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. Many shops are highly-mobile subcontractors. 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. 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 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. One of the reasons the money is going, staffers say, is the expense of the union s aggressive organizing program. But the union has also branched out to organize workers at such companies as Xerox and K-Mart .