FEATURING DAISY GONZALEZ - Los Angeles is home to the nation’s largest garment manufacturing industries, employing about 45,000 workers, disproportionately Latino and Asian immigrants. It is LA’s largest manufacturing sector, generating more than a billion dollars in revenue annually.
In recent years, the industry and its workers have been hard hit, from the COVID-19 pandemic to ICE raids under Donald Trump’s regime. How have garment workers been organizing for their rights in increasingly dire conditions?
Daisy Gonzalez is the Campaigns Director at the Garment Worker Center. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about GWC's organizing efforts.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Thanks for joining us. First, tell me a little bit about the workers themselves. I gave a few statistics. We're talking about tens of thousands of workers. People who live in LA know about the Fashion District. And there's, of course, lots of factories and manufacturing centers in Los Angeles itself, and many people assume that most of their clothes come from China or elsewhere, but LA manufactures and actually creates a lot of clothing. Who are the workers?
Daisy Gonzalez: That's exactly it. You're right. Most people think their clothing is being produced 100% abroad, but Los Angeles has the largest garment manufacturing hub in the United States.
Workers are skilled workers with 20 to 30 years of experience. We're talking about workers from Latin America, from Asia, that are producing clothing for major brands that we're buying in retail stores across the country.
And unfortunately, one of the biggest issues that we continue to see in this industry is the issue of wage theft. So, workers are often paid a couple of cents per seam or per operation that they conduct on an article of clothing. And it doesn't matter how quickly these incredibly skilled workers can do their work, they continue to get paid well below the minimum wage.
But yeah, we are the Garment Worker Center, and we organize these workers and really take their lead on what is necessary to improve their working conditions. And we're a membership-based organization, so we are led by our membership and these workers that we are talking about today.
