Garment Workers

Launched in 1995 with the discovery of more than seventy enslaved Thai workers in a suburban apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire fence, the movement to end garment sweatshops—led by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center—pioneered the integration of strategic litigation and worker organizing to challenge inequality in Los Angeles. The sweatshop regime was built upon a legal foundation of subcontracting, which insulated retailers and manufacturers from the contractors actually producing clothing. At its most ambitious, the campaign sought to make legal responsibility follow economic power, rupturing the fiction that protected retailers and manufacturers from labor abuses such as those uncovered in the Thai worker case. Chapter 2 shows how lawyers built a powerful alliance with labor and grassroots organizers, won important legal victories in court, and achieved passage of a landmark state law creating manufacturer liability for contract labor violations. It then traces the campaign through the fierce battle against retailer Forever 21, which showed the power of industry countermobilization and ultimately marked the end of the litigation campaign. This outcome underscored a central lesson of legal mobilization in the new economy: Individual enforcement and litigation strategies, even when paired with innovative organizing and media campaigns, faced long odds challenging abuse enabled by extensive contracting and—crucially—the threat of global outsourcing. However, in fusing law and organizing, the anti-sweatshop campaign marked a new beginning in the movement against low-wage work—one that would deploy the tools honed in the garment manufacturing context to target Los Angeles’s immobile service industries.