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.
