Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry, and: Voices from the Front Lines: Organizing Immigrant Workers in Los Angeles (review)

The United States is a country of contradictions and extremes: unprecedented growth in high tech industries and a movie industry that advertises its "American way of life" around the world exist right next to pockets of poverty where low-wage, dead-end jobs keep workers trapped in conditions not unlike those in developing countries.

More than any other American city, the metropolis of Los Angeles embodies those extremes. The U.S. workforce is becoming more diverse, but fully one-third of L.A.'s workforce is made up of immigrants from all over the world.

Globalization has shifted the balance of power between capital and labor in the United States. The passage of treaties like NAFTA, with no protections for workers, and the increasing reliance on "flexible production," which emphasizes contracting out and sending production around the world in the search of ever lower wages, has polarized the American workforce,. In that drama, L.A. has led the way. These two books, Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry and Voices From the Front Lines, both bring to life the effects of these changes in L.A. and demonstrate how workers and unions are responding to them.

L.A.'s garment industry, which thrives on the city's connection with high fashion and the glamorous lifestyles associated with the movie and music industries, has brought back a production system that has made L.A. into the "sweatshop capital of the United States." In Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum give readers a very thorough and readable investigation of the sub-contracting web that makes up the Los Angeles garment industry. It is the most complete study to date of how this system works, how it fits into larger, global changes in systems of production, how it feeds on and fosters inequality, and how the anti-sweatshop movement, government and unions have combined to fight back.

Bonacich and Appelbaum tackle a very complex and perpetually changing industry, using a variety of approaches, from interviews with worker and factory owners to surveys of trade publications, giving the reader a good look at the industry's structure and key players and showing the way in which the changes in this industry portend developments in other areas. They reveal how apparel retailers and manufacturers control the industry and drive production to where the lowest wages can be found, be that in Mexico (as their case study of a Guess? Jeans plant shows) or in a contracting factory in L.A. where immigrant workers are paid a piece rate that doesn't always add up to the minimum wage.

Behind the Label paints a bleak picture, with statistics like, "The average garment worker in L.A. made $ 7,200 a year in 1990, at a time when the minimum wage for full-time year-round work totaled $8,840, and when the poverty level for a family of three was defined as $10, 419." This picture is somewhat alleviated by the last three chapters, which deal with the possibilities of government efforts to clean up the industry in spite of heavy pressure from business interests, and the work of community groups that are educating workers on their rights and bringing their cases to the legal and legislative arenas.

In this book, Appelbaum and Bonacich's activism and scholarship inform each other, and the result is a work so broad in scope that it could be a roadmap for high school students active in the anti-sweatshop movement and...