Union Targets Sweatshop Operators : Garment industry: It opens a downtown drop-in center to assist workers--even non-members--to file grievances as part of long-range recruiting effort.

Having never been able to organize more than a few thousand of the estimated 90,000 workers in Los Angeles’ downtown garment district, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union on Thursday opened a downtown “drop-in” center that will assist workers--regardless of whether they are members--in filing unpaid-wage and overtime claims against sweatshop operators.

The effort is part of an embryonic campaign to recruit immigrant workers that is taking place throughout organized labor, most noticeably in Los Angeles.

To recruit immigrants, labor is finding that it must break down widespread cynicism and fear by first offering a broad variety of social services to prospective members and then--months or years later--try to use that base to build organizing drives in plants.

The new center, located in third-floor space rented by the union in a building at 110 E. 15th St., will be run by three union staff members who will counsel workers on a variety of social problems, said Steve Nutter, the union’s regional director.

“It’s a terrible mess out there,” Nutter told a press conference inside the center, standing under a large banner proclaiming the center’s theme, Consiendo con Dignidad-- sewing with dignity.

In blessing the opening of the center, Father Luis Olivares, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Angels Roman Catholic Church, praised the role of unions and said they are always necessary, regardless of how benevolent an employer may claim to be.

The union and state labor investigators contend that the $6-billion-a-year Los Angeles apparel industry requires workers--some of them children--to toil long hours in unsafe conditions for less than the minimum wage.

Theoretically, such conditions make workers ripe for unionization. But hostility from employers, a high failure rate among businesses and the transient and vulnerable nature of many employees have undermined organizing drives.

It was with these types of problems in mind that the AFL-CIO last year created the California Immigrant Worker Assn. to offer so-called “associate” union membership to immigrants, regardless of where they worked or whether their shops were actually organized. The association has signed up several thousand Los Angeles members in what it acknowledges is a glacially slow effort to set the stage for organizing drives at individual businesses.

In setting up its garment district center, the Garment Workers Union became the first formal “division” of the Immigrant Worker Assn. Workers who drop by the center for advice will eventually be asked to become associate union members.

The new center is part of what the union calls one of its most ambitious nationwide organizing drives in decades. Similar efforts are being made in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago and El Paso, all with a call to “declare war on sweatshop conditions.”

The drive began last month on the 79th anniversary of the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in Greenwich Village that killed 146 workers and is regarded as a historical spark in the movement for improved industrial safety.

Besides trying to boost national membership of the union--which has plummeted to 150,000 from 300,000 in the last 10 years--the organizing drive will attempt to publicize proposals for tougher enforcement of sweatshops.

State legislation introduced by Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) last month would make manufacturers jointly liable for any labor abuses committed by the hundreds of smaller businesses that sew their clothing. Among other things, it would protect workers against so-called “stich-and-ditch” sewing contractors who underpay their workers or go out of business without paying at all.

The legislation is expected to encounter strong opposition from manufacturers, who say they cannot police the labor practices of the independents who sew for them.

Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias Del Pueblo, a family-assistance group that has operated from a 7th Street storefront since 1987 to aid garment workers, said she welcomes the presence of the drop-in center.

“It’s a new turn on the union’s part,” she said. “In a sense it’s stepping back, trying to do some groundwork that they have to do if they ever hope to gain the confidence of the workers. You have to work with garment workers on all of their problems--eviction, child care--not just work problems, because so many of them are living in poverty. We have some clients who work 55 hours and get paid $50.”