Los Angeles is on of the major immigrant metropolises in the US. Greater Los Angeles has about eight Million inhabitants. Two Million of them are undocumented immigrants. Two hours takes it to the border to Mexico and Spanish is almost the dominant language in the city. But you can find also huge communities of Chinese and Korean immigrants. For the police it is still not allowed to exchange data’s with the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). The industry has a stake on cheap labor. Last but not least because of Hollywood and it’s fashions Los Angeles is still the apparel manufacturing center and a sweatshop-metropolis in the United States. Three years ago the garment worker center - based in down-town LA - was founded. Kimi Lee is on of the founders of the garment worker center talks about their work.
Kimi Lee, Could you just briefly introduce us into the garment worker center LA?
We are a worker center in Los Angeles, organizing garment workers in the LA area. Los Angeles is actually the largest garment manufacturing district in the country and there is over 100.000 garment workers and over 5.000 factories. Among all this workers, less than one percent are part of the union and so the workers center was created in a way to respond to that, meant really to organize this garment workers. But the garment worker center not only symbolizes a place for workers to organize but also holds a place in a larger movement for corporate responsibility and accountability. One of our main priorities is also, because our workers are predominantly undocumented, working on a legalization program and having undocumented workers recognized in the US. We actually place a very high priority on working in coalition with other workers centers around the idea of legalization.
What is the idea behind worker centers in the US?
In the last ten years, workers centers in the US have started to pop up. Workers center are kind of a non traditional way of organizing and kind of an alternative to unions. In general workers centers are places, that are organizing workers or a place for workers to come, so that they can try either make their working conditions better or try and change whatever industry they are in. Many industries are ethnic based, so many are in a certain community, such as Chinatown, or Korea town, or you have a lot of immigrants, that speak a certain language, or they are based around a neighborhood or an area. And so in the country right now, there are a several dozen worker centers, some of them are more worker based or community based, depending on the language or the culture and then some actually were started by unions themselfs, as a place for workers to get support services, so there is a variety of different types of workers centers. For us, we really support the ‘worker led worker centers’ that are independent of the union. The idea behind that is, that the unions are not able to address all different issues out there. One in particular is, that the unions have kind of neglected workers in the low wage economy, that don’t speak English, that are immigrants, that are women, that are in jobs in the low wage sector, just like domestic workers, household workers, childcare, garment workers. So workers centers have played a role, that they really helped to fill that void that they are organizing workers, that have been forgotten by the union. But they are also pushing the unions, to address these workers. And in the US we have seen a change in the unions. Just two years ago the AFL-CIO - which is the larger union-umbrella in the US - took a position of recognizing the undocumented workers. This had to do with the fact, that workers centers and immigrant-rights groups and all of this combined, really made the unions address these workers. And the fact that a number of people in the unions in the US has declined and they are realizing that this is because, they are not addressing, who the work force is right now in the US. The workforce now is mostly immigrants, mostly non English-speaking and working in the informal sector, what they were ignoring before and they deserve recognition.
Why does the union not organize in the garment industry?
The union is not interested in the garment industry right now, because they see it as a flight industry. The one time, they did try to organize workers in LA, the company just got up and took all their production to Mexico. And with free trade and globalization it is much easier now for companies to just do that. If you could go to China and pay workers 20 cents an hour versus 6.75 $ in the US, you know, that’s going to be a huge factor. So the union itself shifted to organize in distribution centers, where actually the clothing is coming in from China and Mexico and than being sent back out. Another reason is, that the workers are mostly monolingual, non English speaking, they are undocumented that they are women. Those are other barriers, because the US-American Unions still tend to be male-dominated, English, controlling from the top and not from the bottom. Lastly, it is just the way how the industry is set up. There are many little factories, so each factory may have only 20 to 50 workers, and for a union to go and try to organize 20 to 50 workers, the fact, that the boss could just fire them all and find another new 20 workers, because the factories are so small, it is not ideal for a traditional union kind of setting. But we don’t agree with them, that they should just ignore this workers. It is a very large population and it is very symbolic of exploitation of all workers, because it’s a system where you have corporations that subcontract, and subcontract so much, that they have no responsibility for the workers at the bottom. Because, this is happening more and more in the US, we feel the importance to recognize that, and that you have to change your organizing strategy to account for. The unions are still concentrating on the more traditional, lets organize a company, and they are not shifting to account the informal sector, which is so large.
But in some parts the unions started to shift their organizing practice?
For some industry, it depends on the local. But as a whole union movement it hasn’t shifted enough, and that is actually the reason why in the last ten years more and more workers center have been come up in the US. The Union has shifted a little bit, there are some locals, that have started to work with undocumented workers and immigrants workers, but as a whole it is still very token, right now.
But, what are the differences between a worker center and union organizing?
We are not organizing the workers into a union. The idea for us is that we have several approaches to organize the workers. Part of it is just basic education: explaining labor-rights to the workers, health and safety rights, just what their rights are as being workers in the US. From that, we start to develop leaders and we get workers to speak out. Through our campaign work and through our policy-work, workers have taken more of a leadership-role. Than we have more our campaigns around the public, getting the public aware about what’s happening with garments and shopping and all that, because shoppers and consumers are the ones, that hold the corporations countable. Then in terms of just organizing the workers, there is that issue of trust. For us, developing relationships with the workers is very important, so that they than get more active in the center and become more active leaders. The process of trust is a long one and sometimes it could take six months to a year. When we first opened the center, we didn’t have high aspirations of what we could do. It was very much just opening our self up for the workers to get us to know and developing a relationship with them. It took about a year to get enough workers active in the center and for them to really see, that we were not going away, and that we wanted to work with them, and that we were not a government office, that was just trying to get information or something. It’s still something that we are going through, some workers still are not sure, or just have questions.
Which are the main problems, which you were/are facing?
We are facing lots of problems, internally there is things, and obviously externally we are the underdogs in the system, we are fighting billion-dollar-companies, and we are a very small organization. But for us, I think, the main struggle is, what I was telling about trust, and just getting workers really to participate and really take the center for themself. Not that is has been a problem, but it is definitely been something, that’s a slow process. Particularly for us, we are working with multi languages and workers from different ethnicity’s and different generations and so there is definitely these kind of cultural barriers, that happen. And then you have the gender issues: sometimes the men try to dominate, the women come back and fight with them, it’s very typical of society there you have struggles within different generations and genders and ethnicity’s. The different languages is actually a big part, that we have to struggle with, because you have workers that don’t speak English at all, but speak Chinese, Thai, Spanish or over languages for example. Trying to get them together takes a long time. Our meeting could take extra long, because we go into the different languages. It’s kind of a struggle, but it’s been very good, because the workers now expose to each other and they have now more of an understanding of each overs culture. That didn’t happen before, because what happens in the factory is, that workers are separated by their language or by their ethnicity and the owners then are another language or ethnicity. And then there is usually some internal tension that happens, there the owners might be Chinese and the workers might be Chinese and then there are Spanish-speaking workers, and the Spanish-speaking workers think the Chinese-speaking workers get treated better because the owner is Chinese, and the Chinese-speaking workers think the Latino workers are getting treated better, because otherwise they would protest. And in the end, no one is treated better, it’s just, they never know because they are unable to speak to each other.
Two years ago you started a new campaign against ‘forever 21'. What were the reasons for choosing this company?
We started a boycott against a company in Los Angeles ‘forever 21'. The reason, why we chose this company was, because it actually does 95% of it’s production in LA and ‘forever 21' is a company, that is growing, ‘forever 21' is actually based in Los Angeles, and they have 150 stores in the country and they are actually being growing, in the last two years they added another 20 stores. So, we knew if we would organize this company or try to get this company to take responsibility, it would affect thousands of workers in LA. And for us, it was important obviously to have real workers behind the campaign and also to try and change the industry within Los Angeles. So if we could get this company to actually accept better codes of conduct for the factories and to actually be a more responsible company it would trickle down an effect in the Los Angeles garment industry. Another reason, why we took ‘forever 21' is, when we first opened, actually workers came to us, and over and over workers kept saying oh „I sew ‘forever 21'†„I sew ‘forever 21'â€. So now, we actually have over forty workers from twenty different factories. All those factories, no minimum wage, no over time, no breaks, like all sweatshop-conditions, but all, they didn’t know each over, and they all came together at the center, so the campaign was started by the workers.
So, is there are any response from the company?
We are starting now our third year of the campaign and actually the company has responded. They are suing us for deformation which means, because we are saying that they are using sweatshops, they say, that is defaming and hurting their business. They are actually suing me and a few other people and suing our organization. At first, they actually sued the workers - which is really ridiculous - but after a month they dropped from suing the workers. The good thing is, it does show that our campaign does have an impact on their business, because even in the lawsuit it says that they are suing us for unfair business practices and that they have lost business.
How do you organize? How is your organizing structure?
We have a lot of workers, that come to us, asking for help, but we don’t agree to help them, unless they agree to help themselves. And when they just say, I just want my pay-check, when we say, no, we are sorry, this is not a place for you. Because we want workers to be really part of a larger movement, we really kind of screen people out. We also have a very strong orientation process, there we orient the workers about the industry and about kind of the larger movement and there we orient them about the center. So, that’s the first step, when we kind of take them to the next step there we have the workers go through workshops. The first ones are just basic rights, what are the laws, what are your rights as workers, but than we also have other workshops about history of immigration and globalization and more political workshops, which helps to develop them from just being angry workers against the factory owner to immigrant rights advocate, it’s not just that one factory, it’s about this corporate structure and it’s about the US government not doing anything about it, and the larger players in this globalization movement. We have been able to have over 200 workers now in the center, who are active in the center and want to change the industry. For us, this is much more important, to build a large base of workers that know their rights, know about the industry and gonna stand for themselves, then just a few numbers that sign up for membership. Now we have a workers board, and the workers volunteer in the center. And they come every week, and it’s surprising for us, because all this workers, work six days a week 12 hours a day, barely have time to do their errands and have time for their kids, but they come to the center for activities and events and they come every week. It is really is amazing to see that and for us, that’s where our inspiration lies.
