Sweatshops on American Soil

By Lisa Liu, Pacific News Service. Posted June 20, 2000.

I'm a seamstress in a factory with 12 other people. We sew children's clothes -- shirts and dresses. I've worked in the garment industry here for 12 years, and at this factory for over a year.

We have to work ten hours a day, six to seven days a week. The contractor doesn't pay any benefits -- no health insurance or vacations. We get a half-hour for lunch, but no other paid breaks.

We get paid by the piece, and count up the pieces to see what we make. If we work faster we get paid more -- but if the work is difficult to do, and the manufacturer gives the contractor a low price, then what we get drops so low that maybe we'll get $40 a day. The government says the minimum wage is $5.75, but I don't think that working by the piece we can reach $5.75 an hour a lot of the time.

When we hurt from the work we often feel it's just because of our age. People don't know that over the years their working posture can cause lots of pain. We just take it for granted, and in any case there's no insurance to pay for anything different. We just wait for the pain to go away.

That's why we organize the women together and have them speak about their problems at each garment shop. If we stop being silent about these things, we can demand justice. We can get paid hourly, and bring better working conditions.

But many woman workers are scared. Because they only work in the Chinese community, they're afraid their names will become known to the community and the bosses will not hire them.

That's why we try to organize as a group -- our idea is to tell workers how to fight for their rights, and explain the law. We let them know about the minimum wage and that there should be breaks after four hours of work.

We organize classes to teach women they can be hurt from work, and we've opened up a worker's clinic to provide diagnosis and treatment. We do this work with the help of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, here in Chinatown.

We can't actually speak to the manufacturers whose clothes we're sewing, because they don't come down to the shops. So when we have a problem, it's difficult to bring it to them. Still, we have had campaigns where we got the manufacturer to pay back wages to the workers after a contractor closed without paying them.

We also got a hotline for workers to complain directly to the manufacturers. That solved some problems. The fire doors in those shops aren't blocked anymore, and the hygiene is better.

But it's not easy for women in our situation. There's really no other place for us to go. Most of us don't have the training or the skills to work in other industries. We mostly speak just one language, usually Cantonese, and often just the dialect Toishanese.

When I first came to the United States I needed a lot of time to stabilize myself. That's why I'm only now having my first baby after seven years. We don't have any health insurance, we can't afford it.

In China life was very strict. I heard that in America you have a lot of freedom, and I wanted to breathe the air of that freedom. But when I came here I realized the reality was very different from what I had been dreaming.

My idea of freedom was very abstract. I thought that freedom was being able to choose the place where you work -- if you don't like one place, you can go work in another. In China you cannot do this. When you get assigned to a post, then you have to work at that post.

Since I've come to the United States, I feel like I cannot get into the mainstream. There's a gap, like I don't know American history and laws. And I don't speak English, so I can only live within the Chinese community and feel scared. I cannot find a good job, so I have to work the low-income work. So I learned to compare life here and in China in a different way.

Many people say life here is very free. But for us, it's a lot of pressure. You have to pay rent, living costs, you have all kinds of insurance -- car insurance, health insurance, life insurance -- that you can't afford. With all that kind of pressure, sometimes I feel I cannot breathe.

Everywhere you go you just find low pay. All the shops pay by the piece, and they have very strict rules. You can not go to the bathroom unless it's lunch time. Some places they put up a sign that says, "Don't talk while you work." You're not allowed to listen to the radio.

Wherever you go, in all the garment factories the conditions and the prices are almost the same. The boss says, "I cannot raise the price for you and if you complain any more, then just take a break tomorrow -- don't come to work." So even though I can go from one job to another, where's the freedom?

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