Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2005 Student Work

Days Among the Sweatshop Garment Workers, Learning the Fabric of Their Lives

By Amy Wu

(Recipient of the 2004 DiCagno Award for the best investigative story on environmental protection or human rights.)

The creation of the $48 T-shirt that will anchor the upscale clothing designer Eileen Fisher’s spring collection begins in a squat, non-descript three-story brick building, sandwiched between a church and an auto body shop in College Point, Queens, a working-class neighborhood that is marked by strip malls and Archie Bunker-type homes.

Stepping inside and climbing up the iron stairs, past the walls scarred with chipping paint, one encounters an angry buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees.

It comes from a vast high-ceilinged room on the third floor lined with rows of industrial sewing machines that are being operated exclusively by at least 30 Chinese women. The atmosphere has the chaotic feel of a home that has been upturned by a tornado; the air is littered with dust from the bundles of cloth, and some of the women seal their nostrils with white masking tape to prevent them from inhaling the fuzz. The windows, which are mostly covered with cloth, allow very little natural light to filter in, and the air stinks of decaying vegetables.

To the left, past the bathrooms that expose slippery floors and leaky faucets, there is a smaller room with another seven garment factory workers who are overshadowed by stacks of cloth waiting to be sewn. The women – their faces shiny with sweat – glance up briefly to see if the visitor is their boss, someone from the U.S. Department of Labor or the auditor from Eileen Fisher, the company who subcontracts to this factory. When they realize that the visitor is none of them they continue to sew. One of them is Nancy Tan, who sits in the last row.

Nancy and her co-workers make up the immigrant workforce that fuels New York’s garment factories, which are dwindling in number, and deteriorating in condition.

They work in one of the city’s most notorious sweatshops. The owners are not the proverbial big-bellied bosses with cigars in their faces, but two women who were once garment workers themselves. They struggle to make a living as profit margins are shrinking, and the number of factories is fast declining. Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, at least 1,000 factories of 3,000 factories have closed down in New York State, according to the Asian- American Business Development Center, a New York-based non-profit created to help promote Asian businesses.

Globalization resulted in sending many American garment jobs overseas to China and third-world countries where labor is cheaper. The vicious cycle has a direct impact on the remaining workers at home, whose livelihoods depend on the factories. Workers such as Nancy Tan find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances as factories cut back wages, and demand more productivity to meet production deadlines. The workers are well aware of their plight, but they also see it as a way of life. “Everyday I think about changing careers, but we’ve almost given up hope. Right now I have two kids and I have to take care of them,” Ms. Tan said. “This is all I can do.”

Nor do the owners foresee that things will get better in the future.

“I see no future for this industry; in several years it will be gone,” said Fanny Chen, the owner of JHL Fashion, a garment factory in Manhattan’s Chinatown, who was a seamstress for 10 years before she shifted to management.

Chen sounded dispirited when asked whether she thought the garment factory workers’ lives would improve. “Most of them don’t speak a word of English, so what else are they going to do?” she asked, echoing the workers’ mantra of despair.

One company trying to shatter the abusive cycle is Eileen Fisher, the large corporate clothing designer that specializes in clothes for upscale middle-aged women. Rather than follow the steps of competitors who are shifting the majority of their manufacturing overseas, Ms. Fisher, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, has made it a priority to keep manufacturing local, and improve the conditions of the garment factories that it subcontracts to. Whether a big name designer such as Eileen Fisher will succeed is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, the garment workers are just struggling to make a living.

“The Microsofts and Enrons of the Garment World”

Every industry has good and bad apples, said Teddy C.K. Lai, executive director of the Greater Blouse, Skirt & Undergarment Association, an industry group that aims to help the garment factories. Even though they are all sweatshops, not all of them are as bad as they may seem on the surface. At the College Point factory, many workers said that they considered this factory one of the better ones. Despite the growing competition for work, the factory has had steady orders from three clients, including Eileen Fisher. In second-tier factories the work can be sporadic, and the women are sent home because there isn’t enough work.

Unlike other factories the College Point factory also had regimented hours that generally ran from 8:30 a.m. until 7 p.m., although the women could stay as late as midnight if they were in a crunch to meet production deadlines. As with most factories the workers were paid for every piece of cloth they sewed; at this factory most workers received 38 cents per piece.

Nancy and her colleagues said that they were almost always paid on time, unlike some factories that paid workers sporadically, if at all. There was no healthcare or insurance, but Nancy said that was okay; since she earns roughly $15,000 a year, and her husband, a press operator, earns roughly the same, the Tan family quality for free medical care under a New York City program called Family Health Plus. The women said that overall the bosses, Ms. Ling and Ms. Fang, were more understanding toward them because they are women, and were once garment workers themselves.

A few years ago, for example, Nancy left the job because she couldn’t afford childcare for her twin boys who are now 11. A year later the factory found itself desperate for experienced workers, and agreed to let Nancy leave for three hours in the afternoon to spend time with her children.

“It’s a special case, but it shows that they will still compromise and can be pretty fair,” Nancy said. Industry observers agreed that the factory’s unstructured existence had its upsides too. Don Lee, chairman of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a non-profit in New York’s Chinatown that helps new immigrants, said that one of the unspoken benefits of the garment factory world was the flexibility it gives to working mothers.

“It does get to the point of raising the family and specifically the immigrant family. You might have a husband who is a waiter, and then the wife works at a factory. In a factory she can leave at 3 p.m. and pick up junior,” Lee said.

Having a top designer such as Eileen Fisher as a client also seemed to heighten the factory standards. Unlike many second-tier factories, the College Point factory appointed an in-house compliance officer, Shu Ling, who made sporadic rounds to check the quality of the work so that they could catch any glitches before Eileen Fisher sent into quality assurance officers in.

“We need to be so careful because one wrong stitch and the whole order needs to be redone. That’s why we have our own compliance person,” Nancy said, noting that a botched order could set the factory back for weeks.

Another invisible benefit that this factory offered was a level of camaraderie and comfort. The women were in a world where the language and culture are familiar to them.

At the College Point factory, a radio was always tuned to either a Cantonese or Mandarin station that played popular Chinese songs or news reports. Chinese newspapers such as Sing Tao Daily and Ming Pao were scattered around the sewing stations. At lunch the women shared home-made Chinese dishes, chit-chatted about Chinese soap opera plots, and shared information about the children and husbands they often left behind in their homeland.

Nancy conceded that although they frequently worked seven days a week, put in 12-hour days and didn’t have public holidays or vacation, the factory celebrated major Chinese holidays such as Chinese New Year, and the bosses usually allowed the workers to return home. It reminded her of her home in Taiwan.

Other perks included free white rice for lunch, and a mini bus that made an early morning run from Flushing’s Main Street to the factory, which saved the women the $2 bus ride.

“Nancy’s World”

Nancy Tan is not typical of many garment workers who are fresh off the boat from Mainland China and who entered the industry out of necessity. Nancy sought the job because she loved to sew, and as a teenager growing up in Taiwan it was the hot industry for women to work in.

Barely touching 5’1, the 50-year-old is cherubic, chatty and loves to smile, even if her optimism belies the hardships of her life. She was born in Taiwan, and she has been working at the factories since she was 13. Both of her parents died when she was 6, and she was raised by her grandmother.

In the 1960s the garment industry was booming in Taiwan, and seamstresses were in as great a demand as engineers in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. She joined the workforce to earn much needed money, but also because it was a hot industry.

“In Taiwan back then it was one of the few vocations that young girls could do, and they did it in hoards,” said Nancy’s daughter Judy, a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke College. “Her best friends did it.” As a little girl Judy accompanied her mother to the factory. She recalls that the factories were multi-storied enterprises with thousands of workers. There were lunch breaks, naptime, full benefits, free lunches in spacious cafeterias, and training programs for new recruits, and the women would often bring their children to work.

“I would go around and play with the fabrics and hide behind the piles of cloth. It was clean, it was pleasant, it was definitely happy,” recalls Judy, 23. “Her friends were there and they hung out. They would go out to dinner and I’d go along.”

Nancy also waxes nostalgic about the factory life back home. She said that the factories were well structured, well lit, and it was a reputable industry. In fact she said she was content with her life in Taiwan, but her husband – a printing operator at newspapers -- was attracted to America because he saw it as the land of opportunity.

In 1986 when the young family arrived in New York, Nancy said that not only was she shocked by the culture, but also by the conditions of the garment factories.

“There are no signs here that show that this is a factory, it is underground,” Nancy said. “And as a worker you would never just come in and start sewing as you do here. You start out and learn the ropes, learn how the whole process works, and then you finally sew,” she said.

She has worked in at least four factories since coming to America, and through experience she learned that a factory’s quality had a lot to do with the economics of the industry.

“The first factory was wonderful, and the boss was understanding and family oriented. We worked eight hour days, and there were benefits,” she said. “When I had my children, they even let me have time off.” A couple of years later the factory shut down, and Nancy speculated that it was because it wasn’t meeting its bottom line.

“They cared about workers too much, and factories that don’t compete head to head with other factories eventually shut down,” She said. The second factory that she worked in was atrocious because the pay was sporadic and skimmed workers on back pay, she remembered.

About four years ago a friend recommended her to the College Point factory. She said the biggest attraction to work here was the flexibility and chance to be with her children. Despite suffering from repetitive stress syndrome, she has not moved beyond the factory world because her English is limited.

It’s not as if Nancy hasn’t tried, her daughter said. When Judy was little she remembers that her mother would listen to English tapes at home and in the car.

She enrolled in free ESL classes, but quit because most of them were held during the day when she had to work.

“The classes don’t really help, and I don’t have any opportunity to practice it. At the factory everyone speaks Chinese, even the bosses. And we live in a place where I don’t need to learn much English to get around,” she said.

Nevertheless, Nancy’s language limitations prevent her from getting jobs with higher pay and better conditions, such as the bank teller and health care worker positions that are open to Chinese immigrants who can speak English.

“Every day I think about changing jobs, but I’ve almost given up hope. I have two kids and I have to take care of them,” she said, during the 30-minute lunch break that the women are permitted.

Judy agrees that her mother has stuck with the job because she needs to earn money for the family, and for the past four years the money has also gone to her college tuition.

“My mom was pretty constant. From 13 she has not changed a career, and the average American changes jobs at least 12 times,” Judy said. “For us she’s been the stability and the one constant thing that we had.” Nancy’s husband now works as a printing operator at a Chinese magazine in Manhattan’s Chinatown, but has changed jobs numerous times, and moved the family at least a half a dozen times. Like his wife, he returns home around 9 p.m. every night, at which time the couple eat dinner.

udy says her mother is like the corporate lawyers and business executives who struggle to balance work and family, but she is also a part of a generation of Chinese women who are expected to be stellar housewives.

Nancy’s 18-hour days include the garment factory job, shopping and cooking for the family, and helping the twins with their schoolwork. Although she seems positive, Judy said her mother often calls her up to vent her frustrations.

There are other problems that are spawned from the family’s economic hardships: the boys suffer from attention deficit syndrome, but the Tans can’t afford extra help for them. Nancy has problems communicating with her children’s teachers because of the language barrier, and the family struggles to pay the $1,200 monthly rent in their home in Bayside, Queens.

Judy said that her mother stayed for another reason that is less apparent to outsiders: she is used to this life.

“Change is so scary and when you’re in a place where you don’t speak the language, you’re going to hold on to what you know. It’s being a Chinese and Asian woman, and on top of that it’s also the financial and emotional security that she gains from staying,” the eloquent young woman said.

Nancy says that she has no other choice. Of course she doesn’t like the work. “Who does?” she asked. “But it’s kind of like a husband. When you marry him you don’t know about all the flaws, and then after you’re married the flaws start coming out, but you get used to it. And who knows, if you left him and found someone else, that person might not be any better.”

Judy comes home every two weeks to help her mother translate everything from her brothers’ report cards to phone bills. Being the first person in her family to attend college, she said that her mother’s job at the sweatshops makes her feel guilty so she tries to help as much as she can.

Recently she helped line up some job interviews for her mother too, but Nancy has received no offers. Nevertheless, her perception towards her mother’s work has changed. A straight A-student in high school, Judy said that when she was a teenager she was ashamed of her mother, and skirted the question when classmates asked what her mother did.

“I always danced around it and said she makes clothes and it’s kind of cool,” she said. “But she works at a sweatshop. I’ll say that now because I’m not ashamed of that, because you do what you got to do, and I know that the reasons are difficult to overcome.”

So for the past four years Nancy’s schedule has revolved around the sewing machine. On a brutally cold Thursday morning, two weeks before Christmas, she sat hunched over the machine swiftly working through the sleeves that would become the $48 T-shirt. She drowned out the buzz of the sewing machines by listening to her Walkman.

She is swift and meticulous with each stitch, unlike the new immigrants, many of whom have little experience sewing and literally learn on the job. And she secretly blames the newcomers for the declining factory conditions.

“They aren’t afraid of bitterness, they will work long hours. Even if they’ve had no experience sewing before, they will say they have experience,” said Nancy, nodding towards a saucer-eyed woman from Wenzhou named Ms. Li. “And they just stay and work until they have it all down.” Ms. Li left her husband and children back home so she could earn money. Despite the low wages in the United States, the average salary in China remains 1,000 RMB ($120) a month compared to the $1,000 a month they could earn here.

However, Nancy could empathize with why the women stayed.

There is a Chinese saying “mei ban fa” that translates into English as “it can’t be helped.” “Mei ban fa,” Nancy said, as she bundled her finished work. “We need to make a living.”

“Another Kind of Factory”

If Nancy Tan considers herself lucky it is because many of the factories in New York’s five boroughs are much worse.

At 98 Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown there is another kind of garment factory.

At this factory the 100 plus workers typically worked until midnight -- not that the outside world would know, since the windows were boarded up and the factory was located above a popular Chinese restaurant. Behind an iron door the environment was noisy, dusty and boxes of clothes swallowed up the floor space. There were no official lunch breaks and no place for workers to eat. The garment workers drifted in at different times. The workers, mostly women from Fujian, said that they were paid as little as 3 cents per piece, and they were cynical and bitter.

“This work is for old women, there’s no future in this work, why don’t you go work at a restaurant, you can earn more there,” she warned a prospective employee. “We get 2 or 3 cents per piece of clothing, and the pay isn’t even regular. We never know when we’re going to get paid. Sometimes we don’t get paid.”

At the back of the room were a heavily chipped wooden table, a refrigerator, and two sink-sized rice cookers. The women ate hurriedly at their sewing machines because they wanted to get back to their work. The factory was founded and run by a burly man named Bobby Cheung. On a weekday morning in late January, Cheung, who was dressed in a pin-striped suit, discussed his 28 years as a factory owner.

In 1975 the native Fujianese opened his first factory when he decided it was more lucrative than working in a restaurant. The factory grew from a dozen workers to the over 100 workers that are now packed into two floors. It has had clients such as “The Limited” and “Express,” although more recently the work has shifted to school uniforms.

Although Cheung said that the effects of globalization and Sept. 11 had eaten into profits, he said that he had no plans to leave the industry.

The factory has helped Cheung achieve the American dream. The savvy businessman’s spacious office – hidden in the back of the factory -- is decorated with elegant Chinese paintings, and pictures of his three grown children: one daughter is in medical school, his son will soon graduate from M.I.T., and a second daughter who graduated from New York University will soon help him run the factory.

Cheung said that he thought that his factory offered an ideal working environment, and insisted that it complied with the standards set by the U.S. Department of Labor. According to him the factory pays at least minimum wage, and the workers put in eight-hour days, and received overtime. In addition, he said many of the women earned much more than minimum wage because they were paid by piece; stitching a collar pays 30 cents and stitching each body of the garment pays 50 cents.

As with most factory owners, Cheung held a mysterious power over the workforce. On a recent weekday in mid-March, the workers – mostly older women in their 40s and 50s – giggled nervously when Cheung walked around to check on their work. They scattered when a reporter began taking pictures of them, but returned to their workstations when Cheung told them to sit still for the photo.

“The key to running a factory is maintaining good relations with the workers, and talking out problems,” he said. He also pointed out that the women were making much more money here than in their homeland.

“One has to know one’s own ability. If you can’t speak any English and this is all you can do, then this is the job you have,” he said. “I tell them that if they don’t like it they can go elsewhere. No one is forcing them to be here.”

Instead he felt that factory owners were unfairly portrayed in the media and that his hardships were rarely told. The monthly $6,500 rent was too high, and it was hard to make profits with the work hemorrhaging overseas, he said.

“We’d all like to see the industry get better, but we can’t change it alone and the American government doesn’t care,” Cheung said, as his eyes focused on a TV screen, which showed the black and white images of his workers that are filtered through security cameras installed in the factory.

“Being an owner is the worst job in the world. You face the pressure from all sides, workers, designers, the government, and the labor department. I’m always in the middle, I feel like it’s the hardest job in the world,” said Cheung, who is also president of the Greater Blouse, Shirt, & Undergarment Association Inc.

“Shrinking Unions”

The industry’s troubles are so deep-rooted that even unions are having a hard time addressing them. Over the past 20 years unions have lost their power, the number of unionized factories in New York falling because of the rise of illegal immigrants and globalization. In the 1970s and 1980s the majority of garment factory workers were members of the New York-based International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, which closed in 1985.

For example, in 1975 most factories were unionized, and workers typically worked five days a week from 9 to 5 p.m., and received full benefits including healthcare and insurance.

Turn the clock forward to 2004. According to May Y. Chen, vice president of New York-based UNITE!, which stands for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, an estimated one-third of the factories in the New York tri-state area remain unionized, and that number is falling. Although union factories are not perfect, workers received guaranteed benefits including overtime.

“We could argue how completely ineffective they are, but to be fair to the union they are an additional set of eyes and usually there is greater protection for workers,” said Charles Lai, the chief executive officer of New York-based Museum of the Chinese in the Americas, who has extensively researched the garment industry.

UNITE!, formed in 1995 with the merger between the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, is considered the major force for garment factory workers; it currently has 200,000 members in the United States and Canada. Chen, whose work focuses on Chinese garment workers, said that the key to improving factory conditions is keeping work in the United States. UNITE!’s initiatives have focused on getting workers more work so they can make a living. Recent projects include finding factories new clients such as school and military contracts, and targeting areas in the fashion industry that might offer more work such as sample rooms.

Chen admits that so far the progress has been slow, blaming that on the U.S. government.

“The government has clearly sent this industry abroad. Union workers are fighting an uphill battle to maintain the standards that we’ve fought for in the last 100 years as jobs are just evaporating,” said Chen, who has been involved in garment activism for more than a decade. “It’s hard to make things much better when you don’t have a joint support system.” Luke Brindle, a staff organizer for UNITE!, said another problem is that workers themselves need to speak up and want to initiate change. Very often new immigrants are too scared to speak up for fear they will be fired, he said.

Activist groups such as the Chinese Staff & Workers Association, based in New York’s Chinatown, are finding the task of improving factory conditions equally as frustrating. These days the volunteers – most of them ex-garment workers -- are helping the workers find new jobs in a dying industry.

Even the most outspoken association members said that change within the factories seemed unlikely. Mrs. Eng, a former garment worker who volunteers at the 30,000-member association, said that this generation of factory workers has it worse than she did.

“In the past few years it has become all messed up. There is no separation between work and rest. In the 1980s the factories were more structured,” she said in an interview at the association’s cramped offices.

The pint-sized woman spent almost 20 years working at union factories in Manhattan’s Chinatown before she retired in 1997, when she left the industry after winning a lawsuit against the factory where she worked, which closed overnight without paying its workers.

“Eileen Fisher Tries to Make A Difference”

So now it’s up to the companies to clean up the factories. Although designers and retailers are not legally responsible for the workers because the work is subcontracted, companies such as Eileen Fisher have increasingly felt the pressure to make sure that factory workers are treated well to maintain a politically correct image to please customers.

They have seen how public perception can damage a company’s reputation, and eat into profit; Nike and Liz Claiborne are just a handful of companies that came under scrutiny in the mid-1990s for poor working conditions in their factories.

Eileen Fisher’s staff stresses that corporate social responsibility is part of the company culture, and this includes trying to keep work in the United States.

The $160 million company keeps 30 percent of its manufacturing in the United States and contracts out 70 percent of the work to eight factories in China. It has eight factories in New York City, and one factory in New Jersey.

Fisher also prides herself on treating her 575 corporate staff well; in 2003 she was named one of the top CEOs for workers to work for by Fortune Small Business Magazine. At corporate headquarters in Irvington, New York, an upper-middle class town in Westchester County, there is a yoga studio, free clothes, tuition reimbursement and childcare, and every employee receives $1,000 a year to spend on services that promote their wellness.

Fisher has received accolades for being socially responsible by organizations such as Business for Social Responsibility, and the Social Venture Network, and the company releases an annual Social Accountability Progress Report. In 2003, the non-profit Trickle Up Program honored Fisher and touted her as a social responsibility advocate.

Five years ago Eileen Fisher created a corporate social responsibility department and staffed it with Amy Hall, the company’s manager of social responsibility. Hall said that since day one her job was to make sure that the factories complied with the standards set by the U.S. Department of Labor; she speaks Mandarin fluently and spent 10 years working at non-profits before joining Eileen Fisher.

In order to further legitimize its pro-worker image, the company adopted the SA8000 (Social Accountability 8000) standard in 1999, and has tried to push its suppliers to follow suit; the SA8000 standard is officially given out by Social Accountability International, a U.S.-based non-profit that focuses on improving the work conditions at companies.

Several years ago the company began sending its quality assurance staffers into the factories everyday to examine the clothing, and report on the conditions of the factories. A year and a half ago it hired an outside auditor to audit the company.

Nevertheless, Hall said that factories are hard to monitor. Common problems include missing fire extinguishers and blocked exit doors. However, she prefers to work with the factory owners on fixing the problems rather than finding new factories.

“We won’t just drop the factory and we want to really understand why it occurs. Sometimes it’s done consciously or unconsciously, and we want to find a solution, the whole point is to make sure the workers have been treated fairly,” Hall said.

Four years ago the company tried to launch a number of programs that try to prevent worker exploitation. In 2000 it started The Apparel Industry Compliance Program, and invited fellow designers to join. Members of the program compiled a list of worker-friendly factories, but there was lukewarm interest from the industry. In the end only eight designers joined, and the list contained a sparse 18 factories.

That same year the company started a program offering incentives to factories that ensured that workers would receive better benefits. They pushed their factories to offer full benefits to workers; the caveat was that the workers would have taxes deducted from their paychecks. The program flopped.

“The workers didn’t like the idea of paying taxes, but this is what happens when you work in the United States,” Hall said. “We knew early on that there was a big problem with workers not necessarily wanting to get paid on the books.”

Hall said that since the company subcontracts its work, it isn’t legally responsible for workers such as Nancy Tan. However, she added that the well being of factory workers was crucial to Eileen Fisher’s image as a socially conscious company.

“Of course there are two ways you could look at it. Legally we could walk away, but we definitely care. We want to see them being paid minimum wage or more, we’ve had a congenial relationship with the owners,” she said.

Nevertheless, the company cannot extend the benefits system to women like Nancy Tan and their garment workers in China because the work is subcontracted out.

“We don’t own the factories. In China we only take up 10 to 20 percent of their full capacity, and there could be 4 to 5 other brands that they are working for,” she said. “In New York City the percentage of capacity is higher.”

Hall said that pleasing Wall Street, consumers and also the factory workers was a tough balancing act. “There’s only so much that a company like us can do. The big season for us is the fall holiday, and the factories will take on as much work as they can possibly take and they won’t tell us if they are overworked. We can spread the work over a few factories, but a lot is out of our immediate control.”

“Myself As A Worker”

Ultimately it is hard to understand what it’s like working at a garment factory unless you do the work yourself, which is why last winter I put away my notebook and went looking for work at the hundreds of factories in New York’s Chinatowns. I found work at Eileen Fisher’s factory where Nancy Tan worked. For two days last December I folded T-shirts at a garment factory. My stint as a factory worker in what many people would label a "sweat shop,'' was short not because I chose to leave -- but because I was forced to.

I quickly learned that it was not an easy world to move into, let alone work in.

I am not your typical garment factory worker. I am not from the Chinese provinces of Fujian or Wenzhou, where many of the workers come from. I am a first-generation Chinese American, born in Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and Benjamin Franklin, and raised in Westchester County, New York, one of the most expensive and affluent suburbs in America.

At 28, I am a younger than many of the workers who are in their 30s or 40s, and I am single whereas most are married with kids. Unlike them I speak perfect English, and attend an Ivy League school. The most blue-collar work I have ever done was as a newspaper delivery girl when I was 14. The most sewing I ever did was in home economics class in junior high.

In my favor, of course, is that I am Chinese, can speak near-fluent Mandarin and a smattering of Cantonese, and I thrive on rice, so I was sure I could easily slip into this employment underworld and flourish.

After two days of hanging out and getting curious glimpses from the workers, I got my lucky break. One worker wasn’t feeling well, and I was recruited to step in.

The work began right away. There was no need for working papers, a resume, references or Social Security number. There was no interview, no job application, no physical and no discussion of how or when I would get paid. I needed to be at work at 9 a.m. sharp, there was a 30-minute lunch break, and the pay was $4 an hour, below the $5.15 minimum wage mandated by the U.S. Department of Labor.

And so it began as I was brought before an ominous mountain of stretchable white T-shirts, and introduced to Lao Zhong and Jimmy, one who was punching a $48 price tag into the labels, and the other slipping the shirts into plastic bags. Ms. Ling, one of the factory owners, showed me how to fold the T-shirts.

"See, it’s simple, no trick to it," she said as if anybody, but anybody could do it. Yes, I thought, this is a cinch -- but I was wrong.

The faster the man punched the faster I tried to fold, but it wasn't working.

While the T-shirts everybody else folded were perfect squares, mine were slanted at the ends and appeared sloppy. There were so many other things to remember too; I had to use a sticky roller and take off all extra lint and thread, I had to mark problem spots with color coded stickers, and I needed to separate the T-shirts according to shades of white and sizes.

After an hour of this frenzied activity, the complaints started flying: "You missed a thread!" Lao Zhong bellowed, as I nervously tried to speed through the stacks. "You’re folding the T-shirts too big, I can’t fit them into the bag!" Another annoyed worker chimed in: "Why are all of the shirts slanted? It looks like a triangle and not a square."

"Do you want me to fold them again?" I asked.

"No, forget about it, just go on to the next pile," he said with a shrug.

Three hours later at quitting time, I had a pair of very sore feet, and the sense that Ms. Ling wasn’t at all happy with my performance. Why did the others pick up sewing and folding so quickly? Was I just a pampered suburban girl? Was I stupid, and was I the uneducated one? The only thing I had to show for my long day of work was a stack of poorly folded T-shirts, and the scorn of my fellow folders, who treated me as if I were invisible. And my pay, of course, which came to $12.

On the wall just outside the office was an antiquated time card puncher. I took my card, punched in the date, and punched in the time and punched out. I said I would be back tomorrow at 9 a.m. Only later did I find out that the time card system was a hoax.

“There are two time cards,” Nancy said. “One is the one we punch in, the one that the Department of Labor sees. We never see the second time cards, and the bosses fill them out. They mark down our real hours and pay us according to that, and it’s never eight hours.” A sign was posted on the factory wall. “Please remember to punch in your time cards.” “It’s a joke but everyone does it,” Nancy said. “It’s all for show.” It was the same story on Day Two.

So it came as little surprise when Nancy delivered the bad news on the third day. I was no longer needed; the production deadline had been met. I was crushed and wondered why a smart and well-educated woman like myself couldn’t catch onto the art of folding shirts.

I wasn’t any better at sewing. Turn the clock back to mid November.

I hit the pavement in Chinatown’s Canal Street; through word of mouth I found out that one of the factories at 98 Mott Street was desperately looking for workers.

I rode up the tiny box-shaped elevator and was thrust into a landscape of sewing machines, and a forest of linens and cloth. A sea of faces looked up with awe as I walked across the floor to look for the boss, a harried Cantonese woman named Lai Fong.

“What can you do?” Fong asked me brashly. I told her that although I didn’t have much experience, I was a hard worker and fast learner.

“Okay, sit down, start working,” she said thrusting me in front of a machine. When I said that I wasn’t too familiar with the work, she ordered me to sit behind a veteran worker, a graying Fujianese woman, who continuously asked me why I was here.

She also didn’t mention how much the pay was, but the Fujianese woman warned me that it was generally 2 to 3 cents per piece.

I quickly calculated my potential weekly income, and came up with $6 a day—three subway tickets or three pretzels. Although the Fujianese woman was most likely exaggerating, these workers definitely made less than 38 cents a piece.

Geez, how did these people live? Wouldn’t they do better handing out fliers on the street or pushing dim sum carts? I returned the next day to face the wrath of Lai Fong, whose eyes bugged out when I asked her if she had scissors and thread. “You mean you didn’t bring anything, how did you think you were going to work!” she asked.

Within minutes I found out two things about garment factories. The first is that you are self-employed. You bring your own tools and you make your own hours. However, because you are paid per piece and not by the hour, the inclination is to sew as much as you can so you can earn as much as possible.

The second thing I learned is that getting hired means little because the reality is easy hire, easy fire. Whether or not one remained employed depended upon how quickly and meticulously one worked. The system automatically weeded out incompetent workers such as me.

The moment I sat down at the workstation I knew I’d be lost; I stared stupidly at the three spools of thread running from where the fluorescent lights hung.

The woman at the workstation next to me was from the Zhejiang province. She took pity on me when she caught me trying to figure out where the on and off switch was.

“If you don’t have any experience there’s no way you’re going to survive here. Maybe if they have any empty machine you can sit here and practice, but if you want to earn anything you have to learn,” she said.

And there was much to learn. There were two pedals that operated the machine. One pedal lifted the needle, and the other moved the needle forward. And one needed a steady hand, which I found out I didn’t have. I stepped on the pedal like a racecar driver and the stitches sped away, and veered off the cloth bunching up like a ball of yarn.

The Zhejiang woman shook her head and sighed.

“Sit here and practice,” she said, lending me a pair of scissors. I took cloth and fed the machine but my stitches looked like Frankenstein’s face; at this rate I wouldn’t earn anything.

It hit me how little these women were paid for such a labor-intensive job.

How did they survive? “It’s enough for food and transportation, it’s enough for a living, it’s enough to survive,” the Zhejiang woman said. The women were so frugal that they brought their own lunch, drank tea from jars, and subsisted on heaps of their one free benefit: rice.

Three hours later I had managed to jam up the machine that was now making an angry 'grrrrr' sound. I had no idea how to re-thread the needle so I sat and pouted. In the meantime, I was clearly a distraction to worker productivity because I was such an anomaly.

“Why are you here?” one woman asked. “You can’t possibly want to work in a factory.” Another woman snapped at me when I asked her how to re-do the stitches. “Why don’t you ask your Zhejianese auntie, she will help you,” she said sarcastically.

In actuality there are various jobs at a factory, and one of the easiest and lowest paying jobs is that of the thread cutter. After a day and a half of producing absolutely nothing I decided I wanted to give that a try.

“Hey, I can do that,” I said. The women laughed; I had gone from colleague to entertainment. “It’s only for old women, they do that,” the Fujianese woman said. “No, I can do that, it’s easier than sewing and I could definitely do the work,” I said. Little did I know that there was no such thing as compromise or negotiation in a garment factory.

I walked across the chaotic landscape to Ms. Fong, who was barking orders at a man who was struggling with the ironing presses that let out angry bursts of steam.

“What do you want?” she snapped

“I was just thinking that I could do another job instead of sew, like cut thread, I’d be really fast at that,” I said. Her eyes grew wide and were as cold as a shark’s.

“Why don’t you just leave us alone and get out of here. If you can’t sew then you can’t do anything else,” she said, and stalked away. I was hurt, hurt that the owners simply didn’t care. She never even talked about how much I’d be paid, when I’d be paid, and if someone just sat down with me and gave me even an hour of training I would have at least gotten the basics down.

I returned to the workstation and packed my belongings up.

“Hey, hey where are you going?” the Fujianese woman asked. “If you want to survive here you need to practice with the machines.” I said I was going out to buy scissors, waited for the antiquated elevator to arrive, and never returned. I wanted to put the rejection and this frightening world behind me.

Epilogue

In late March I had a sudden itch to return to College Point. Strangely, I missed the repetitive, but reassuring rhythms of factory life. The work was hard on the body, but also predictable and mind numbing. As a well-educated and ambitious woman I often struggled to find a balance between work and life, and these women seemed to have both.

So maybe the stitching women settled for what some might perceive as a second-rate life, but they were also satisfied. The insular factory life shielded them from the pressures and temptations of the outside world.

I missed the sisterhood that emerged from shared lunches, and shared gossip. I miss the community within that dismal looking factory. I also have a stubborn streak and am sometimes tempted to give T-shirt folding another try.

Nevertheless, I decided to cut my ties and not go back. When I closed my eyes I saw the workers and factory again and heard the angry and endless buzz of the sewing machines. I was also haunted by Nancy’s words, “we have almost given up on hope,” and I was left wondering if she would forever be stuck in this dying industry.

Perhaps there was hope.

On Feb. 27, Eileen Fisher launched surveillance on the College Point factory after being tipped off that there were wage abuses.

“That’s not acceptable, and if that was the case we wouldn’t want to be involved with the factory,” Amy Hall said, adding that the company had problems with the College Point factory in the past. “It’s perfectly reasonable and likely that the factory is falsifying their payroll records, and significantly reduces their wages. Honestly, we’ve not ever dropped a factory because of compliance issues, but if we find out it is true we will move production elsewhere.”

When I asked why social responsibility was so important to the company, Hall said: “For our company it’s really who we are. We were founded with these values, and it’s part of our fabric. Eileen personally recognizes the value of everyone who works in the supply chain, and that without them we wouldn’t have a product and we wouldn’t have a company.”

In the meantime, Nancy and her fellow garment workers would continue churning out the garments. It would soon be the start of another season, and with it the arrival of the fall collection.