World War II; while it had once been concentrated in New York City and other eastern and Midwestern cities, with smaller outposts on the West Coast, the work done by formerly unionized shops fled to other parts of the US or abroad, where unions were non-existent and wages far lower. The ILGWU was unable to prevent these runaway shops or to organize workers at the new locations. The union's membership also changed greatly in the years after World War II; what once had been a predominantly Jewish and Italian workforce became largely Latino, African-American and Asian. The leadership of the union had less and less in common with its membership and very often had no experience in the trade itself. In the last decade of Dubinsky's tenure some of these new members began to rebel, protesting their exclusion from positions of power within the union. That rebellion failed: the established leadership had too strong a hold on the official structure of the union, in an industry in which members were scattered across a number of small shops and in which power was concentrated in the upper echelons of the union, rather than in the locals. Without the support of a mass movement that would have given the majority an effective voice, individual insurgents were either marginalized or coopted. The union continued to expand its membership after World War II, reaching its apex at 500,000 members in 1965, one year before Dubinsky's retirement. Dubinsky's focus on maintaining the stability of the industry and the union's place in it dampened the union's desire to gain significant wage increases for its members. The union gradually lost its ability to keep sweatshop conditions from returning, even in the former center of its strength in New York. While the union still had one-half million members in the years immediately after Dubinsky's retirement, the forces that brought about the decline and eventual disappearance of the ILGWU thirty years later, when it merged with the ACWA to form the union known as the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), were already at work. In his last years, Dubinsky was often accessible to the union's members. Retirement, death, and legacy On March 17, 1966, Dubinsky resigned as leader of the ILGWU at the age of 74. At the time of his retirement, he had led the ILGWU for 34 years. Nearly three years after his retirement,