Ching Yoon Louie
Cambridge:
South End Press, 2001
Review by
Mickey Ellinger and Sharon Martinas
Shoppers stared
as we picketed Jessica McClintock’s San Francisco boutique. About half of us
were young white people in jeans and sweatshirts, about half Chinese women in
their 30s and 40s, some children, a few Asian men, a few young Asian women
with clipboards and bullhorns. Our chants and signs demanded that McClintock
pay back wages to the women who, working for subcontractors, had made the prom
dresses and wedding gowns in the window. Asian Immigrant Women Advocates
brought their members to confront shoppers and store employees, and recruited
our Challenging White Supremacy workshop to staff this week’s picket line and
leaflet passersby.
Miriam Ching
Yoon Louie combines analysis, history, and storytelling in Sweatshop
Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Economy. Louie draws
on “the real experts”—the Korean, Chinese, and Mexican women workers whose
12-hour days in the sweatshops of New York, Oakland, San Antonio, El Paso, and
Los Angeles produce extraordinary profits for the Gap, DKNY, Jessica
McClintock, and other well-known labels. A long-time organizer and educator
with the Women of Color Resource Center, she relates today’s struggles against
sweatshops, runaway shops, and persecution of immigrants to the international
movement against global capitalism and to labor, immigrant, and women’s
organizing. She challenges the anti-globalization movement to learn from these
experts and fight for justice for immigrant women and their communities. Some
of the organizers Louie interviews are recent immigrants; many of the Mexicans
have families on both sides of the border. Most worked in factories before
they came to the U.S. Many were activists in student or labor movements.
They’ve founded organizations like the Chinese Staff and Workers Association
in New York and the Korean Immigrant Workers Association in LA, led
international campaigns against the sweatshop industries, formed multi-purpose
centers for women workers, dealt with men in their families who did not
support their activism, and traveled the world as organizers.
We learn more
from these women than their moving testi- monies. They teach how the two waves
of globalization have galvanized resistance. We learn how they overcame their
own fears and those of the women they work with, the competition among
workers, between documented and undocumented, newcomers, and the more
established. Louie quotes an organizer from Fuerza Unida, an organization of
workers laid off by Levi Strauss in San Antonio, Texas, when they moved their
operations to Costa Rica: “This is the best school you could have, working
with people, chairing meetings. We work with Asian, Filipino, African
American, Mexican, white. We are part of the same vision, the same movement.”
Of a Fuerza Unida delegation to Honduras: “We saw just what Levi’s was doing
to our sisters in Central America. The place looked just like a prison and
workers were treated like prisoners. I saw that with my own eyes.”
The sweatshop
warriors have a clear grasp of imperialist expansion; as they say, “We are
here because you were there.” Louie’s book introduces us to these experts,
their democratic wisdom, determination, and humor. She closes with her poem
“Sewing Sisterhood,” which ends “Let us join our sister sweatshop warriors
design trace cut stitch hem press weave/Wrap each other in a rainbow banner of
liberation.” Z
Ellinger and Martinas founded the Challenging White Supremacy workshop in San
Francisco in 1993 and are members of its core collective.