From El Monte to SB 62

Before dawn on August 2, 1995, a task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided a fenced apartment complex in El Monte, a small city near Los Angeles. Inside were seventy-two Thai garment workers, most of them women, held behind razor wire and armed guards, some for as long as seven years, sewing up to sixteen hours a day for roughly 69 cents an hour to repay smuggling debts. The clothes they made were finished at a front shop downtown staffed by Latino workers and delivered to major retailers and manufacturers. In February 1996, the eight operators pleaded guilty to federal charges including conspiracy and involuntary servitude. Represented by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, the workers sued not only their captors but the companies that had ordered the garments; settlements with retailers and manufacturers including Mervyn's and Montgomery Ward eventually exceeded $4 million, the first time garment workers in federal court had held such companies responsible for their contractor. El Monte was extreme but not isolated: in 1995 Los Angeles had more than four thousand contract shops employing about 100,000 people, and the piece-rate system that dominated the trade was routinely used to pay below the minimum wage. On September 27, 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senator María Elena Durazo's Garment Worker Protection Act, SB 62. Effective January 1, 2022, it banned piece rates in California garment work and made brands jointly and severally liable for wages owed by contractors at any level of the chain.