Government Survey Underscores Garment Work As Dangerous

In five years of working at a succession of sewing shops and factories in Los Angeles’ garment-manufacturing industry, Juan Canto says, he’s lived with a litany of health and safety hazards. Locked emergency exits. Sewing and cutting machines that lack safety guards. (Once Canto had a sewing needle driven through his finger.) No ventilation to clear the air of foul chemical fumes. No air-conditioning to relieve the heat.

“During the summer, the temperature inside the factories is an inferno,” said Canto, 50, who immigrated to Los Angeles from the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan.

Canto’s grim account reflects problems that are commonplace in the area’s garment industry. And that was underscored this month with the release of the results of a spot check by state and federal authorities of 76 apparel contracting shops in Southern California.

The government survey discovered that 96% of randomly chosen shops were violating one or more occupational health or safety laws. What’s more, 72% of the shops were found to have serious hazards, defined as problems that, should there be an accident, could lead to a “substantial probability of death or serious physical harm.”

Although the survey marks the first time that government regulators have assessed the extent of serious hazards at apparel shops, experts say the findings came as no surprise. Marianne Brown, director of UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, said the comments she and her staff receive when they interview local apparel workers suggest that the industry is one of the most hazardous in Southern California.

But determining the number of workers injured and cracking down on sweatshops, she said, have been complicated by widespread underreporting among employers. Also, the workers themselves often refuse to notify authorities out of fear of losing their jobs or, if they are illegal immigrants, fear of deportation.

Mark A. Carleson, deputy chief of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said: “You have an industry that, up until the last few years, has not been used to being regulated. . . . And you have a work force that is very susceptible to being taken advantage of. You put those two things together and you have a very dangerous situation.”

Among the 76 shops surveyed, eight were found to have blocked or locked exits. That’s a particularly frightening finding in an industry infamous for the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. tragedy of 1911, a New York factory fire that took the lives of 146 apparel workers who were trapped behind locked doors.

For workers such as Canto, less dramatic health and safety problems also abound that add to hardships on the job. He cited a lack of fresh drinking water, bathrooms with no towels or toilet paper, and cramped working quarters providing no place to eat lunch other than the stairways or floor.

First-aid supplies, he said, also are hard to come by. When his finger was punctured, Canto said, he had to bandage himself with a piece of fabric, then return to his machine. “You have to keep on working,” he said.

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In an apparent first for the labor movement, nearly 80 community college deans from the nine campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District have ratified a union contract.

The bargaining agreement, culminating eight years of labor organizing and negotiations, is believed to be the nation’s first union contract for community college administrators. The three-year pact provides for minimum salaries of $58,307 for community college deans, $53,987 for associate deans and $46,823 for assistant deans, and leaves the door open for raises to be negotiated next year.

The deans group, known as the Los Angeles Community College District Administrators’ Assn., will be affiliated with Local 911 of the Teamsters Union.

Charles Bossler, the association’s president, said one of the chief obstacles was persuading the deans themselves that college administrators belong in a union. “To some, it seemed to be an oxymoron--how do you have an ‘administrators’ union’?” Bossler said.

What eventually won over a majority of the deans, he said, was that “they did not feel they had a voice in college policy . . . and they didn’t think they could negotiate reasonable pay increases or changes in their work environment” without collective bargaining.

Stuart Silverstein can be reached by telephone at (213) 237-7887 or by e-mail at stuart.silverstein@latimes.com