Behind ‘fast fashion’ brands are underpaid workers working in sweatshops

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Lured by the promise of a restaurant job paying $1,000 a month, Yeni Dewi travelled to the United States on a tourist visa in 2013. Once here, she realized she had been trafficked. She was forced to work as a domestic help at a house in Sherman Oaks near Santa Monica. She worked 18 hours daily and was paid $200 every 35-38 days. She managed to escape after a couple of years and has been a garment worker ever since.

Currently she works at a garment manufacturing factory near the intersection of Wall Street and 8th Street on the outskirts of the Fashion District in downtown L.A. Dewi said that the factory is a supplier for Fashion Nova. But she earns around $300-$350 per month even though she works for at least 40 hours every week.

“I don’t like the situation…but I have no other choice,” said Dewi, who is mother to a daughter here and a son who lives back home Indonesia with his grandmother.

Yeni Dewi with her daughter

According to a report by CIT Group Inc. and the California Fashion Association, the fashion industry in Los Angeles generates at least $18 billion in revenue. However, behind the world of mass-produced garments from fast fashion brands like Zara, Forever 21 and Fashion Nova, lies an underbelly of exploited workers receiving less than minimum wage and working in sweatshop conditions.

The minimum wage in the City of Los Angeles is presently $12 or $13.25 an hour, depending on the size of the business. According to the first quarterly report of 2018 of the California Employment Development Department, the hourly median wage of a worker in the garment and textile industry was $11.81. Despite state law mandating that all garment workers must be paid at least the minimum wage, many say that they don’t even get half of the designated amount.

“We are earning like $5 an hour right now, when every year it [the minimum wage] rises up to $12, $13 and so on,” she said. “In L.A, the minimum wage rises every year, but the piece rate never rises.”

According to the piece rate, each garment worker is paid around 70 cents for each “operation” like stitching the sleeves to the main body of a dress or joining the two sides of a shirt. Dewi said the total amount earned by a worker per garment depends on the style, but generally comes to around $2.

Mariella Martinez of the Garment Worker Center said that part of the reason that garment workers receive such low wages is that the big, sometimes multinational, brands that the factories supply refuse to increase their prices. This puts the onus solely on the owners of the factories to pay decent wages. The owners, in turn, are often unwilling to cut into their own profits. They also have to compete with manufacturing plants in Asia or Central or South America where labor is cheaper and labor laws are less stringent.

“If it is $15 an hour [for labor] in the United States and in California, that is a day’s labor in Mexico and two days’ labor in China,” said Ilse Metchek, the president of the California Fashion Association.

The Association, which Metchek said deals with, “the voice of the industry, the business of the business,” was formed in 1995 in the aftermath of the El Monte Slavery Case.

Metchek said that manufacturing has decreased in Los Angeles and will keep on decreasing over the years. The industry however is still huge. In 2016, Business Wire found that wholesalers in the industry added roughly 1500 jobs each year.

In 2016, researchers from UCLA studied the wage claims processed through the Garment Workers Center and found that workers earn an average of $5.15 an hour. Despite state legislation that holds manufacturers liable for wage and hour violations in the garment manufacturing industry, there is also little governmental oversight or enforcement.

Many of the factories operate illegally in garages, sheds, or abandoned properties, making it very difficult for government agencies to monitor them, said Dewi. They also do not provide health benefits, holidays or insurance and workers often have to work in sweatshop conditions.

Dewi has worked in factories where there were no bathroom or lunch breaks and the workers there had to bring their own clean water and toilet paper, she said.

Virgilda Romero, another garment worker, also described working in unsafe and unhygienic conditions.

“I worked at a factory between Broadway and Main streets on Adams where things were really bad…They would make me do a lot of the cleaning. So I would be in charge of cleaning the bathrooms and also like catching killing the rodents and then so I would deal with like rat pee falling on me and things like that,” said Romero. “I wouldn’t work sometimes on Sundays and they would leave the trash over, so there would be like maggots in the trash.”

Virgilda Romero at the Garment Worker Center

Romero arrived in the United States from Guatemala in 2001. She has worked in the garment manufacturing industry for more than 16 years. The first factory she worked at paid only 5 cents a piece. She has also worked in places where the employers would pressure her to work faster and not allow her to take any breaks. There have been times when she worked for 11 hours a day, Monday through Saturday, and sometimes even on Sundays to earn enough to survive.

Romero said that her present employer was much better and pays her around $470 for six-day weeks. Even then, when she informed her that she would be unable to work for some days due to a surgery, she got very upset and said, “You’re going to miss work again. You better get healthy quick so that you can come back to work as soon as possible.”

“I was very nervous because I’ve been taking these medications that make me have to go to the bathroom a lot because of the surgery and I was, you know, kind of scared the whole time that she would get angry for taking so many restroom breaks,” said Romero.

According to the California Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of the garment workers are immigrants, mostly Latinx and Asians. While both Romero now has valid work permit, many of the workers are undocumented immigrants and some are, like Dewi, victims of human trafficking.

The owners of the factories easily take advantage of their workers because they know that they are in precarious positions and will be too scared to go to the authorities to file wage claims or complaints about work conditions, Martinez said. Many are simply not aware that even though they are undocumented, they still enjoy certain rights.

For instance, Dewi did not speak English or Spanish when she first arrived in the United States. She was also not aware that she had certain rights as a victim of human trafficking. She was hiding both from her traffickers and also immigration authorities. She was scared that if she went to the police, they would arrest her for not possessing valid work permits. She did not realize that the garment industry was short-changing her as well.

“When I was working for my traffickers, they only paid me $200 [every 35 days]…and I didn’t get any holidays. In the garment industry, I got like $200 or $150 a week, and I thought it was good,” said Dewi. It was only after lawyers with the Garment Workers Center made her aware of her rights did she realize how low her wages were.

Dewi’s documentation is being processed and she hopes she will soon be able to apply for a green card and bring her son to Los Angeles.

As a member of the Garment Workers’ Center, Dewi often helps them with their campaigns. She said that most importantly the industry needs to abolish the piece rate.

“The first thing we are gonna to do is get minimum wage for the workers and then everything else, step-by-step, said Dewi. “We are gonna ask for health and safety and everything else.”

How affordable is “affordable housing”?

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Luis Herrera lives with his 82-year-old father in a rented 1-bedroom apartment right opposite the Union Avenue Elementary School on South Burlington Avenue. Herrera works full-time at a credit union in downtown Los Angeles, around two miles from his home.

After moving from another apartment building nearby, the Herreras were settling into their new home. But that sense of comfort was short-lived. After a series of gradual rent increases every year, the owners of the property, the “1979 Ehrlich Investment Trust”, suddenly hiked the rent by nearly 25 percent.

The Herreras are not alone. Across the 192 housing units owned by the Trust in the Burlington Apartments, residents of every single unit have reported an increase in rent by 25 to 50 percent this year, according to activists from the local chapter of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Luis Herrera

According to real-estate website Zillow, the average rent in Los Angeles has steadily risen to nearly $3000 per month in the last five years. Nearly 2 million residents of the county spend more than half their monthly salary on rents.

Herrera moved into his Burlington apartment four years ago and remembers that the rent was initially $850 per month but the contract said that it would increase by $100 the next year.

“It was okay for me because we were moving from another building where the rent had gone up to $1200…So when we moved from that place, you know, $850 sounded a lot better,” said Herrera.

In 2015, Herrera’s rent increased to $950 and then to $1045 the next year. This year, the owners notified him of a further increase to $1300. Herrera earns a little more than $2500 every month. He said that he already spends half his salary on just the rent.

Herrera’s precarious financial position is compounded by the fact that his father needs regular dialysis. Although the dialysis is paid for by Medicaid, sometimes emergencies crop up which further add to Herrera’s financial burden.

“We have a limited amount of subsidies for housing in this country, which means that most people, even most poor people rent housing on the private market,” said Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA. “Generally speaking, in Los Angeles, we do need more housing.”

What is the state of the private market when it comes to housing?

According to Zillow, the median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood in which Herrera’s flat is located is $2,370. The last recorded monthly median household income in the council district was $3,647.

    Median Rent in South Burlington Avenue (Source: Zillow)

 

Even in 2015, when the incomes for the council district was surveyed, the rent was around two-thirds that of the household income.

“I know how to spend my money, but it’s really hard when even…if you make, you know, say $2500 a month, when $1300 out of that money is going to rent,” said Herrera.

Besides the rent, Herrera budgets $300-$400 for his food but he says that it usually exceeds the amount because on days that his father is hospitalized, he has to rush from his work to the hospital leaving him no time to cook his own food and forcing him to eat outside.

He also has to pay $300 more every month for his car. His monthly expenditure on gas is around $80. Herrera said that although he works nearby and can easily walk to work, having a car is essential because of his father’s medical condition.

Around $150 more goes on his phone and internet connection and some more on electricity and gas. The result? Herrera hardly has any money left as savings.

Herrera said that many of his neighbors have been forced to move out or have had to take up multiple jobs, sometimes working for 18-20 hours a day, just to be able to pay the rent. Many of his neighbors are old and on fixed incomes from retirement funds and they won’t be able to pay rent if it keeps increasing at the present rate, he said.

Families are also hesitant to move because their children study at the Union Avenue Elementary School right across the street. Herrera said that he knows people in the buildings who are looking for a third job or women who had been taking care of their kids at home and running the house now going out to look for jobs.

“If it comes to it, I can sleep in my car and then I rent a place just for him [Herrera’s father]. I can go to the place, take a nap and just sleep in my car at night…That’s how far I’m willing to go,” said Herrera. He said that his father’s illness has prevented him from moving somewhere else.

A similar situation is faced by Elyse Valenzuela, a resident of a cluster of rent stabilized apartments right opposite the new Banc of California Stadium on Exposition Park. The buildings have been bought by an Irvine-based real estate company, the Ventus Group, and are slated to be demolished to make way for a multi-use luxury residential-cum-commercial complex.

Elyse Valenzuela

What worries Valenzuela the most about her impending eviction is how her brother, who is disabled and suffers from cerebral palsy, will adapt to a new life in another neighborhood.

“It is going to be hard for him because he has his whole life established here…All of his programs are down the street. We have been going to the same doctor for years,” she said. If they are forced to move somewhere else Valenzuela’s family would also have to consider whether there are good programs for him and good doctors in the new neighborhood.

“The development will generate significant tax revenue for the City of Los Angeles, which will help to provide more city services,” said Alice Walton, a spokesperson for the group.

The developers also plan to set aside 82 of the 186 residential units in the project as “affordable housing” units, available for households making less than 80 percent of the area median income determined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Maria Ochoa, a local activist however pointed out that even if the project included housing units at lower prices, the demolition of the existing buildings still means that 32 units are off the market.

“[If] say the whole building was rent controlled and turned over into affordable housing, that would be super helpful to the community,” she said.

Valenzuela’s apartment falls under Council District 9, where the median household income is among the lowest in the county. The district has among the highest unemployment rates in the city (8.5 percent unemployed). More than a quarter of the households are also enrolled in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program — the highest in the city.

                                                                                                               Made with Infogram

The planned commercial project is part of a surge in gentrification around the University of Southern California which adjoins Exposition Park. the university’s growing international cohort also show a willingness to pay more — a fact developers and property owners wish to cash in on. Last month, for instance, around 80 tenants at an apartment complex off Exposition Boulevard were evicted because the new owners plan to convert the units into student housing.

Most of the tenants facing eviction, like those in Burlington, come from working-class backgrounds and are old and retired.

“Luckily for us in our situation we have…people that are willing to open their doors for us. But I know that the rest of the tenants here…their situation is not as good as ours. Some tenants, they don’t have other family members. They’re retired. They get a $500 paycheck every two weeks. How can they afford to go pay $2500 rent?” asked Valenzuela.

Activists fear that increasing gentrification around Los Angeles which increase the area median incomes which in turn will drive up rents even for “affordable housing” projects since their rent is directly dependent on the incomes of the neighborhood.

Herrera said that just because the rent for his apartment is cheaper than the others in his neighborhood does not make it affordable for him or many of the other tenants.

“All these companies that are increasing the rent so much. Are they going to increase their employees’ salaries by 25 percent or 40 percent?” asked Herrera. “Everything is too expensive around here, right? They said the rent here is cheaper than other places. It is cheaper, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it is affordable.”