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In leading the 17-year organizing drive at J. P. Stevens, Mr. Stetin spearheaded one of the most ambitious unionization campaigns in the anti-union South and one of the most publicized unionization drives since World War II. The effort, which ended successfully in 1980, eventually organized 3,500 workers at 12 textile mills.

In 1975, in the middle of the Stevens drive, Mr. Stetin engineered a surprise move by arranging for his 174,000-member union to merge with the larger Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. He pushed for the merger because it would make more money and manpower available for the Stevens campaign, on which the 1979 movie "Norma Rae" was based.

Mr. Stetin, who emigrated from Poland at the age of 10 and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, was fond of saying he got his education in the labor movement. To show his gratitude to labor, he played a pivotal role in creating the American Labor Museum, the nation's first museum dedicated to the union movement. Located in a former silk worker's house in Paterson, N.J., the museum helped to commemorate the 1913 strike in which 24,000 workers struck 300 silk manufacturers.

Sol Stetin was born on April 2, 1910, in Pabianice, in what is now Poland, near Lodz, that country's silk manufacturing center. When he was 10, his family immigrated, settling in Paterson. After quitting high school, Mr. Stetin became an amateur boxer and semiprofessional basketball player, even though he was just 5 feet 4 inches tall.

In 1930, he took a job at a dye shop for 32 cents an hour, becoming active in the nationwide textile strike of 1934, involving 500,000 workers. He climbed the union's ladder, as a shop steward, organizer and director of its mid-Atlantic region.

In 1934, he married Frieda Goldstein. He is survived by her, two daughters, Sondra Gash of Lebanon, N.J., and Myra Levine of St. Louis; a sister, Sophie Sitnick of New York; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

In 1968, he was elected secretary-treasurer of the Textile Workers Union, and in 1972 he became its president. Mr. Stetin dedicated his union to organizing the South; at the time only one-tenth of 575,000 textile workers there belonged to unions. J. P. Stevens was his No. 1 target in the campaign, which began in 1963.

Meanwhile, Mr. Stetin engineered the Amalgamated merger to advance the effort. To ease the way, he agreed to take the No. 3 spot in the merged union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, not the No. 2 position traditionally reserved for the president of the smaller union.

"The most significant thing about Sol Stetin was the decision he made in the throes of the J. P. Stevens campaign to merge," said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, the successor union to Mr. Stetin's union. "At the time, he headed a very viable union that had the resources and money to survive, but he supported the merger, not for himself - he got nothing out of it - but because the deal called for the new union to expend considerable resources on the Stevens campaign and finance a national boycott."

After retiring in 1982, Mr. Stetin helped establish the labor museum, taught labor studies at William Paterson College in Wayne, N.J., and was named the first labor leader in residence at Rutgers University, where he taught students how to organize unions.

Last month, having just turned 95, he was still taking part in union protests, attending a rally in St. Louis in a contract dispute with a large laundry company.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company