Rally weds immigration, garment-district fights

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Jefferson Siegel
Immigrant garment workers rally en masse in the Fashion District on Tuesday in commemoration of May Day.

By Chris Lombardi

Bruce Raynor, president of the nation’s garment workers union, looked out over Seventh Avenue at the statue on 39th Street. He told the 50 or so union members gathered before him, crammed into a pen in front of the stage, to turn around and look.

“That statue over there is of a Jewish immigrant, because the immigrants who built the garment industry in New York City were Jewish and Italian,” Raynor said. “Now they’re Asian and Latino. The garment industry is part of what makes this country great, and by God, we’ve got to preserve those jobs.”

Some decisions are made in Washington, D.C., including the shape of policies on immigration; others are made in downtown city offices, like city zoning rules and policies that help or hinder certain industries. On Tuesday, May 1, as hundreds of thousands across the country marched for immigrant rights, a different kind of protest was held on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 39th Street. Like the others, its speakers and organizers stressed the need for comprehensive changes in immigration policy. But the event on “Fashion Avenue,” right next to that statue of an old man bent over a sewing table, was focused on a threat as terrifying as la migra or a sweatshop owner: the prospect of losing their livelihood due to changes in Garment District zoning. Organized by the textile union UNITE-HERE, which has its roots in the immigrant-driven International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), founded in 1900, the rally deployed some star power in actor Danny Glover and City Comptroller William Thompson, while including immigrant workers who had been in the U.S. from three to 50 years. Speakers focused on immigrants’ contributions to the nation and garment industry, the need to recognize and legitimate those who need it, and the need for the city officials and business leaders to pursue policies that strengthen and expand the besieged industry.

May 1, International Workers’ Day, has in recent years become a day of immigrant-rights demonstrations across the country, most famously when half a million swelled the streets of Los Angeles last year. This past Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people marched in L.A., Chicago, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., including hundreds who marched from Union Square Park to City Hall demanding meaningful immigration reforms and denouncing raids by immigration officials that have often separated immigrant parents from their U.S.-citizen children.

Such rallies, pressing for changes in national policies, are no stranger to New York’s Garment District, where unions have assembled en masse repeatedly over the 150-year span of their industry. But last Tuesday in the Fashion District, at the rally called by UNITE-HERE (today’s version of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union), members and speakers focused their attention equally on punitive immigration policies and on something seemingly different: upcoming changes in Article XII of the city’s zoning regulations, subtitled “Special Garment District.”

May Chen, director of the Garment District local of UNITE-HERE, told Chelsea Now that over the years, “we’ve rallied for all kinds of things,” including a 100,000-strong funeral march in 1911, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. More recently, workers in the district demonstrated for “better wages, better working conditions…. President Kennedy even came by once,” said Chen.

Chen said her local members have been directly impacted by the recent tightening of federal immigration policies, including longer wait times for visas and raids on immigrant homes. “These laws force immigrant workers into an underground economy, which means sweatshops. And that creates wage pressure on the employers we work with, who are trying to do the right thing,” according to Chen. Concerns about exploitation by unscrupulous employers also inspires UNITE-HERE’s opposition to any sort of “guest worker” program, proposed by many lawmakers as a way forward.

Union officials told Chelsea Now that they prefer a slow path to legalization, with credit given for immigrants’ hard work. And like others at the rally, they are dead set against President George W. Bush’s recent proposal to allow undocumented workers to apply for legal status only after paying a $10,000 fine, going back to their home countries and paying a $3,000 legal fee. “My members have families, children in school,” Chen told Chelsea Now.

Chen added that her members were just as imperiled by the slow march of real estate interests into the District as by national laws. Changes in zoning for the district, proposed by the Department of City Planning (DCP), could shut down local apparel factories entirely, she said. “There’s just not enough space protected [in DCP’s current proposal].” If only 25 percent of the space in the District were reserved for apparel producers while a broader range of offices, hotels and restaurants filled the rest, “it could take the area to a tipping point, where the factories, the small shops that remain, would be under unbearable pressure from real estate,” said Chen. Meanwhile, Chen added, the city needs to enforce the existing rules.

Current zoning rules reserve 50 percent of the space in the Garment District’s buildings for apparel and allow only a selected number of other uses for the rest, though the percentage is eroded, advocates say, by landlords who illegally rent out their spaces at higher rents while turning away apparel producers. “Right now,” UNITE-HERE president Bruce Raynor told Chelsea Now, “the City has rewarded the landlords who cheat, not the ones who play by the rules.”

Tuesday’s May Day rally began with testimonies from garment workers themselves, not unlike those in the crowd. “I came here from Guatemala 12 years ago,” seamstress Mary Sandoval told the crowd. “I am now making beautiful clothing for Bill Blass. And now we make clothing for First Lady Laura Bush.” She paused while the crowd laughed. “We work, pay taxes and make New York a dynamic city.”

Other current union members onstage included Petra Velez, who came here 50 years ago from Puerto Rico and is now a board member of UNITE-HERE, and sample maker Carolyn Ho, who spoke in halting English about her journey.

“I am a sample maker for 20 years. I join the union three years ago—now have a good salary and benefits. The workers are all immigrants like me,” said Ho. “My brother was still in Hong Kong, and I made a paper to bring him, but my brother have to wait 11 years.”

Workers like these, said many speakers at the rally, are the descendants of the immigrants who built the industry and deserve the same respect. Employers in the District agreed, like Nicole Miller Company CEO Bud Kondheim, who said, “Immigrants make our economy strong,” and Samanta Cortes, CEO of Fashion Design Concepts, who said her own journey and company demonstrated what is possible.

“The people you’ve heard are like me, like my mother who came to the Garment District as a seamstress. I moved from Puerto Rico five years ago to get started,” said Cortes, whose company is now worth more than $5 million. “I now employ people, immigrants who pay their taxes, who want to continue in the industry. Don’t take that dream away from them.”

New York City Comptroller William Thompson, like those before him, started with personal experience. “Eighty years ago, my parents came to New York from the island of St. Kitts, the island of Nevis,” he said, adding, “there are some [anti-immigrant advocates] who, now that they’re here, want to close the door.” He added that New York City, a city shaped by waves of immigration, had to stand for something different: “Instead of pushing them away, we should embrace them.”

In the face of real estate pressure on the garment industry, Thompson said, city officials “must not simply protect what’s there, but help to expand and grow those jobs.” Thompson was also the only elected official present at the rally and received a warm round of applause (if not Kennedy-sized). But the biggest roar from the crowd, and from spectators outside the pen, was for the rally’s final speaker, movie actor Danny Glover.

Glover blinked in the high-noon sun as he greeted the crowd: “Brothers and sisters!” After calling on the memory of his hard-working parents and grandparents, and praising “the immigrants who make the most amazing contribution to what we are, who work hard to make this city and this nation,” he called on the crowd to take up the fight begun by their predecessors a century ago.

“You stand here in their memory, of those martyrs,” Glover said. “You must speak their voice.” He closed with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, who had worked for more than 10 years and walked many miles to throw off British rule in India: “We are the change we have been waiting for.”

As the rally ended, Glover was mobbed by fans asking to him to sign Fashion District brochures, notebooks and even their arms. The union members dispersed back to their families and shops. And UNITE officials girded for another round of talks with the city.

Both May Chen and Bruce Raynor told Chelsea Now that UNITE-HERE is negotiating with the city, and Raynor expressed confidence that “Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff will help us, will do the right thing.” The bottom line, he said, was making sure public officials stood firm against pressure from real estate interests.

“The politicians are going to have to agree to protect the garment industry,” he said.