AFTER A ONE-MONTH STRIKE, members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) won a limited victory with the Leslie Fay Company in July 1994. Leslie Fay, one of the largest U.S. dressmakers, wanted to move all of its production abroad. But under the agreement, 600 of Leslie Fay's 1,800 workers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia will remain on the job until July 25, 1995. Then their fate will hinge on the findings of a joint labor-management committee created to explore how the company "can continue to profitably produce dresses domestically and compete successfully in the moderate dress marketplace."
Winning even such temporary relief has not come easily for U.S. garment and textile unions. The export of jobs has been relentless, draining ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) of the bulk of their members. Once, these unions could claim some 900,000 members between them. Now, their combined strength is about 350,000. Since 1979, the United States has lost an average of 3,451 textile and apparel jobs every month.
It is not hard to see why ILGWU and ACTWU have decided, after more than 50 years of separate and often competing efforts, to merge. The new union, to be called UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees), is expected to be approved at ACTWU and ILGWU conventions in late June.
If all goes as planned, UNITE will begin its life with a new $10 million organizing fund. Union leaders say that fostering stronger links with unions in Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico, where so many U.S. garment jobs have been exported, will be high on UNITE's agenda.
Staff members at both unions (several of whom asked not to be named as the merger is still being finalized) agreed that the single greatest benefit of the merger is an increased organizing capacity. But no one can predict the character of the new union, which will be headed by ILGWU president Jay Mazur.
Apparel industry spokespeople have been blunt about the new union's prospects, given the state of a global market that pits U.S. workers against their lower wage counterparts around the globe. Eli Elias, president of the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association, suggested the Hebrew prayer for the dead for the two unions, even if they do merge: "You can say Kaddish for both of them. The whole apparel business is going global, and in less time than you think, the domestic apparel manufacturing industry will be negligible," Elias told Women's Wear Daily.
Money and members
Two deep needs are behind the merger: ACTWU's need for funds and ILGWU's need for members. The trick will be for UNITE to meet the needs of both unions, and draw from each of their strengths. An ACTWU staffer likens the merger to a marriage between two problematic partners: "It's a marriage where one party is sloppy and the other curses a lot. When they get married, you hope that they won't both wind up sloppy and cursing a lot."
The ILGWU, which has traditionally represented workers in the women's garment industry, has a base in smaller, urban shops that often employ immigrant women. Many shops are highly-mobile subcontractors. The union has always been strongest in the Northeast, but its membership is now heavily concentrated in the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia, where, notes ILGWU vice president Sol Hoffman, "you often have undocumented workers working for less than the minimum wage." When it comes to organizing, he adds, "it's almost an impossible situation." Hoffman says that while the union has more organizers on staff now than it has had for many years, "we've still had fewer successes."
Many small New York City garment shops have moved to neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Sunset Park, where they often employ very recent and sometimes undocumented immigrants from Central and Latin America, Mexico and China. At night, passersby can sometimes steal glimpses of workers bent over their sewing machines in dim, poorly ventilated rooms. Late into the night, in apartments all around the neighborhood, women do "homework" on their sewing machines, stitching pieces of fabric that have been furtively delivered by unmarked vans. Wages are often paid by the piece. Employers are notorious for abruptly closing up shop without paying workers what they are owed. Without representation, workers have no real recourse.
Like the industry itself, organizing garment workers is labor-intensive. The ILGWU has begun to try a "workers' center" approach to organizing in New York and Los Angeles, although so far the union's success with this has been limited. The workers' center model has perhaps been pioneered most aggressively by a number of workers' organizations not affiliated with the union, such as New York City's Chinese Staff and Workers Association. It is a community-based approach: the union or organization establishes a center in the community, offering services, language courses and other assistance, and slowly builds a connection with workers.
If many ILGWU organizing efforts have been unrewarding, the union has had more luck holding on to its assets. The union has $176 million in assets according to a key union staffer, and a rich union-controlled pension fund. ACTWU sorely needs a financial boost from ILGWU. ACTWU does control the country's only 100 percent union-owned bank (which ACTWU president Jack Sheinkman will head after the merger), which has provided the union with some financial support.
Still, ACTWU's funds have dwindled, and the staff has already contracted. One of the reasons the money is going, staffers say, is the expense of the union's aggressive organizing program. ACTWU has traditionally represented workers in the textile industry and in men's apparel, often employed in larger, rural shops. But the union has also branched out to organize workers at such companies as Xerox and K-Mart. UNITE is sure to continue the move to expand beyond the troubled garment industry.
As ACTWU's clothing and textile jobs have migrated to the southern United States, the union has tried to follow them. In fact, ACTWU's most successful organizing efforts have been in the union-hostile South and Southeast. There, ACTWU has pioneered a highly involving model of organizing and has hired a crew of talented organizers, a mix of union rank-and-filers and energetic college graduates.
When the union conducts an organizing drive, says ACTWU southern regional director Bruce Raynor, "We try to actually talk face-to-face with each worker in their home, at least twice. We do extensive education not only about the union, but about employer campaign tactics, so the workers are prepared." Raynor adds that "unionism is a very radical notion in the South. So you can't afford to have people belong to the union and not understand the union." Raynor says that 1993 and 1994 were "the two best years we've had in 20 years," both in terms of the number of plants organized and the number of workers who have joined the union. The union's latest big win brought in about 2,500 new members from the Tultex Corp. plant in Martinsville, Virginia.
Even so, winning comes hard and requires tremendous investment. The union election that finally brought ACTWU in at the Tultex plant was preceded by two failed elections in 1989 and 1990. In 1991, after its second intensive drive to organize more than 6,000 workers at Fieldcrest Cannon in North Carolina [see "Organizing the South," Multinational Monitor, September 1991], ACTWU narrowly lost a union election. The union charges that the company used illegal intimidation and fired union supporters to control the outcome.
Activist union
As U.S. unions go, ACTWU has been on the socially active side. ACTWU president Sheinkman co-chairs and has long helped to sustain the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America. For years, the National Labor Committee, officially an alliance of some two dozen U.S. union presidents, has educated U.S. unionists and the public about workers in Central America and the Caribbean, and helped build links between workers. The organization opposed some of the worst Cold War postures of the AFL-CIO overseas.
In 1992, the National Labor Committee, under the leadership of executive director Charlie Kernaghan, exposed how the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Commerce Department encouraged U.S.-based companies to locate in impoverished countries in the Caribbean Basin [see Aiding and Abetting Corporate Flight: U.S. Aid in the Caribbean Basin," Multinational Monitor, January/February, 1993 ]. The National Labor Committee's current campaign targets Mandarin International, a Taiwanese-owned plant in El Salvador that has terrorized the 850 workers, mostly women, trying to win union rights at the plant. The company is under contract to The Gap, JCPenney, Eddie Bauer and Dayton-Hudson.
Both ACTWU and ILGWU have a direct stake in efforts by workers in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico to organize. They maintain that textile and apparel jobs will continue to be exported in bulk to countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Costa Rica, so long as employers are able to abuse Latin American workers and pay them well under a dollar an hour.
The two U.S. unions have sought to establish bonds and a system of mutual support with unionists in Central America and the Caribbean. They have been engaged, along with a number of other U.S. unions, in efforts to communicate and link up with unionists in Mexico, particularly in the maquiladoras.
ACTWU and ILGWU supported a long, hard effort by unionists in the Dominican Republic to organize at Bibong Apparel Corporation. Bibong, which had contracts with both ILGWU and ACTWU shops, was located in a free trade zone. Workers were fired, blacklisted and physically threatened during their organizing campaign. After their union was recognized in July 1994, Dominican unionists were able to organize three more companies in the free trade zone, representing some 2,500 workers.
In the Dominican Republic, as elsewhere, says Ron Blackwell, an economist with ACTWU and Sheinkman's executive assistant, the union's first move was to establish contact with the indigenous unions in that country. "And the proposition to them is to say simply, �We have an interest in the factories of these companies, their contractors and their competitors being organized. If organizing them fits into your strategy, we have something in common. And recognizing that we have different levels of financial resources, we of course bear an equitable proportion of the financial responsibilities.'" This approach, he adds, "is not based on clientelism or even notions of global solidarity, but rather on union- building values."
The union's strategy for trying to improve labor standards and working conditions internationally operates on three levels, Blackwell explains. The union urges U.S.-owned companies to sign a "code of conduct" pledging decent labor standards in their operations overseas, and then works, along with sister unions, to enforce those pledges.
ACTWU has also tried to negotiate conditions with employers in collective bargaining. In one case, ACTWU agreed to let an employer import a limited amount of apparel, provided that it obtains prior union approval, that it ships the material through a union-controlled warehouse and that it guarantees that workers in the country of origin will enjoy fundamental worker rights and a living wage.
ACTWU, as well as ILGWU, have both fought for conditioning all U.S. and international aid, trade privileges and investment on respect for workers' rights in recipient countries. The two unions were quite active in the coalition to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, and now they are jointly fighting the proposed Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act, which would lift tariffs and open markets to allow freer imports of apparel from the Caribbean.
"Because of systematic repression and violation of labor rights across Central America and the Caribbean, wages are being artificially suppressed," Mazur and Sheinkman argued in a statement opposing the measure. In El Salvador, they say, maquiladora exports to the United States in the past decade are up 3,800 percent, while real wages there have been slashed by 53 percent. In their statement, the union presidents say the initiative would give multinationals and their maquiladora partners $240 million a year in increased tariff handouts for their products to enter the U.S. market. At base, the union presidents say, "This is the corporate agenda."