OAKLAND — For nearly a decade, Kwei Fong Lin tolerated numbness in her forearms. Like a great many Chinese immigrants who work in this city's cramped and poorly equipped garment factories, her neck and back ached from long days spent hunched over a sewing machine while perched on rickety folding chairs, stools or even crates.
"We just took the pain as it came," the 52-year-old Hong Kong native said in Cantonese.
But an unlikely revolution has taken root here. Today, dozens of women work in relative comfort while seated on customized ergonomic chairs. Simple table extensions relieve their tired shoulders. Wooden footrests keep their legs from dangling. Padded sleeves cushion the metal rods they must press hundreds of times a day with their knees to clamp and release fabric.
A city grant will soon bring the ergonomic equipment to other garment shops that dot Oakland's Chinatown and other commercial strips. And the project has spawned a much larger study now underway in Los Angeles County -- the heart of California's rag trade.
Most surprising in an industry synonymous with powerless and mistreated workers: The women made it happen. They did it with the help of a group of teenage girls tired of seeing their seamstress mothers suffer, and a team of medical professionals, ergonomics experts, state health officials and product designers.
Low-wage immigrant workers -- most with no health insurance -- are not likely to file workers' compensation claims, said Jackie Chan, an industrial hygienist with the state Department of Health Services involved in both the Oakland and Los Angeles programs. Because state inspections are triggered only if two workers doing the same task are injured in a 12-month period -- and report it -- ergonomic concerns in the garment industry have largely fallen below regulators' radar, she said.
But the Oakland women overcame fear and language barriers to make a change. First, they had to face their pain and seek treatment. Then, over countless boxes of Chinese take-out, they were measured, studied and surveyed in a makeshift sewing laboratory until the best -- and most cost-effective -- designs were complete.
"We've done something we never thought we could do," said Lin. "The workers in Oakland now know there's an ergonomic chair that's good for their health. Everybody's talking about the chair."
Much of the clothing once manufactured in the U.S. is now mass-produced overseas. But complex garments and high-end women's fashion, which demand quick turnaround and constant changes, are still made in small contracting shops in this country.
Oakland's sewing machine operators are almost all from Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Kwang Tung. The nonprofit Asian Immigrant Women Advocates was founded two decades ago to help them improve their lives, but ergonomics was never on the agenda -- until the workers and their daughters put it there.
By the late 1990s, the teens were walking picket lines on behalf of their mothers to compel large manufacturers to take responsibility for the conditions in small contracting shops. Their mothers came home exhausted, complaining of headaches, backaches, and pain in their arms and hands.
Meanwhile, the organization was training seamstresses who gathered for evening English classes to teach their colleagues about health and safety issues. They surveyed their colleagues on the job and drafted a list of key concerns.
"They hurt all the time," said Nan Lashuay, an assistant professor at the UC San Francisco School of Nursing, who helped train the women.
Just how prevalent the injuries were, no one knew. So, with the help of Robert Harrison, a leading UCSF occupational and environmental medicine specialist who also heads the Department of Health Services' occupational health section, a clinic opened four years ago in a borrowed room downstairs from the Oakland nonprofit.
With a small grant, and translation help from the teens, the collaborative effort to document -- and treat -- the women's aches got underway.
The job of spreading the word fell to the daughters, who prowled Oakland's garment factories with fliers encouraging the women to seek treatment for pain. "At first we were so scared," said Winter Xie, now 19. "The people just shut the door right in our face, or they'd yell at us. Or the workers wouldn't accept the fliers. They were scared of their bosses."
Still, the women streamed into the evening clinic. Beate Ritz, a UCLA epidemiologist who is heading the Los Angeles study, said women in pain were more likely to come, skewing the results. But the findings nevertheless hinted at crisis.
