Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Celebrates Workers’ Struggle for Justice

by James Parks, May 6, 2007

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and the union movement is highlighting the millions of Asian Pacific American workers who are toiling and struggling in the fields, behind cash registers, on assembly lines and on shop floors to make a better life for themselves and their families.

Gloria Caoile, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), an AFL-CIO constituency group, says generations of Asian Pacific American workers have fought for justice in this country:

From the days of organizing in the sugar plantations of Hawaii, the canneries of Alaska, the agricultural fields of California and now organizing in the garment shops of New York, the hospitals of Chicago, the hotels, restaurants and taxis of Las Vegas, we honor our Asian Pacific American brothers and sisters who keep alive union ideals of fighting for social justice and economic opportunities.

As part of the observance, Journey for Justice, 223 years of APA Labor History in the Puget Sound, is on display in the lobby of AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C. The APALA’s Seattle chapter and the Evergreen State College produced the exhibit.

It features portraits and stories of Puget Sound workers fighting for their rights and their fair share of the American Dream. Workers such as David Yao, who along with his co-workers at a private mail-processing facility sought and won a union with the Postal Workers. Yao says:

It was a low-wage place, but I guess the thing that made a real difference was just the lack of respect that management had toward the people who worked there. The workers on the floor were mostly Filipino or Samoan or various Asian ethnicities, and there was just a lot of ways in which [management] talked down to them. They would just talk really loud and slow at people like they were dumb—the way the managers would talk to some of the workers.

Or Sun Watkins, a Washington state employee, who says:

I think every worker needs a union to protect their basic rights and needs, and the only means to gain that is through the union. What else is out there?

Later this month, Kent Wong, director of the University of California Los Angeles Center for Labor Research and Education, will discuss the book, Sweatshop Slaves: Asian Americans in the Garment Industry, at the AFL-CIO here in Washington, D.C.

Written by Wong and students at the center, Sweatshop Slaves captures the role of Asian American workers in the sweatshop industry. It exposes the structure and organization of the industry, the history of sweatshops, the organizations and organizing campaigns that have worked to eradicate sweatshops and brief oral histories of key leaders in the movement.

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