Los Angeles’s Garment District Is Still Home to Severe Exploitation
Over 45,000 workers are concentrated in Los Angeles’ Garment District. Long faced with paltry wages and inhumane working conditions, those workers are now taking significant risks to organize for better pay and workplace protections.
An employee assembles denim jeans at the 9B Apparel manufacturing facility in Los Angeles, California, on Wednesday, January 17, 2018. (Dania Maxwell / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
When Francisco Tzul arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s after fleeing a brutal war that was ravaging his native Guatemala, he needed work — both to support himself in an unfamiliar country and to help people who remained at home.
“All we wanted was to start working and start to get some economic relief to our people in our home country,” he told Jacobin. “So, I didn’t really care about work conditions. All we wanted was to work . . . no matter what the situation was.”
What Tzul found was something that, in a number of American cities, is a thing of the past: a bustling, throwback garment industry fueled by the cheap materials shipped into the city’s port. Los Angeles today is still a center of garment manufacturing: a 45,000-person-strong industry that produces clothing for a number of the country’s biggest fashion brands.
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