Center Offers Garment Workers a Voice

Kimi Lee and her co-workers have no illusions about the obstacles they face.

From an office in the garment district, she and two other anti-sweatshop organizers are taking on L.A.’s multibillion-dollar garment industry. They are trying to improve the treatment of the overwhelmingly immigrant and female work force toiling in thousands of sewing lofts, storefronts and hidden factories concentrated on the southeast end of downtown.

“All of these little dots are the contractors,” Lee says as she directs a visitor’s attention to a map of Los Angeles County posted on the office wall. With each black circle marking a sewing shop, it shows a target-rich area.

Lee and her two colleagues run the Garment Worker Center, an office on the second floor of a brick building filled with clothing distributors on a busy South Los Angeles street, just north of Pico Boulevard. Outside, racks of children’s clothes, women’s fashions and other garments spill from mom-and-pop stores. Vans load and disgorge merchandise in a nonstop choreography of commerce. Industry managers and wholesale buyers in fashionable clothes rush to grab quick lunches before getting back to business.

Mainly invisible amid the bustle is the plight of many of the area’s estimated 140,000 garment workers. Many cannot afford to buy the clothes they make. A U.S. Department of Labor survey last year found that only one in three garment shops in the area was in compliance with federal and state labor laws on minimum wage and overtime.

It is an old story, one that generally earns headlines only when something spectacular happens--such as the discovery in 1995 of 72 Thai workers held in a South El Monte sweatshop ringed with barbed wire. Outraged officials and embarrassed industry leaders vowed to make things better. The White House even hosted a meeting on the return of the garment sweatshop, greeted like an unwanted visitor from another epoch. But workers and their advocates say improvements have been marginal, despite the booming economy.

The center opened in January with a budget of $100,000 a year, mostly from area foundations. It is a joint project of several local labor and civil rights groups, including Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and Sweatshop Watch.

One of the major challenges is to transcend ethnic differences in a work force that is mostly Latino, but includes substantial numbers of Asians, including Thais, Chinese and Vietnamese. Someone on staff can usually speak the languages used by workers.

“This is a truly multiethnic effort,” says Victor Narro of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

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Organizers at the center say their goal is not to jump-start unionization in a mostly nonunion industry. Organized labor has had difficulties in recruitment in the L.A. garment industry, with its proliferation of small sewing shops--many not even legally registered--and others in and out of business in a few months. Many are run by immigrant entrepreneurs.

Rather, the center’s focus is on educating workers about their rights, tutoring them in minimum wage law and filing wage claims with the state. Workshops on wages, health care and other concerns are a mainstay,

“We are trying to be a resource for them,” says center coordinator Lee, the daughter of a garment worker in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Filing a wage claim is a complex process that may drag on for months.

About 200 workers have already called the center, come by in person or attended a workshop. About 15 cases have been filed or are close to being filed, and another 10 are being reviewed by the center, Lee says.

Some garment workers are drawn by the center’s fliers, which are regularly distributed throughout the district. Others hear through the grapevine.

One who made the trip and found it stimulating is Yeny Saavedra.

She is a vivacious 24-year-old from Mexico City who calls the United States “the land of any opportunities” without any sense of irony. Her four years in this country have not dampened her spirit.

Saavedra is an illegal immigrant who has cut cloth at various Los Angeles garment plants, working for such labels as Levi Strauss, Billabong, Speedo and Sears, Roebuck. She worked more than two years for her last employer, Saavedra says, and never received overtime despite regular days of 12 hours or more. She says she sometimes started work at 5 a.m. and didn’t finish until 10 p.m.

“I never heard anything about overtime in this business,” says Saavedra, who went to the center after seeing a report about the service on Spanish-language television. With the help of Joann Lo, a center volunteer who speaks Spanish, Saavedra has a back-wage claim pending for about $9,000 against her former employer, now out of business.

The claim is proceeding at the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement against the former owners. Saavedra says she has heard they are planning to open a new shop--a not-unusual scenario in this industry, where contractors go in and out of business as quickly as fashions shift. But Saavedra says it’s not just about the money.

“Just because we’re illegal, that doesn’t mean we don’t have rights,” Saavedra explains at the center on a recent afternoon.

Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Assn., which includes many manufacturers, says she has heard of the center but has had no dealings with it.

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She says she welcomes its work, “if this center truly assists people in getting their fair share and getting their due.” But she says she would object if it tries to “extort” manufacturers into paying extra money with the threat of filing an unfounded complaint. She says she had no evidence that the center had done so.

The center offers a booklet on how to pursue legitimate claims: Keep extra labels from clothing jobs to track down wholesalers; maintain records on hours worked and wages provided; and write down names of owners, contractors and retail customers. Those details are all useful in future cases. The center has a hotline--(888) 449-6115--in English, Spanish, Thai and Mandarin.

Lee stresses that one of the center’s tasks is to educate workers about where they fit in the garment business. A hand-drawn representation of a pyramid representing the industry hangs in the office; garment workers are on the bottom of the chart.

Saavedra says the center has given people courage. “I can only hope more people come forward and are not afraid,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do at first when it happened to me. At least now I feel I’m doing something about it.”