HEARTS OF THE CITY: Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news. : Garment Industry Sweatshops Show System of Exploitation Is Alive and Well
It has been an uncomfortable revelation: The clothing that we wear, the garments that grace the racks and shelves of Downtown discount outlets and tony Rodeo Drive boutiques, the apparel that says so much about our distinctiveness, taste and even social status--all this is made by real live women and men, toiling away at sewing machines, not infrequently in modern-day sweatshops. How disquieting.
The highly skilled seamstresses and craftsmen who are the grunts of the intensely competitive garment trade are usually impoverished and almost inevitably from the Third World, be they based in Bangkok, San Salvador or right here in L.A.
This, after all, is the heartland of California fashion, the capital of cool--and the place where the Third World has been quite successfully replicated to thwart offshore competition and provide a ceaseless stream of low-cost, transnational labor, an essential ingredient for the much-ballyhooed global economy.
The bustling sewing lofts and sundry factories that have sprouted in grime-encrusted Downtown buildings are testament to a new postindustrial boom, predicated upon cheap immigrant labor, not dissimilar from what emerged in early 20th-Century New York. Then, Manhattan was the nucleus of immigrant America. Today, Los Angeles is the newcomers’ hub. The Latino and Asian faces at the sewing stations reflect the radically altered demographics of the nation’s greatest surge in immigration since early in the century.
As the discovery last month of a semi-slave-labor operation in a bootleg El Monte garment factory demonstrated, the sweatshop is very much back, its conditions rivaling those of that earlier, unenlightened epoch. The age-old institution of involuntary servitude--toiling to pay off debts to a smuggler/employer/sponsor--has proved stubbornly persistent.
This discovery has given Gov. Pete Wilson and others a platform from which to express righteous indignation about “slave labor,” and to signal solidarity with the Thai laborers liberated from the El Monte site. Yet the rhetoric of outrage is almost beside the point because most sweatshop workers are not literally held against their will. Most don’t have their mail and telephone calls censored and armed guards posted to ensure their continued presence, as is alleged in El Monte.
Today’s sweatshop hands are mostly voluntary employees, ostensibly free to come and go. Not infrequently they are forced to leave their jobs, particularly if they dare complain about the abysmal working conditions, firetrap venues and sub-minimum-wage pay that is their lot. Or bosses may simply threaten to call in la migra , one way to tame a restive work force.
Some sewing contractors abruptly close shop in the middle of the night, leaving bewildered workers shortchanged the next morning. When scandals hit the press, the big retailers who drive the system and ultimately profit from it are shocked and outraged to learn about such abuses. They promise to get to the bottom of it.
The Thai sweatshop rhetoric also is a distraction because most of today’s sweatshop rosters are composed of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Crossing the border without papers is today a near-demonized act, especially in post-Proposition 187 California. Yet for L.A.’s sweatshop workers, who sew “Made in U.S.A” garments for the nation’s major stores, who may earn 50 cents for their contribution to a shirt or pants that you might buy for $80, coming to the United States was an act of economic survival, in some cases prodded by death squads and masked gunmen.
A few months before the El Monte case broke, I met with a handful of garment workers at a textile union office near MacArthur Park. All were illegal immigrants from Mexico, all were family breadwinners, all said they earned less than the minimum wage, had no health insurance or other benefits and had never earned overtime. This was standard in L.A.’s apparel trade, they emphasized. All welcomed the prospect of inspections from labor or safety officials, even if their workplaces could be shut down. But none had ever witnessed such an event.
These men and women are not slaves, just luckless cogs in the international arbitrage of labor, inexorably chained to a system of exploitation.
“Who’s going to care about us if we die in a fire in one of these factories?” asked a man named Aquilino, an artistic sort who got into the business because of his interest, still unfulfilled, in fashion design. “The bosses will just pick up their businesses and move to some other country.”
Another man, Jesus Rangel, spoke of how he hopes to finance a good education for his three kids back in Mexico City, so that they will never be obliged to follow his footsteps north.
His dream may be illusory, particularly with his beleaguered homeland staggering toward depression, but it inspires him. To listen to him evokes the true cost of fashion.
“I don’t want my children to end up killing themselves on the sewing machine,” he said.
