Fashion in Los Angeles has always been fast. The city’s mild climate encouraged the use of lighter, low-cost synthetic fabrics and more casual, leisure-oriented styles year round and, as the epicenter of the entertainment industry, local designers and brands became trend-setters for the rest of the United States. This “fast” fashion industry has always depended on the labor migrants, its workforce representing a convergence of many diasporas—Jewish, Italian, and Mexican immigrants in early 20th century, Black and White tenant farmers fleeing the Jim Crow south in the 1940s, and waves of South and East Asian and Central American immigrants after 1965—each of them woven into the fabric of L.A.’s garment industry. 

In the same years, however, apparel manufacturers also began shifting their production outside of the United States: in 1961, only 4% of clothing sold in the United States was imported, by 1995, over 60% of garments sold in the U.S. were made elsewhere, resulting in the loss of thousands of high-wage, union jobs. By the 1970s, many Los Angeles employers facing new competition from imported goods returned to old ways of doing business. They hired more undocumented immigrants, fired union organizers, and contracted work out to homeworkers paid by the piece, not by the hour. But while many other local unions blamed immigrants for similar changes in their industries, garment workers in Los Angeles took a different approach, making an aggressive push to organize undocumented immigrants even as federal immigration agents raided garment factories. In 1980, the ILGWU became one of the first unions in the United States to call for unconditional amnesty for undocumented workers. 

The offshoring of the garment industry accelerated as new “free trade” policies were implemented in the 1990s, placing ever-greater pressure on local manufacturers in Los Angeles. Corporate consolidation further entrenched the power of the retailers and fashion got faster, with stores demanding trendy, low-priced clothing in smaller batches sometimes multiple times a week. An incident in 1995 exposed the depths of labor exploitation that prevailed in this hyper-competitive fast fashion industry: officials from the California Department of Industrial Relations raided an apartment complex in El Monte (east of Los Angeles) where 72 Thai women, all of them victims of human trafficking, were being held against and forced to sew for 18 hours a day. The incident in El Monte coincided with a years-long campaign against Guess? Jeans led by UNITE! (Union of Needle Trades and Industrial Textile Employees, formed after a merger of the ILGWU and the ACWA) which, while achieving some victories for workers, ended with the company moving its production to Mexico. Confronting an increasingly vulnerable workforce and ever-more powerful corporate retailers, garment workers were forced to rethink their strategies once again.

The crises of the 1990s also brought new stakeholders and constituencies into the garment workers’ fight. Progressive lawyers, immigrant rights’ advocates, religious leaders, consumers’ groups, students, and community-based organizations joined UNITE! in their opposition to sweatshops. They worked together to pass legislation that would establish joint liability of the retailers and, as the goal of collective bargaining became more difficult to achieve, introduced new ideas and approaches to organized labor’s toolbox. Among these new approaches was the Garment Worker Center (GWC), which offered an innovative model for worker empowerment that combines education, advocacy, and organizing. The GWC both inspired and was inspired by a wave of organizing and advocacy focused on the most vulnerable, low-wage immigrant workers in Los Angeles that continues to this day in the Los Angeles Worker Center Network.