Julie Su
The slave labor case in El Monte, California is probably the most notorious example of sweatshop abuse in modern American history. (Allow us to be the latest in a long line of people to thank you for the amazing work you did to help free the victims.) Are there more recent examples that anti-sweatshop advocates should have at their fingertips when discussing the continued existence of sweatshops in the United States? Unfortunately, sweatshops in the United States remain a reality in many industries, including the garment industry. Today, Los Angeles is the sweatshop capital of the U.S., where garment workers sew for long hours, often without meal and rest breaks and often for less than the minimum wage. They almost invariably work overtime but these hours are not reflected in the time cards of the factory or in the pay workers receive. The U.S. Department of Labor's last study about this was nearly 10 years ago but at that time, over 60% of Los Angeles factories were found to violate basic wage and hour protections for workers. Over 90% were found to have health and safety violations detrimental to workers' well-being. These statistics are unacceptable and they demonstrate that sweatshops are not aberrations in an otherwise lawful industry. They are a way of doing business. Even during the El Monte case, I was afraid that the horrific conditions endured by the Thai garment workers would set a new low, would make the routine sweatshop conditions seem tame by comparison and therefore, would make it harder to push for higher standards in the industry as a whole. People would say, "maybe the conditions aren't perfect but at least the workers aren't held behind barbed wire as they were in El Monte." After the El Monte case, we at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, working together with our allies, brought a number of cases involving such sweatshop conditions. We represented immigrant Asian and Latino workers against companies including bebe, BCBG, and XOXO using the same theory, that manufacturers and retailers at the top of the garment industry food chain are responsible for the conditions in which their clothes are made. We represented a group of Latino workers who sewed jackets, including university apparel, right here in L.A. and we drew strength from the fabulous student movement that has grown up to leverage university power to demand decent working conditions. Perhaps the most publicized case was the one in which we represented Latino garment workers against Forever 21. These workers labored in different factories but all were paid less than their lawful wages and endured terrible verbal abuse and inhumanely long hours. The workers launched a 3-year campaign against Forever 21, which www.ethixventures.com Page 2
was covered in the Emmy-award winning documentary, "Made in L.A." Finally, a few years after El Monte, several nonprofit workers' rights organizations sued over a dozen manufacturers and retailers producing garments in the U.S. territory of Saipan. Those garments were sold with "Made in the U.S.A." labels but the workers, mostly from China and the Philippines, were forced to live, sleep, eat and work in abject poverty without any of the federal labor law protections that exist in other parts of the U.S. I think it's critically important to know that the fight against sweatshops in Los Angeles and in the U.S. did not begin and end with El Monte. But El Monte lit a fire and exposed the standard practices of the industry -- and the dangers when we look the other way and pretend they don't exist -- in a way that galvanized the anti-sweatshop movement. Incidentally, there is happy news to report for the El Monte workers, the majority of whom became U.S. citizens last year (2008). It was an incredible moment in their long and often very difficult journey toward achieving the dreams that brought them to the United States in the first place. After all these years, do you think most people understand that sweatshops still exist in the United States? If not, why hasn t the message sunk in? I definitely think people are more aware of sweatshops in the U.S. than they were, say, 15 years ago. When I started this work in 1994, the campaign against Jessica McClintock, led by the brave Chinese workers from Oakland and the Oakland-based Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) and the Los Angeles-based Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), was in full swing. Activists, workers, and students regularly picketed outside of the Jessica McClintock boutique at the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and when people saw them, or took the flyers about the campaign, I often heard them say, "What sweatshops? Not here." It is harder to claim total ignorance about the existence of sweatshops in our backyard. But at the same time, I think there has been some anti-sweatshop fatigue both by the public and the media. There was a tremendous amount of attention in the 1990s, spurred by the horror of the El Monte case and the courage of the Thai and Latino workers in that case who refused to be silent. Soon after that, there were exposes about Kathie Lee Gifford and Disney and the conditions in which their clothes were made overseas. And federal and state governments felt they had to do something, but the reality is that this type of change requires a fundamental challenge to the industry itself, not just fixes at the margins and window dressing. It is not enough to enforce existing minimum wage and www.ethixventures.com Page 3
overtime laws without looking at the fundamental reason why sweatshops exist, which is the power exerted by corporations at the top for the cheapest labor possible and the corresponding lack of power by workers at the bottom to protect themselves. Shifting this balance of power, making it more equitable, more just, is difficult and faces intense resistance by those who profit from things the way they are. Some of this resistance is more institutional, like the media coverage about business and what is good for business vs. labor and what is good for workers. It's hard to get sustained public attention to sweatshops. Even in our cases, we started to see the media ask, "Ok, so it's another sweatshop case, what is the new angle on this story?" Some of this relates to consumer habits, people are really devoted to fashion and if there isn't a quick answer to where they can get sweatshop-free clothes they like at prices they can afford, they'll tend to still buy whatever is available. The change needed to really eliminate sweatshop conditions requires sustained, focused efforts and resources which simply aren't there. So while workers, activists, unions, community-based organizers and nonprofit organizations continue to do this work, the public often doesn't hear about it. From an economic standpoint, how is the struggle of garment workers in the United States connected to that of foreign garment workers? The struggle for justice for garment workers in the U.S. is intimately tied to justice worldwide for workers. Most obviously, the threat that manufacturers and retailers have always made is that if U.S. workers stand up for themselves, organize, and improve working conditions, the companies will simply ship their work to countries with even more vulnerable workers and even fewer labor law protections. It's really quite cynical and, I think, appalling, but it is a real option for corporations in the garment industry and we saw this in the years immediately before and after the sunset of the Multi-Fibre Agreement, which made it even easier for companies to seek out the cheapest labor anywhere in the world. It led to a significant (though by no means complete) decrease in garment production in the U.S. So it is essential for working conditions everywhere to be improved to eliminate the competitive advantage that companies find by producing elsewhere. This doesn't mean that every worker has to be paid the same wage, but it does mean that there should be living wage standards across the globe that ensure www.ethixventures.com Page 4
that someone who works in a garment factory can make enough to live, to eat, to have shelter, education, health, and some leisure. From a justice perspective, it is obvious that the crushing poverty faced by so many workers who sew garments violates our most basic notions of human rights. We cannot pay attention to one group of workers in one country without understanding the interconnectedness of all the workers on whose backs billions of dollars in clothing are sold each year. Why did Sweatshop Watch, the organization you co-founded, close its doors? Who is stepping in to do the work that was being done by SW? Sweatshop Watch closed our doors after an amazing 15-year history of fighting with and for garment workers in the U.S. and around the world. We started as a coalition of groups across the state working on anti-sweatshop efforts in the garment industry, and together, we helped pass the strongest anti-sweatshop legislation in the country, California's AB 633 (which has had multiple problems with implementation, but has also allowed hundreds of garment workers to access a speedier process of winning wages through the state labor commissioner and has also been the model for legislation in other low wage industries, such as the car wash industry). What we found in the last few years is that the garment industry in California has changed. Production that used to be in the Bay Area has all but left, so many of our coalition partners were no longer working in the garment industry. In this economy, funding was a challenge. We realized that it made sense to go back to the roots of why we started Sweatshop Watch in the first place, which was to support the organizing and advocacy efforts of garment workers in the U.S., and this work would have to happen in Los Angeles. We decided that using limited resources to sustain a statewide coalition didn't make sense, but everyone involved in Sweatshop Watch remains very committed to having the work carried on by APALC. Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that APALC is currently doing? Over the last few years, APALC has been trying to do more research on the state of the local garment industry. There have been many changes, including, for example, the distribution of work by a single manufacturer across many different contractors (we believe this is in part a response to our lawsuits which demonstrated that if one factory was completely dependent on a single www.ethixventures.com Page 5
manufacturer, this helped prove that the manufacturer exercised control over working conditions in that factory and helped establish liability of the manufacturer). We have also been very interested, particularly in the last 2 years, in identifying companies who want to partner with us in raising standards in the garment industry and actively working to combat sweatshops. We have also reached out to City officials to try and launch a "Made in L.A." marketing campaign that would harness the power of Los Angeles production -- there are strong reasons production has decreased everywhere else in the country but the L.A. industry remains vibrant. Want to read more? Read our interviews with other Sweatfree Tribe members. www.ethixventures.com Page 6