Remember This!

Power from the past

Tag: Garment Workers

Historically garment workers in southern California has been represented by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) which merged with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) in 2003 to form UNITE HERE. In 2010, UNITE HERE split up with the garment worker sections affiliating with SEIU as Workers United. The hotel workers retained the name UNITE HERE.

  • Fighting for Joint Liability

    Fighting for Joint Liability

    While many recognize the 1990s as a time of the labor movement’s resurgence in Los Angeles, for garment workers, it was a time of existential crisis. Facing new competition from imported goods, local manufacturers returned to old ways of doing business, hiring mainly undocumented immigrants, firing union activists, and severing long-standing contracts. A raid on an apartment complex in El Monte revealed how dangerous the exploitation had become: the CA Department of Industrial Relations found 72 Thai women, victims of human trafficking, being held against their will and forced to sew for 18 hours a day. The clothing investigators found in the apartment was sold at major national retailers, including Robinson’s May, Montgomery Ward and Mervyn’s. 

    The incident in El Monte—which occurred amidst UNITE’s years-long campaign against Guess? Jeans Inc., Los Angeles’ largest apparel manufacturer—prompted UNITE! and its allies to rethink their tactics. It made clear to garment workers that they needed legislation to establish Joint Liability, so that manufacturers like Guess? And retailers like Robinson’s May could be held accountable for conditions to which they subcontracted their work. Previous attempts to pass similar legislation had been vetoed by governors Wilson and Deukmejian, but after Assemblywoman Hilda Solis introduced the new bill, AB633, Gov. Gray Davis expressed his support. AB633 increased registration fees to fund additional inspectors, established an expedited process for wage theft claims and introduced successor employment liability so that subcontractors couldn’t simply close their shops to avoid paying fines. Unfortunately, almost immediately, major retailers in Los Angeles challenged the law in court, claiming the new rules did not apply to them, and the fight for Joint Liability continued.

    Pictured here: Assemblymember Hilda Solis and Father Pedro Villaroya of CLUE stand with Thai workers from El Monte at UNITE! rally, while organizer Cristina Vásquez speaks at a retailer-accountability demonstration at the Robinsons-May store in Santa Monica, CA in December 1997. From the Steve Nutter Collection, IRLE Archives. 

    For more about AB633, read: Blasi, Gary, and University of California Institute for Labor & Employment. 2001. Implementation of A.B. 633 : A Preliminary Assessment  / Gary Blasi and Associates. Los Angeles: Institute for Labor and Employment, University of California, Los Angeles.

  • Guess? Who Pockets the Difference (1996)

    Guess? Who Pockets the Difference (1996)

    In 1995, UNITE! (Union of Needle Trades and Industrial Textile Employees, formed after a merger of the ILGWU and ACTWU) launched a campaign against Guess? Jeans, the largest apparel manufacturer in Los Angeles. Known for its distinctive stone-washed jeans, Guess? operated its own retail stores and made down-market lines sold at department stores, averaging over $500 in annual sales. UNITE estimated that some 5000 workers in Los Angeles cut and sewed garments for Guess? , including around 1000 employed at the Guess?  warehouse. Their campaign relied on creative new tactics, including “hot shop” strikes at two Guess? subcontractors and direct actions at retail stores targeting the Guess? brand. Their media strategy included videos like this one, where Guess?  workers shared their testimonios and rallied support for the union drive. 

    UNITE’s campaign against Guess?, while achieving some victories for workers, drained the union of resources and ended with the company relocating most of its production to Mexico. As UNITE organizer Cristina Vásquez described, the campaign was “like fighting an octopus” – when the union made progress in one of its subcontracted shops, Guess? would sever their relationship to the subcontractor and deny any liability for the conditions in the shop. The Guess?  campaign would be the last of UNITE’s major union drives, forcing garment workers and their allies to pursue new methods of establishing joint liability in the industry. 

    A Spanish language version of the video is available here.

    Both videos from the Steve Nutter Collection, IRLE.

  • Boycott Forever 21

    Boycott Forever 21

    In 2001, the coalition of organizations that had come together to support the Thai Workers in El Monte pooled their funds to establish the Garment Worker Center (GWC), as a legal clinic to support workers in filing wage claims under the new procedures established by AB633. They hired three young Asian American women to run the GWC, including Kimi Lee as director, a lawyer who had previously worked on wage theft cases at the ACLU. But soon after they opened, the GWC’s small organizing staff began to notice that many of the workers seeking their support were coming from the same shops. And some additional research revealed that those shops were producing garments for the same company: fast fashion retailer Forever 21.  

    The GWC launched its multi-pronged campaign against Forever 21 in 2001. With support from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, they filed a lawsuit on behalf of thirty-three workers alleging wage theft and dangerous working conditions. They organized picket lines at Forever 21’s subcontractors across the city and at its various retail stores, and even demonstrations outside the homes of the company’s owners. And they organized a nationwide boycott campaign calling on their fellow workers and allies to join through loud and colorful public demonstrations like this one. Pictured here: María Pineda, one of the thirty-three workers who filed the lawsuit, and GWC Director Kimi Lee (in the orange vest). 

    Check out more photos from the GWC’s campaign against Forever 21 here.

    Watch the 2007 documentary about the Forever 21 campaign, Made in L.A. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvhOO2RdgA

  • Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

    Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

    A garment worker carries a “Bill For Your Dirty Laundry” at a “Day of Conscience to End Sweatshops” rally and march in Los Angeles’ garment district on October 4, 1997. Organized by UNITE and its allies as part of their campaign against Guess? Jeans, the event was part of a national day of action that aimed to pressure the Presidential Task Force on Apparel Manufacturing to enforce a strong accord that would protect garment workers’ rights in Los Angeles and around the world. 

    Photograph by Linda A. Lotz, CLUE records (LSC.2441), UCLA Library Special Collections Collection Information: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8g167r7/

    View more of Lotz’ photos from the CLUE collection here.

  • May Day Los Angeles, 2003

    May Day Los Angeles, 2003

    The Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network (MIWON) formed in the year 2000 to support immigrant and undocumented immigrant labor rights across Los Angeles. The coalition brought together the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute for Popular Education of Southern California, IDEPSCA), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), the Pilipino Worker Center (PWC), and later the Garment Worker Center (GWC), among other organizations. Throughout its ten years, these groups committed themselves “to the struggle for dignity, justice, and the human rights of immigrant workers and all peoples,” through sharing strategies and information, fostering interethnic and interracial solidarity, and promoting political consciousness and civic engagement among low-wage workers in Los Angeles.

    MIWON campaigned for the passage of the “Immigrant Workers Bill of Human Rights” at the Los Angeles City Council in 2001, and to expand undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses and government-issued identification. But perhaps their most enduring tactic was their annual commemoration of May Day (International Workers Day), marches that promoted solidarity among multiethnic and immigrant workers in Los Angeles and beyond. 

    Pictured here: a scene from MIWON’s May Day march in 2003, where protestors connected “immigrant bashing” in Los Angeles and the United States government’s invasion of Iraq weeks earlier. 

    View more images from the 2003 May Day march here.

  • They were willing to break with tradition

    They were willing to break with tradition

    Maria Elena Durazo recalls her first organizing job

    On a trip to Mexico I met Cristina Vázquez and others from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU or ILG, now Workers United-SEIU). And when we came back, Cristina referred me to the union for a job. I was already familiar with the work of the ILG at that point. It was the only union that was openly, aggressively organizing immigrants. They were doing things like challenging the INS for raiding the factories without arrest warrants. In conjunction with its aggressive program of organizing workers in the shops, the ILG also had a legal program that backed it up to push the INS out of the shops. Because ultimately, as long as they continued with those raids, it was gonna be pretty much impossible to organize. So I just loved the fact that they were so bold and they were out there on the front lines in a vanguard position.

    Once I got to know Cristina I saw the way that the ILG approached organizing. It was very experimental in the sense that the organizers were given the freedom to organize anyway they liked. “Figure it out, do whatever you can. Be creative!” They were almost, in a sense, given carte blanche, instead of, “This is the way, and this is the only way.” All those elements made the ILG even more appealing to me.

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  • We were the union they’d call

    We were the union they’d call

    Cristina Vázquez on the lessons of organizing immigrant workers in the 1970s

    In 1976, when I started working for the ILGWU, we had several thousand members, but for ten years they had hardly organized a shop. The union had not paid much attention to the situation in L.A. … but then the ILGWU decided to bring an organizing director from back east, Phil Russo.  He was an organizer himself and he had a vision. He thought there was a lot of potential here, and he said he was going to find and hire the best organizers. He started going to the universities and recruiting people who were active in political groups. He put a team together, and among them was my husband, Mario F. Vázquez, who had just graduated from UCLA law school after emigrating from Mexico at age 15. He saw this ad, “Organizers Needed at ILGWU.” At the time he was doing some volunteer work for CASA (Centro de Acción Social Autónomo), the Chicano pro-immigrant organization, writing and translating for its newspaper, Sin Fronteras [Without Borders], and doing all this political work.

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