Word: garments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...School is too expensive and they are too tired after work. Those without skills find jobs as maids, pick vegetables and fruits in the fields or clean up litter along roadways. A step up are jobs as waitresses or in factories. Sweatshops are coming back, both in the old garment trade, still a prime source of entry jobs, and in the new, high-tech electronics industries. Within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which has a membership that is 85% female, male workers hold virtually all the better- paying jobs. But the power of organization is still a new idea...
...collar jobs at home for blue-collar jobs here, the drop in status is offset by the satisfaction of a significant rise in income and the hope of moving on. Anna Cruz-Vasquez is 56 and divorced. She came alone from the Dominican Republic in 1977 and with a garment-industry job that has never paid % more than $130 a week has managed to send for four of her six children. "I lived on 150 pesos ($48) a month in Santo Domingo," she says. "This is paradise. I am working. I am earning money. I am driving. I am buying...
...grew up in a sweatshop owned by her parents, where women's blouses were made. "When I was little, we would work until 1 in the morning, then sleep on the cutting table," she says. This year she wrote her senior thesis at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., on garment workers. "This is my parents' dream," she says. "This is America. America gives rights to women that would be unattainable if we were back in our homeland...
...school, the boys, Ricardo, 16, and Jorge, 15, work in the family business, changing and repairing tires, while Leticia, 14, helps keep the books. The girls also do many of the household chores, because their mother badly twisted her back five years ago while lifting boxes at a local garment factory. Workmen's compensation paid for surgery on her spine, and her resident's status was never at issue...
...match between what they can do and what offers an opportunity," says Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer. "They try to find a niche, and what's surprising is that there's always a niche to fill." Jewish tailors from Central and Eastern Europe became important in the American garment industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chinese laborers, barred by discrimination from many occupations in the American West, found that they could become entrepreneurs by opening laundries...