Holding up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92

Abstract

Based on many years of interviews, activist involvement, and living with Chinese women garment workers in New York City, this book aims to study “the multiple intersecting forces that have shaped the lives and perceptions of Chinese women garment workers in New York City.” It is perhaps the most evocative depiction of the daily lives of Chinese workers in the United States since Paul Siu's 1953 dissertation, The Chinese Laundryman (published 1987). Through long quotations and sensitive accounts of interpersonal relationships, Xiao-lan Bao offers a nuanced picture of transformations in personal and family life. Particularly successful are the portrayals of women's growing financial and emotional centrality in the family and of relations among Chinese women born in different parts of the world, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. The first section recounts the history of the New York garment industry and the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union since the nineteenth century. It shows the competitive pressures that led to union complicity with shop owners in the exploitation of cheap labor to help the industry survive on a thin margin. The second section presents material gained from participant observation that illustrates the complex identities of Chinese women garment workers, as shaped by family, place of birth, time of migration, job, ethnicity, and cultural background (arguing that this latter factor is most often ignored in labor histories). The third section focuses on the Chinese garment worker strike of 1982, as a moment when diverse social interests coalesced and at the same time stood out in clear relief against each other. It especially emphasizes the owners' calls for ethnic solidarity as a way to undermine class-based demands. The conclusion offers several generalizations of the midlevel structural organization of the Chinese garment industry, presented as factors that contribute to and undermine both worker solidarity and owner exploitation.