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From the Introduction: “Listening to the Women The Real Experts”

Outtake #1: What 60 Minutes Cut

In December 1994, 12 Chinese seamstresses sit perched on the edge of their seats in the workers’ center that has become their second home: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates’ in Oakland’s Chinatown. Together with an estimated viewing audience of between 23 and 36 million people, these women are about to watch a 60 Minutes segment on the garment industry’s labor practices that will include footage of correspondent Morley Safer interviewing them.

For over two years, the women have been fighting a bitter battle with San Francisco garment manufacturer Jessica McClintock to recoup unpaid wages and demand corporate responsibility. When 60 Minutes producers approached them for interviews, they had agonized about whether to go on camera without the protection of masks or blurred images. Being seen means running the risk of getting fired and blacklisted. The producers argued that the women could tell their story most effectively if they showed their faces and spoke directly to the American public. After much discussion, the garment workers had finally agreed.

The seamstresses watch as the camera zooms in. They see themselves beginning to describe in their native tongues how the sweatshop boss threatened them and posted signs ordering, “No loud talking” and “Do not go to the bathroom without permission.” Of course the women understand what they are shown saying, but they realize the sounds mean nothing to millions of North American viewers. Their words go untranslated as Morley Safer’s voice-over drowns out the women’s declarations. 60 Minutes has exposed their faces and silenced them.

The show cuts to the white male sportswear manufacturer charged for his subcontractor’s failure to pay back wages. He tells viewers that fashion designer Jessica McClintock—focus of the seamstresses’ campaign for corporate responsibility—“is a hero to every small businessman.”⁽¹⁾

The program’s “objective reporting” divides blame equally among manufacturers, workers, and bargain shoppers.

After watching the program, the women struggle to overcome their sense of betrayal.

Outtake #2: Fighting for a Place at the Table

On July 20, 1998, at corporate headquarters in San Francisco, company executives from Levi Strauss and Co., comfortably attired in casual wear, sit at a corporate conference table across from representatives of labor and human rights organizations. The advocates argue that Levi’s should set a positive example by pledging to pay living wages to the workers who sew its products at home and abroad. Despite sharp differences, everyone appears to be on their best behavior.

Then a former Levi’s seamstress enters the dialogue. Petra Mata starts to explain how Levi’s employees are paid below minimum wage, showing copies of recent pay stubs to make her point. A white company man interrupts Mata, questioning the veracity of the check stubs and dismissing her comments as irrelevant to the meeting’s agenda. His mocking comments and body language convey the message that her English is not good enough and that she couldn’t possibly know what she is talking about. None of the other groups at the table, including those with histories of sharp disagreements with the company, are subjected to such shoddy treatment.

“They treat us like we’re stupid, like the only thing we’re good enough to do is to sew for them,” Viola Casares later declared. Casares is co-coordinator with Mata of Fuerza Unida, a fightback organization launched by laid-off Levi’s workers in 1990 when the company closed down its San Antonio plant and moved to Costa Rica.

Path Breakers and Tree Shakers

This book is dedicated to the immigrant women workers who are barred from board rooms where deals get cut; whose stories end up on cutting room floors; who get punished for telling the truth; who are asked to speak only as victims, not as the trail blazers they truly are. These women warriors have trekked across mountains, rivers, oceans, and borders, cutting deep paths through the heart of this nation’s industries and inner cities. Tucked inside their weathered work jeans, double-knit pants, cleaning uniforms, cooking aprons, and serving caps are continents and worlds of experience. These are the women who sew our clothes; grow, cook, and serve our food; make our fancy little gadgets; care for us when we get sick; and clean up our messes. For those of us who come from communities of color and working-class families, these are the women without whose labor, love, sweat, and tears we would not even exist on this planet.

Yet the powerful and the privileged often stifle these women’s voices. Luckily for us, these workers are chiseling through thick walls of censorship to make themselves heard. They are organizing themselves in workers’ centers, creating their own groups when the labor or community organizations that already exist fail to meet their needs. Contrary to conventional wisdom that leans heavily on white and/or male academics, these women are the real experts about the inner workings of the global economy, labor markets, and immigrant communities—speaking to us from the bottom of the sweatshop industry pyramid. They stand steadfast as the first line of whistle-blowers and flak-catchers against corporate greed, government negligence, and racial wrongs. They serve as the tree shakers who knock down the fruit, the piñata busters who break open the goodies—of economic democracy, gender justice, and human rights—for all of us. They are neither victims nor superwomen. These sweatshop warriors are simply everyday women in our communities who have much to tell and teach.

Sweatshop Pyramid of Exploitation

The term “sweatshop” was initially coined during the industrial revolution in the 1880s and 1890s to describe the subcontracting system of labor. The sweatshops that served larger companies were run by middlemen who expanded or contracted their labor forces depending on the success or failure of different clothing fashions. The middlemen’s profits were tied to the amount of labor they could “sweat” out of their workers—most often women and children—through low wages, excessive hours, and unsanitary conditions. This system led to such industrial accidents as the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that claimed the lives of nearly 150 young women.⁽²⁾

The US Government Accounting Office defines poor working conditions as the hallmark of a sweatshop, specifically “an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation, or industry registration law.”(3)

According to the US Department of Labor, more than half of the estimated 22,000 garment shops in the United States—where many immigrant women find their first US jobs—violate multiple wage, hour, and safety laws.⁽⁴⁾

Sweatshop workers toil at the bottom of a pyramid of labor exploitation and profit generation. Workers’ immediate bosses are subcontractors, often men of their own ethnicity. Manufacturers and retailers sit at the top of the pyramid over the subcontractors who act as buffers, shock absorbers, and shields. The subcontractors compete with each other to win bids from manufacturers and are generally not paid until the work they have been contracted for is completed and accepted. Like the 19th-century sweatshop middlemen, many of today’s subcontractors survive the competition by “sweating” their workers out of wage, hour, benefits, and safety rights. Sitting at the top of the industry pyramid, large manufacturing corporations design products and services, set retail prices, and find buyers and retailers to distribute their products.⁽⁵⁾

Connecting Threads

Five main themes surfaced in the women’s stories [as I interviewed them for this book]. First, the women worked in their homelands, within economies that have been increasingly integrated into the global sweatshop. As teenagers many of the women served as the Asian and Latin American counterparts of the 19th-century factory girls who spun the industrial revolutions inside the former colonial powers. Before them, their mothers and grandmothers labored as the counterparts of the Native American women before they were brutally driven from their lands and the enslaved African and indentured Latina and Asian immigrant women workers on plantations and farms, and as domestic workers. Though barred from factory jobs, these slaves, coolies, campesinas/os, [farmworkers] and braceros [laborers] grew the cash crops and birthed generations of workers whose labors financed the industrial revolutions. Working in the global sweatshop and plantation, and in odd jobs in the informal economy, these golden skinned daughters of former colonial subjects described how they came to serve as the foot soldiers on the march to national economic development, industrialization, and globalization. In the new era of globalization, Third World feminist scholars dubbed the disproportionately high numbers of women working in the global sweatshop since the 1960s, “feminization of labor.”(6)

Second, the women migrated to urban centers inside their rapidly industrializing countries, and to the US, the country whose dominance has so deeply influenced the destinies of their homelands. As the anti-racist immigrant rights movement in England puts it, “We are here because you were there.” This slogan appeared on a picket sign at an immigrant rights rally of South Asian and Caribbean protesters during the 1980s.

 The women all came from regions that have long been the target of US capital export and labor import, and whose economies are more and more tightly woven together through global sweatshop production, distribution, and labor markets. While they face racist and nativist backlash as new immigrants, the women often traced their roots back to family members who had migrated to the US during and before the great waves of immigration from Europe beckoned by post-Civil War industrialization and expansionism. The women talked about their decisions to migrate as part of family strategies to improve economic and educational options. In other cases the women reported coming without family approval, and in times of crisis, without connections and ties to ease their journeys. They in turn have become the nuclei of new migration chains of workers. International feminist activists have dubbed this rise in women’s labor migration from the global South, “feminization of migration.”⁽⁷⁾

Third, the women worked in the sweatshop segments of the US labor market. Entering and transforming the historically segregated US workforce, the women generated new capital for corporations, developers, and ethnic entrepreneurs, revitalized inner city economies, and sustained immigrant communities during a period of economic instability. They talked about how networks of family, friends, and community contacts helped them set foot on now well-worn paths to sweatshop jobs, how they “learned the ropes,” and struggled to adjust to their new lives and work environments. They also noted shifts in the origins and immigration patterns of their co-workers. They detailed how working conditions had deteriorated over the last decade, with falling wages, loss of health benefits, longer work weeks, speedups, and massive layoffs. Many expressed great fear about the future fate of their families and communities given industry changes coupled with growing hostility, hatred, and backlash against them as immigrants and people of color. The women had a lot to say about what goes on “behind the label,” in the “back of the house,” at the bottom of the “high fashion,” “high tech” economy. Labor, feminist, race, and immigration scholars call the stratified job market within which the women work, the “segmented labor market.”⁽⁸⁾ Additionally, a significant portion of African-American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Native American women did not make the move “up the ladder” into better jobs, but were instead squeezed out altogether by deindustrialization and cuts in social welfare programs. During the 1980s for the first time in US history, the labor force participation rates of African-American and white women began to merge. The closing of the gap between Black and white women’s labor force participation rates indicates not only that growing sections of white women are working outside the home; it also means that Black working class women are falling through the cracks.⁽⁹⁾ The Clinton administration’s 1996 welfare “reform” legislation and other state programs are pushing African-American, Latina, Asian, and white women to take workfare jobs as non-unionized minimum and sub-minimum wage workers with little in the way of childcare, nutrition, housing, or health assistance to support this move.⁽¹⁰⁾

Fourth, the women chronicled the painful yet liberating process through which they changed from being sweatshop industry workers to sweatshop warriors. They transformed from women exploited by the subcontractors and elites to women who clearly understood where they fit into the “big picture.” They started painting themselves, their co-workers, and comadres [women friends] into that big picture as they began to dream and talk to each other about the way that they themselves wanted to be seen, heard, understood, respected, and, yes, paid for all the sweat, blood, and tears they had shed while squeezed down at the bottom of the pyramid. And in standing up for their most basic human rights, the women confronted entrenched relations of class, gender, race, and national privilege not only within their industries, but also within their families and communities, including within what sociologists have called “ethnic enclaves.”⁽¹¹⁾

By the very act of speaking their minds, these women workers have challenged multiple layers of oppression stretching all the way from corporate boardrooms to labor union halls, media outlets, churches, community gatherings, and the cramped living spaces of their homes inside inner-city barrios and ghettos. Like the skilled sample makers who figure out how to design, cut, and sew the pieces of a garment, then teach this process to their fellow seamstresses, these sweatshop warriors are helping their co-workers, extended families, and communities see where they, too, fit into the big picture, and how they can work together to liberate themselves as well. Feminist organizers in the South and in the South within the North call this women’s “triple shift” of labor in the workplace, family, and community to challenge “multiple oppressions” and serve as “bridge people” within and between grassroots movements for justice. Latin American feminists discussed the “triple jornada,” or triple shift, of women’s work during the 1980s when international financial institutions imposed structural adjustment programs on Third World nations besieged by rising debts to First World nations. The unpaid work of poor women increased as they were forced to shoulder the costs of cuts in wages and social subsidies.⁽¹²⁾

Fifth, the women helped build workers’ centers that enabled them to both resist the oppressions they face and begin to fashion new ways to work, live, think, and create. The workers’ centers featured in this book are independent groups where workers gather and organize themselves to carry out their fights and meet their needs. Continuous industry restructuring requires the workers movement to develop strategies, tactics, methodologies, and organizational forms appropriate to specific niches of workers in the new economy. The groups emerged because the existing labor movement was not addressing the needs of these workers. The workers’ centers served as vehicles through which the women could fight for their rights from the bottom of the sweatshop pyramid. The women talked about how they either went to existing workers’ centers or formed them with their bare hands to fortify themselves in their fights for justice. Particularly as immigrant women, they talked about how useful these organizations were in helping them translate what was being said to them and what they wanted to say within the primarily English-speaking, US institutional, and cultural environment.

These women eventually went on to serve as the leadership core of industry-wide campaigns that reached out to their peers working in other sweatshops. They spoke of the mutual relationship between their own individual risk-taking and the forward motion of organizations that backed them. The organizations themselves were transformed through the women’s participation and leadership. Many women also spoke of how the centers reached out to them to fill other unmet needs in their lives—to learn English, to become enfranchised citizens, to break their isolation, to get out from under the thumb of domineering partners, to give themselves space outside the sweatshop grind, and to taste the freedom of remaking themselves as fuller human beings.

Petra Mata: Former Levi’s Garment Worker, Fuerza Unida Organizer and Miracle Maker

When I started working [at Levi's], they were paying by levels A to D, with D getting higher pay—which I qualified for. I did the hard, more difficult operations, like sewing the pockets on the sides of the coat. For three and a half years I sewed this way before they put me on utility so I could do any operation. Then they made me a trainer to teach the new people. I liked working with the girls and helping out. Finally they made me a supervisor for eight years. I was very happy with my job because I got to work closely with my co-workers.

The layoff happened on January 16, 1990. The Friday before the Martin Luther King holiday, they told us that all the supervisors and trainers had to go downtown for a meeting. We suspected something was wrong because we had heard a lot of rumors. Usually at Christmas they gave us a $500 bonus, but not that year. We found out later that they decreased our hours because they were planning to shut us down. Nobody got the benefit of a pay increase based on 40 hours because we were working less hours.

We [supervisors] went downtown to a very fancy hotel on Tuesday. Everyone sat down around tables in a big room. Then all of a sudden we saw a lot of people coming with folders. We thought, “What’s going on?” Finally, the person from Levi’s started to speak and said that they were planning to shut us down because Levi’s had to be competitive in the market. Everything turned black. We started screaming and saying “Why?”

They already had the package ready, knew who we were, and took us to different, individual rooms. Then they start explaining, “This is what you’re going to get.” I was very sad. I started crying. They told us, “Yeah, yeah, calm down. I know how you feel, I know.” Ahhh! I told her [eyes water], “How in the hell do you know how I feel?” I mean I love my job. After the 14 years I worked for this company, they just turn us out like this. Our jobs are over. “You’re going to tell me you know how I feel? You still have a job!”

We came back and went outside. We hugged each other and said, “What are we going to do?” “Ahhh!” “I just bought my car.” “I just got my credit card to buy Christmas gifts.” A lot of people were buying houses, then lost them. They lost their cars. I had two cars at the time. We lost everything because we couldn’t pay no more, sabes [you know]? When they turned us away they said, “Oh, we want you to cooperate with us. We want you to help us to work with the people tomorrow.” Everybody went back and said, “Oh no! You want us to help you when you are doing this to us?”

They had a lot of advisors [who] told us, “You poor lady, you’re going to be all right.” They gave some money to the city to provide services, but those services did not help Levi’s workers directly, but instead went to the whole city with close to 10,000 people out of jobs. They [also] mishandled that money by renting a big office and buying a lot of things. We didn’t get anything. About 1,150 workers were displaced.

When Levi’s closed, it was a disaster for most of the families. My husband has had to work at two jobs since they shut us down. In the evening he’s a cook at the Marriott Hotel and in the morning he’s working with vegetables in a lot of grocery stores. Before I lost my job I sent one of my kids to college. My two older kids had everything that they needed, not what they wanted, but at least what they needed. The ones who suffered most were the small ones. They remember that we could buy five pairs of pants, one for each day. When I lost my job my small boy said, “Mom, how come we can only buy two pants, one to use today and the other one tomorrow?” He asked, “Why did Junior have this and I cannot?” It was hard for them to understand.

About two months before they shut us down, they started reducing personnel. They paid us whatever they wanted. Workers didn’t know how to calculate their pay. So we started comparing. “How much do you have?” “How much did you get?” And they said, “Well, look I got less than you and I was working more years.” That’s when we started to get together, decided to form Fuerza Unida, and declared the boycott against Levi’s.

At first we didn’t have any office. We did all of the work from Rubén’s house. Rubén [Solís of the Southwest Public Workers Union] was the one who helped us start to put together Fuerza Unida. The first day they made the shut down announcement, Rubén was there protesting in front of the plant. We got a lawyer right away. We had meetings and formed the Concilio [Board of Directors]. The workers got involved, and we decided to put together our demands. Then we got a very little place at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center on South Flores Street.

For six months we got unemployment benefits, $200 every two weeks. After that ran out, we felt very bad. We put more and more attention and time into Fuerza Unida. We put aside our personal and family problems. We used to cry noches [nights] to see the people with no food. We started having trainings and participating in conferences—locally, nationally, internationally. We moved again to 3946 South Zarzamora and stayed for almost two years until we moved over here [to 710 New Laredo Highway] where the rent is cheaper. We’re low on income. The owner is a very good, cooperative man.

Viola, Irene [Reyna], and I were the co-coordinators at that time.… For the first year or two the people worked for free, nominated by the Board. First, there was Frances Estrella, Raquelina, and another lady whose name I don’t remember, and Margie Castro, who volunteered so much. A lot of girls got involved and put in a lot of time. Then they decided to make Fuerza Unida a non-profit organization with papers and everything, and get a grant to pay full-time coordinators. They nominated Viola and Irene, and, because I was putting in my time volunteering, me in February 1992. We worked as a team, Viola, Irene, and myself. Irene had to leave when we ran out of money. I wish we had resources to hire technical assistance. We need someone to sit down and use the computer. Then we could move more quickly, with our sewing cooperative, food bank, and everything.

Every several weeks, we went to San Francisco to organize the campaign at Levi’s corporate headquarters. We had to leave our families. It was good but hard. We needed to walk so far and learn to be good leaders to head the campaign. We have learned that if we want to do something, we just need to develop our own goals. I have a lot of friends who do not know what they can do. They see themselves as a wife and mother, washing dishes, cooking dinner, or making clothes only for their own families. A lot of women are heads of households; not enough attention is paid to the problems they face. San Antonio is very poor. Sometimes women fall deep down into that depression they must learn to cross so they can get to the other side. We also need to be motivated by other issues and aware of other people’s problems to make changes. We tell women that if someone is trying to abuse you, you must speak up.

Of course, we learned these things. When we started picketing and going to protests, I held the poster up to cover my face. I was afraid. Now if people don’t call me, I call them. If you are denied opportunities, you have to look for and create opportunities.

My two oldest [children] got married when I lost my job. I missed them a lot. With the two small ones I did not spend too much time at home. My son is very independent, but my little girl has always wanted to be with me. If I go to town and work late, she comes here to help me. It’s hard for me to decide how many hours to work a day. You plan your day, but something comes up, people come in the door. Most of the time my family supports me. My husband’s friends say, “Hey, I saw your wife on TV.”

I learned so much at Fuerza Unida. This is the best school you could have, working with people, listening, chairing meetings—all the things you have to understand to carry out the struggle. Here we are not just individuals. We go to support and participate in all struggles in the movement. We work with Asian, Filipino, African American, Mexican, white. We are part of the same vision, the same movement.

⁽¹⁾ 60 Minutes, 1994.
⁽²⁾ Sweatshop Watch, 1997; and US Government Accounting Office, 1988:11.
⁽³⁾ US Government Accounting Office, 1988:17.
⁽⁴⁾ Yeh and McMurry, 1996:1/Z5.
⁽⁵⁾ Chin, 1989:A10; and Bonacich and Appelbaum, 2000.
⁽⁶⁾ Committee for Asian Women, 1995a; Fernández-Kelly, 1983; Vickers, 1991; Lourdes Arizipe, 1981:453-473; Lim, 1983:76-79; and Benería, 1994:49-76. For more on women’s labor in free trade zones and the global sweatshop industries, see Asia Monitor Resource Center, 1998; Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1984; Southeast Asia Chronicle and Pacific Studies Center, 1978 and 1979); Nash and Fernández-Kelly, 1983; Nash and Safa, 1985; Boserup, 1970; De la O and González, 1994; Enloe, 1989:151-176; and Mitter, 1986.
⁽⁷⁾ See for example Villalba, 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Kyeyoung Park, 1997; Sharon M. Lee, 1996:1-22; Grace Chang, 2000:129; Conover, 1997:124-132; Stalker, 1994; Asian Migrant Centre, 1996b and 1998; Daniel Lee, 1991; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, 1992; China Labour Education and Information Centre, 1995; and Huang, 1997.
⁽⁸⁾ For more on the impact of gender and race on labor market segmentation, see Amott and Matthaei, 1996:317-354.
⁽⁹⁾ See Burnham, 1989.
⁽¹⁰⁾ See Burnham and Gustafson, 2000
⁽¹¹⁾ Light and Bonacich, 1988; Kwong, Peter, 1987 and 1997; Mar, 1991.
⁽¹²⁾ Thanks to Luz Guerra for bringing this term to my attention. For examples of organizing around issues of multiple oppression, see for example issues of the Third World Women’s Alliance newspaper, Triple Jeopardy. See also Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981.