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."
