Garment industry

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April 6, 2011 | 10:19 AM | By

The gripping tale of a garment industry slave

Photo by Sebastia Giralt/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Roman-era slave shackes at a museum in England, August 2010

Human trafficking into the United States is often associated in the public consciousness with the sex industry, and for good reason. But the trafficking of workers, including factory workers in the garment and food processing industries, is also relatively commonplace.

Today CNN’s anti-slavery Freedom Project posted the harrowing testimony of Flor Molina, a Mexican woman who in 2001 was enslaved as a garment worker.

Desperate for money after losing her baby because she could not afford health care back home, Molina began taking sewing classes in order to find work. It was there that she fell victim to trafficking, after a trafficker approached her sewing teacher “because she knew a lot of women who knew how to sew and would be desperate to come to the United States.” Molina recounts:

I had to leave my mom and my children behind. I was told that when I got to the U.S. I will have a job so I could send money home, food and a place to stay. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I quickly realized it had all been a lie.

My trafficker told me that now I owe her almost $3,000 for bringing me to the U.S. and that I had to work for her in order to pay her back.

I was forced to work 18 hours a day making dresses that were being sold for $200 department stores. When all the workers in the factory got to go home, I had to clean the factory. I was forced to sleep at the factory in a storage room and I had to share a single mattress with another victim. The other workers in the factory were able to come and go at the end of their shift. I was forbidden to talk to anyone or from putting one step outside of the factory. I worked hard and I was always hungry. I was given only one meal a day and I had 10 minutes to eat.

Molina said she was held in slavery for 40 days, “but if felt like 40 years.” As it turns out, the FBI was investigating the trafficker, who was prosecuted, she said, but sentenced only to house arrest.

According to the Polaris Project, a national anti-trafficking and anti-slavery organization, laborers are trafficked into the United States to work in agriculture, the garment industry, food service and other industries, as well as prostitution. A 2009 report from the organization on brothels that enslave women trafficked from Latin America was recently featured in a related MSNBC story on “Latino residential brothels.”

FILED UNDER: Economy, Politics/Justice, Garment industry, Human trafficking, Labor trafficking, Slavery
March 25, 2011 | 2:04 PM | By

A list of the Triangle fire’s immigrant victims reveals how little has changed

Photo by Dennis Crowley/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A sidewalk memorial in New York to Sonia Wisotsky, 17, one of the Triangle factory fire victims, March 25, 2010

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a blaze that killed 146 New York garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, and is credited with sparking the modern labor movement. Workers were trapped in the building, unable to escape to the stairwells because doors were locked. A fire escape collapsed. Desperate, many of them jumped, falling several stories to their deaths.

The fire was not only New York’s biggest workplace disaster of its time, but the greatest tragedy to hit the city’s communities of then-recent arrivals from Europe. Most of the workers were Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the vast majority women, many with families. They put in long hours and scraped by with meager wages, much like immigrant garment workers today.

This morning I came across a list of the victims, some with notes next to their names like “identified by gold-capped tooth” and “attractive woman who died with folded arms.” What was most striking was the last names of the dead: Aberstein, Ardito, Astrowsky, Bellotta, Benanti, Bernstein, Binevitz, Caruso, Cohen, Costello.

By now, some of these names have become relatively common in the United States. At the time, they were utterly foreign.

A hundred years later, our clothes are still made by people with foreign names, whether made in the garment district of downtown Los Angeles or an ocean away. Much of the industry has been outsourced to sweatshops abroad, where conditions are no better and the dangers the same as workers faced a hundred years ago in New York, as evidenced by a recent deadly garment factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh that was eerily reminiscent of the Triangle tragedy.

In New York, sidewalk chalk memorials in now-pricey neighborhoods spring up at this time each year to commemorate victims of the Triangle fire, women with names like Wisotsky, Eisenberg, Maltese and Oberstein. Much has changed, and little.

FILED UNDER: Economy, Garment industry, Triangle fire