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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Review
Sweatshop workers to 'Sweatshop Warriors'
SWEATSHOP WORKERS: IMMIGRANT
WOMEN WORKERS TAKE ON THE GLOBAL FACTORY, by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, South End
Press, 2001. In Sweatshop Warriors Miriam
Ching Yoon Louie invites the reader to participate "in a kind of written
word 'workers' exchange' and 'study tour' that poor peoples' groups have
organized across the decades for their friends in labor..." This is clearly
a labor of love for the author, as she painstakingly recorded voices of many
women who became sweatshop organizers. She also put their stories in the
context of objective developments. She focuses on Chinese, Mexican
and Korean immigrant women who "changed from being sweatshop workers to
sweatshop warriors." The women in this book are not just victims but have
become organizers and successfully led campaigns against big companies like Levi
Strauss and DKNY, as well as subcontractors like Lucky Sewing Co. These women
took on every aspect of life in their struggle, including health, environmental
safety and problems at home and with their own traditional culture. The book is full of inspiring
stories. Most remarkable are the author's own conclusions that "as they
carried out their battles the women started to define not only what they were
fighting against, but also what they were fighting for...to independently secure
their rights to dignified work, housing, nutrition, health, and freedom of
expression and affiliation....They learned to build a new world through trial
and error.... Take, for example, Petra Mata,
who was one of the founders of Fuerza Unida, a workers' organization in San
Antonio, Texas. She was a trainer at the Levi Strauss plant there. Fuerza Unida
started when the workers noticed that Levi's was paying them unfairly. After the
shock of closing the plant in 1990 (they call themselves "early victims of
NAFTA") they responded by organizing a lot more: "We started having
training and participating in conferences–locally, nationally,
internationally.... Every several weeks, we went to San Francisco to organize
the campaign at Levi's corporate headquarters. We had to leave our families. It
was good but hard." These stories make it clear
that capitalism will not cease to produce its opposite: women like these,
capitalism's gravediggers. The book raises the question of what is the
responsibility of those who meet these women through the book: "Listening
to the women speak cannot be an act of consumerism. Seeing them fight for their
rights cannot be an act of voyeurism.... Each of us is called upon to do the
same..." The author does us a tremendous service by translating their
voices, which may not have been available in English before, and by providing a
global context for these women's struggles. Her call to the readers to
express solidarity by "challenging the pyramids of oppression we face"
can be met in a variety of ways. One way is to join picket lines and "train
our ears to listen harder to hear the vibrant voices and lyrical leadership of
grassroots folk on the bottom, the foundation rock of mass movements." This is a great beginning in helping mass movements develop. It starts with going to the picket lines and being conscious of what you hear and don't hear. Such consciousness comes from a theoretic posture that allows us to recognize and appreciate the reason in these voices. –Urszula Wislanska |
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