with the ILGWU that he had done so. His efforts proved inadequate as the failed 1926 strike had nearly bankrupted the ILGWU, and consequently the International also lost a proportion of the locals that had decided to follow their expelled leaders out of the ILGWU rather than stay within the union. Morris Sigman's preference toward the right-wing within the ILGWU led David Dubinsky to suggest in 1928 that the union bring back Benjamin Schlesinger. In response, Morris Sigman did not support the proposal, but acceded to it and resigned in a dispute with the union's