At-Home Apparel Work Returns

The article that the White House gave the “green light” for the legalization and return of at-home work in the apparel industry made memories and images of my childhood on the Lower East Side of New York close in on me.

I remember classmates regularly coming to school late and tired because they helped their parents with at-home work. There were friends who could not play until they finished their allotment of work. After dinner I entered dimly lit apartments, seeing whole families basting, cutting, cleaning and pressing work brought home from factories hours earlier. I left them to go to sleep with unopened bundles still to be done. Sometimes I joined them, ever fearful that my parents would find out.

My parents instilled me with the knowledge that every person taking work home closes another person’s opportunity for a job with decent wages and benefits. Eight hour days, job security, fair wages, health and unemployment benefits, and child labor laws are the result of what people like my parents fought for, for themselves and for future generations.

Yet this Administration and seemingly the next are turning their back on them and the clock. If the Administration wants to help mothers have flexible working hours, emphasis should be put into child-care centers. Only then will parents and children benefit.

This ruling on at-home work must be rescinded. The strikes of the 1930s will seem calm in comparison to the anger when consequences of this ruling are understood by both the employed and unemployed.

SHIRLEY SEROTA

Huntington Beach