Marchers Protest Garment Sweatshops

The bad memories swirled through Juan Canto’s head as he marched Saturday through the gritty core of Los Angeles’ garment district, past rows of once-elegant office buildings now converted to sewing lofts and supply outlets for the region’s largest manufacturing industry.

“I remembered working in shops around here and being paid $10-$12 a day for up to 10 hours’ work,” recalled Canto, who arrived from Mexico six years ago and, like many new immigrants, found his first job in a clothing factory. “Sometimes the bosses wouldn’t let you break to get a drink of water. In some places, you breathe nothing but pure dust all day.”

Canto was among the many garment workers joining labor activists, clergy, students and community representatives Saturday during a lively march calling for an end to sweatshop abuses in the apparel industry. The event was part of the National Day of Conscience, marked by similar protests from New York to San Francisco and timed to occur just before the busy holiday shopping season begins.

The sweatshop issue resonates with special force in Los Angeles, heart of the nation’s largest garment-making industry, employing more than 140,000 workers in about 5,000 shops, mostly those of small contractors where casual wear for women is cut and trimmed.

The shocking discovery two years ago of a clandestine factory in El Monte that held scores of Thai workers in virtual servitude solidified Los Angeles County’s dubious distinction as the nation’s sweatshop capital.

Alternating between English and Spanish, participants in the six-block procession Saturday chanted, “No more sweatshops!” and hoisted banners and signs with slogans such as “Stop Slave Labor.” A goal was to raise the consciousness of consumers.

“We are asking people to be aware of these things, to know that when you spend a dollar it’s an act of conscience,” said Steve Nutter, Western states director for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, or UNITE.

The message seems to be catching on at local colleges, where many students have taken up the cause of sweatshop workers, making trips to factories and union halls and using the Internet to monitor sweatshop developments here and abroad.

“We buy a lot of these clothes, so I think it’s important that students know the conditions these workers face,” said Amron Bevels, a freshman at Claremont’s Pitzer College and one of many students attending.

The enthusiastic marchers wound their way through the core of the fashion district, often watched by garment workers from windows above. Although organizers said more than 1,000 participated in the event, police put the number at closer to 400. The march concluded with a rally outside the California Mart, the city’s preeminent garment showroom complex.

In the view of apparel manufacturers, the rhetoric Saturday wrongly besmirches an industry that is working hard--and investing millions--trying to clean up abuses.

“We believe that the manufacturers have done far more to protect not just the jobs of the workers . . . but to assure that the workers are properly paid minimum wage and overtime,” said Stan Levy, head of the labor committee for the California Fashion Assn., a trade group, and former general counsel of Guess Inc., the region’s largest clothes manufacturer.

Guess has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with UNITE, which seeks to unionize the firm. A ubiquitous poster at the march had on one side a slick Guess ad showing a young couple cavorting in the surf, and on the flip side a Latina hunched over a sewing machine with the caption: “Nobody should be a slave to fashion.”

Guess officials have said they are in the vanguard of promoting equitable labor practices.

Juan Canto, as it happens, stitches jeans not for Guess but for its high-end competitor, Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand. Now earning the minimum wage, he is still chagrined at how hard it can be to make ends meet in this country. He is a long way, he said, from affording a pair of the $60 jeans he sews every day.