Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Rosa Calvillo. “She’s always been doing some kind of agitating.”

Some of the best men's suits in the country are made at a factory in Chula Vista called American Fashion. Expertly tailored from imported wools and silks, these suits retail for between $800 and $1000.

Now they are asked to make the suits in batches as small as 10 or 20.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

They are marketed under a variety of brand names, including V-2 by Gianni Versace, Terzo, Uno Moda, Louis Roth, Ratner, Le Baron, Nick Hilton, and Jayne Barnes at such elegant department stores as Neiman-Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Nordstrom. American Fashion, formerly called Ratner, has been in business for almost 75 years.

In 1987 there were about 15 menswear factories in California. Now there is one — American Fashion.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

During its heyday in the mid-1970s, 2500 people worked there. But by the mid-1980s, the cheaper labor and efficient manufacturing of foreign competitors (including foreign subsidiaries of American manufacturers) had devastated the domestic clothing industry.

Fabric warehouse. Where they had once worked almost exclusively with wool, they now had to cope with cashmere, Ultrasuede, and hard-to-handle, filmy silks.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Garment factories in the U.S. closed by the hundreds in the 1980s, and men’s suit manufacturers were no exception. In 1987 there were about 15 menswear factories in California. Now there is one — American Fashion — with a work force of only 473 people.

Barbara Mejia. Mejia told Calvillo there was no job available for her anymore.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

The story of how American Fashion survived is one of solid management, to be sure, but it is one of struggle and sacrifice on the part of its workers. The company’s massive restructuring undertaken to remain competitive meant the elimination of many old manufacturing methods and the creation of many new ones. These changes, begun around 1989 and still going on, have taken their toll, especially on older workers who had been doing the same tasks for 20 or 30 years.

“If they close the company, it won’t be because of us."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Workers at American Fashion, like most in the garment industry, are paid by the piece. Since they could not perform new and constantly changing tasks as quickly as old ones, many American Fashion employees saw their piece rate wages drop by almost $2 an hour, down to $5 or $4 or even less.

Rick Bunch on Channel 39: “We gave the TV crew an hour-and-a-half tour of the factory.”

And as a generation of workers, primarily Mexican-American women, reach retirement age, they face the reality of garment work in any country: After decades of backbreaking labor, low pay, myriad health problems, and few benefits, they receive a minimal pension. An average pension for an American Fashion worker with 25 years on the job is about $250 a month. A 25-year employee who retires early or who has worked less than full time some years may get less than half that amount.

The company laid off five workers who could not keep up.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

A group of about 20 current and former American Fashion workers have come together under the leadership of a 21-year employee at the plant, 54-year-old Rosa Calvillo, to try to remedy what they perceive to be this unjust and unfair treatment. Their complaints range from health and safety to wage, benefit, seniority, and retirement issues. Calvillo’s group is angry not only at company management, but at the union that is supposed to protect and defend them, the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union. The union, they say, has “sold out” to management on piece rates, raises, and other issues, in its desire to help keep American Fashion in business.

For its part, the union sides with company management in considering these complaints baseless. Both American Fashion personnel manager Rick Bunch and the union’s district manager Barbara Mejia call Rosa Calvillo a “troublemaker.”

“I’ve known Rosa 25 years,” said Bunch, a young-looking 49-year-old who, like many employees, has worked at American Fashion more than 20 years. “She’s always been doing some kind of agitating.”

Calvillo’s agitating did not become disruptive until the last three years or so, after the company reorganization began. Since that time, she and her group have enlisted the aid of a San Diego attorney, an environmental group, and a TV station to help press their cause. Calvillo or her supporters have called inspectors from the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal-OSHA) and other inspectors from the county and city to investigate conditions at the plant. She has hired a lawyer to investigate the possibility of suing the union for violating its own rules.

According to Barbara Mejia, “Rosa Calvillo’s agenda is getting rid of the union and causing that factory to close down." Mejia, 45, has short blond hair and wears oversized glasses. “She might get her wish if she keeps it up.”

Calvillo responded, “If they close the company, it won’t be because of us. They will just use us as an excuse. They intimidate people by saying things like that. They are trying to scare people off from joining with us."

Whether or not Calvillo’s group succeeds in getting better treatment for American Fashion workers, the problems they describe are endemic in the garment industry. Clothing manufacturing is an intensely competitive, low-technology business whose several discrete operations — cutting, sewing, and finishing — can be divided easily among different regions, countries, and continents, wherever labor is cheapest. Many garment workers in the United States are immigrant women and, in the Third World, teenage girls, both easily exploited groups. Although a few multinational firms dominate the industry, manufacturing is often farmed out to subcontractors that must compete with non-union, illegal sweatshop operations and Third World laborers. All these factors serve to keep wages low and worker demands in check; the threat of companies closing or moving is ever-present. Given these economic realities, it would seem Calvillo’s group is fighting an uphill battle. Nevertheless, some progress eventually may be made, if not in time for Calvillo’s group to benefit, then for the next generation of workers at American Fashion.

In 1987 Rosa Calvillo had worked for Ratner — as the company was then called — for 16 years. She was in the area of the factory known as the “pant shop,” sewing zipper plackets on trousers. She made $6.12 an hour, about average for a U.S. garment worker at the time, and, in today’s economic climate, about what an immigrant with little formal education and limited English can expect. Calvillo worked alongside old friends, and she liked her job.

But that year Ratner was bought by 35-year-old Steve Kurtznian, whose father owned Los Angeles-based Le Baron, also a men’s suit manufacturer. Over the next few years, the Kurtzmans closed Le Baron, moved some of its equipment and workers to Chula Vista, and renamed the new company American Fashion. (The Ratner manufacturing operations in downtown San Diego were gradually consolidated at Chula Vista as well.) At the same time, in order to supply retailers with the European-style suits that customers were demanding, Steve Kurtzman entered a joint-venture agreement with Zengina, an Italian manufacturer based in Zurich. They took Zengina’s designs and manufacturing techniques and began to apply them at American Fashion.

These changes were hard on workers. Where before they had made suits in batches of 10- or 20,000, they now were asked to make them in batches as small as 10 or 20. Previously, they had made suits of similar styles but now had to sew constantly changing cuts and designs. Where they had once worked almost exclusively with wool, they now had to cope with a variety of fabrics, including cashmere, Ultrasuede, and hard-to-handle, filmy silks. Dozens of operations were eliminated or substantially modified, and while no one lost his job (union rules prevent the company from firing workers), many employees had to change jobs and locations within the factory. All of these changes caused a decline in the speed with which workers did their jobs, and consequently, a decline in wages. The piece rates changed constantly as well, as the union and company haggled over how long it should take to do a certain task. Moreover, in order to help the company stay afloat while the restructuring went on, the union agreed to delay indefinitely a scheduled 45-cents-an-hour wage increase.

In the garment industry, unions have traditionally had a powerful role in managing the work force, which somewhat compensates for the low wages. Workers can not be fired, nor can they be made to work overtime, without union approval. The union also helps determine which workers do which jobs. The result is a paternalistic relationship between the union and the workers, who look to the union, rather than the company, to solve problems and in turn blame the union rather than the company when problems are unresolved.

One of the workers who found her job eliminated in the restructuring was Rosa Calvillo. The company decided it was more efficient to press the fly plackets in place, rather than sew them, as Calvillo had done for many years. The union offered Calvillo a number of other jobs, including a higher-paid position in the cutting room (“People are dying to get in over there,” said the union’s Mejia), but Calvillo didn’t want to leave her friends. She asked if she could replace a young woman who had recently begun working in the pant shop, but was told that the girl had been doing that job for more than 30 days and so had seniority at the position. Frustrated and angry, Calvillo went out on disability because of a wrist problem. When she was cleared to return to the shop on “light duty,” she worked for a while in the “swatches” department, making little booklets of fabric sample? for the salesmen to carry. But in August of last year, Mejia told Calvillo there was no job available for her anymore. Since that time, Calvillo said, she’s been waiting to return to work, but they won’t call her back. “When I asked Barbara when I could come back, she said, ‘Talk to your lawyer.’ ”

While Calvillo was having her own problems, she began collecting the grievances of co-workers as well. One friend of Calvillo’s, Carmen Juarez, lost her seniority after being on layoff for a year. Another, Aurora Castro, felt she deserved to be on permanent disability for the respiratory ailment she said was caused by breathing dust, fibers, and fumes in the shop for 25 years. American Fashion’s insurance company balked at paying her claim, arguing that the cause of her illness wasn’t clear. Other workers complained of back, neck, and wrist problems, and difficulty getting adequate workers’ compensation for these injuries. One longtime employee, Rufina Flores, did receive permanent disability because of her back and neck pain but says she is unhappy with the $77 a week she receives. Another woman, Adela Borboa, saw her piece rate go down to $3.53 an hour just before she took early retirement. After 22 years at the factory, Borboa receives a monthly pension of $62.63.

In addition to these problems, Calvillo has compiled a list of 16 American Fashion employees who either have cancer or have recently died from it. Calvillo suspects something in the air at the factory may be causing it. She said one woman who worked near the “perc” station (per-chlorethylene, a dry-cleaning solution used to spot-clean suits before shipping) died of lung cancer, “and she never smoked.”

Calvillo has other complaints as well. The front offices at the factory are air-conditioned, but the shop floor is not. On summer days, temperatures inside the plant can reach 120 degrees. There are many large fans on the factory floor, but Calvillo said they just circulate the heat, steam, and fibers from the pressing and cutting operations. Workers sit on hard, metal, nonadjustable chairs with straight backs; “We’ve had the same chairs for 20 years,” said Calvillo. The sewing machine tables are similarly old and non-adjustable.

Calvillo is also annoyed that union representative Mejia cannot speak Spanish. (Mejia is an Anglo from New York who got her Spanish surname through marriage.) At least two-thirds of the workers at American Fashion are, like Calvillo, Mexican immigrants who speak little or no English. “They send someone who cannot even talk to the people,” Calvillo said.

Armed with these grievances, Calvillo circulated a petition to decertify the union. When that failed, 12 of the 20 disgruntled workers in her group engaged a lawyer, Bernard Lafer, to help settle their workers’ compensation claims. They also spoke to Jose Bravo of San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition, who agreed to investigate and to meet with union and company officials about the health and safety situation at the plant. Finally, Calvillo’s group met with a reporter from KNSD, Channel 39, who aired their allegations on the night of October 30, 1992 in a three-part series called “Toxic Workplaces.” Barbara Mejia and Rick Bunch are more angry at the TV station’s handling of the allegations than they are at Calvillo and her group for making them. “We can’t blame Rosa [Calvillo] for being irrational or for the others for being frightened,” Barbara Mejia said. “But we can blame Channel 39 for irresponsible reporting.” The TV station sensationalized and distorted the charges, Mejia and Bunch contend, in order to make it appear that American Fashion workers are in grave danger. “We gave [the TV crew] an hour-and-a-half tour of the factory,” Bunch said, “and they saw for themselves that this is not a toxic workplace.’’

American Fashion occupies a 144,000-square-foot warehouse on L Street in a Chula Vista industrial park just east of I-5. The factory floor is wide open, like an airplane hangar. Rows of fluorescent lights hang about 15 feet over the workers’ heads, suspended from the ceiling on long cords. On one side of the building, the cutters — here, as in most other garment factories, they are all men — work with power saws on 60-foot-long tables. (Cutters are traditionally the highest-paid garment workers. They make up to $14 or $15 an hour. Pressers make about $7 or $8 an hour; and seamstresses, the majority of the workers, make the least.)

In the middle of the floor, row after row of seamstresses —nearly all of them women — sit hunched over their machines, working on the bundles of suit pieces they take from carts in the aisles. The pressers — both men and women — work at dozens of stations around the factory floor, interspersed among the sewers and along the east wall, where racks of suits await final finishing and pressing before shipment. The steam rises from the pressing machines, which look like rounded ironing boards with metal lids, as the operators open and close them hundreds of times a day. Some of the seamstresses work just a few feet from these pressing machines.

A walk around the factory floor offers an indication why, despite the apparent validity of many of their complaints, Calvillo’s group has had trouble rallying other American Fashion workers to their cause. On one morning a couple of months ago, when Barbara Mejia was visiting from Los Angeles, a small group of seamstresses approached her and announced that they could not see what they were doing under the safety guards recently installed on their machines. A cluster of onlookers gathered around while Mejia, a union shop steward, and a company mechanic looked at the women’s machines. The mechanic determined that the guards had been improperly installed. He fixed them, and the women went back to work. A few moments later, other seamstresses complained to Mejia that the staples the factory uses in place of pins were cutting their fingers. Mejia went to the woman who does the stapling and asked her to make sure the staples were properly closed. Over and over, all morning long, workers asked Mejia to solve their problems, both personal (“I have to leave for a dentist appointment”) and professional (“My machine isn’t working”). Thus, while they may not be entirely satisfied with their working conditions, most American Fashion employees apparently feel that they must look to the union to remedy their complaints.

Another obstacle to Calvillo’s gaining support is the increasingly varied numbers of immigrant groups working at the factory. Younger Asian immigrants are being hired to replace the retiring Mexican immigrants. The different nationalities represented at the factory now include Vietnamese, Japanese, Cambodian, German, Portuguese, and Yugoslavian, in addition to various Central and South American countries. While most employees are still Spanish-speaking, the growing presence of immigrants from other countries tends to divide workers and dilutes the pressure to have Spanish-speaking union representatives.

“I’m sick of everything having to be repeated in both Spanish and English,” complained one Vietnamese woman who has worked at the plant many years. “When I came here, I had to learn English. Why don’t they? I don’t even like to go to union meetings anymore because they talk too much in Spanish.’’

Calvillo’s most serious charges center on safety and health issues at the plant, and this is what the Environmental Health Coalition and the state, county and city investigators are most concerned with as well. Bunch and Mejia insist that the plant is safe, and so far the official investigations mostly support their contention.

On the morning that the Channel 39 crew came to film the interior of the American Fashion plant, a building inspector, an inspector from the Chula Vista Fire Department, and an inspector from the San Diego County Hazardous Materials Management Division showed up as well. “We were set up by the Environmental Health Coalition,” Bunch suspects, adding that the company handled the “ambush” successfully. All the violations found were minor, Bunch said, and no fines were levied.

In 1990 an anonymous call to Cal-OSHA brought an inspection from that agency as well. The inspector found one major violation — exposed gears on an old folding machine that had been brought from Los Angeles — and eight minor ones, including unlabeled secondary containers of perc handled by workers. American Fashion was fined S750 and remedied the problems. Since then, the company has been inspected by two industrial hygienists from insurance companies and one from the union. One of the insurance company inspectors “laughed all the way through the building,” Bunch said, meaning that, in this man’s view, the allegations of unsafe conditions were baseless.

An inspector from the union’s New York office, Charles Austin, visited the plant during the first week of December 1992 and tested the air and workers around the perc station for contaminants. Austin said one employee he tested reported having headaches and breathing problems after being around perc for eight hours, but the test results were all negative. In 1991, Cal-OSHA also tested for perc and found no exposure above permissible limits.

Workers in the “fusibles” department, where interfacing is pressed onto the cut fabric, have complained of fiber particles in the air. According to Austin, insurance company tests for dust in that area would have picked up fiber particles as well, and none were found. Mejia said the union plans to study ways to improve ventilation at the plant, although it will not press for the installation of air conditioning. “We don’t want to injure the company and put them out of business,” she said. On days when it gets too hot, Mejia explained, the workers start humming in unison, which is taken as a sign for the company to shut down for the rest of the day.

As for the claims of cancer, Austin said he doubts that something in the air at the plant could be causing it. “Cancer is not common in this type of industry,” he said. “In textiles, where people work with dyes, bladder and throat cancer are hazards. But not in clothing manufacture.” Mejia added that some of those who died recently of lung cancer were smokers, and in any case, she does not think the number of American Fashion employees dying of cancer are out of proportion with the general population.

Mejia is less sure about the respiratory illnesses claimed by Aurora Castro and others. “Who knows?” she said. “Someone has worked here for 25, 30 years, who knows what they could have been exposed to?” Castro has a report from one doctor recommended by her attorney claiming that her disease was caused by breathing dust and fibers at work. But when asked by the TV reporter, Castro’s insurance company physician said he could not confirm that her job was responsible.

American Fashion’s workers compensation carrier has refused to pay Castro’s claim, arguing that she never, in all her years of working at the plant and serving on various union committees, complained about breathing problems. Castro said she did complain, and in any case, she is sick now and deserves compensation. American Fashion changed workers’ comp carriers last year, but Castro’s battle with the previous carrier, Transamerica, goes on. Bunch conceded that some workers may not have gotten the “best service” from Transamerica because “[Transamerica] was flooded with Rosa [CalvilloJ’s people, which put them under the assumption that the claims were frauds.”

One valid complaint concerns the hard, metal, nonadjustable chairs. The union’s Charles Austin said “ergonomic issues” — tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and back problems — are common in the garment industry, and after years on the job, almost all workers suffer these problems to varying degrees. The insurance company appears more willing to pay these types of claims. As some in Calvillo’s group have discovered, however, disability payments, like pensions and wages, are low.

Bunch said he is trying to remedy the ergonomic issues. He said he plans to apply for a state grant to buy padded, adjustable draftsman’s chairs at a cost of $150 each, and he recently put down thick rubber mats for workers who have to stand at the pressing and cutting stations. In the meantime, most workers have brought in their own cushions and pillows to sit on, and Mejia said insurance has covered the orthopedic shoes needed by several pressers.

In January, Gloria Borrello, a ergonomic trainer sent by the union from New York, spent three days in the factory going from machine to machine and talking to the workers individually. Borrello noted that, in addition to new chairs, workers need training in how to sit properly and how to avoid repetitive-motion injuries. She also saw that they needed better lighting on their machines, and that they were crowded too close together. Borrello said the management seemed willing to cooperate on making these changes, and she plans to return to the factory in June to conduct her training sessions.

Borrello also found that, on the whole, employees she spoke with were reluctant to complain. She talked to one woman who was working with an old pressing machine that lacked a steel guard. The woman told Borrello she had to use this machine because the new one, with a guard, was broken. Borrello told her the old machine was dangerous. “I know,” the woman answered. “Two years ago it came down on me and broke my arm.” The woman had apparently never mentioned this before to anyone in authority,

While American Fashion appears to be making efforts to solve the ergonomic problems at the factory, solving the wage issue and the associated problems of low disability and pension payments won’t be as easy. Low wages are a structural problem in the garment industry, and given the increasing global competition, it is unlikely that wages will go up in the near future. One suggestion for making wages at least more consistent involves doing away with the piece rate system. Austin said some Levi’s factories are experimenting with “modular management,” in which small groups of workers make garments for an hourly wage. The goal is to enable workers to learn different jobs, take on more responsibility for quality, and be part of a team. The greater control offers “psychological upliftment,” in Austin’s words, in addition to more mutual support among workers and freedom from wildly fluctuating piece rates.

Workers at American Fashion would never approve such a system, argued Bunch, because they like the greater personal incentive of the piece rate system. “Besides,” Bunch added, “if we adopted time work, we’d probably go out of business because efficiency would drop to about 60 or 70 percent of what it is.” It seems that the piece rate system, both despite and because of its harshness, will remain a fixture at American Fashion for now.

The unequal effects of the piece rate system can be seen in the varying wages that resulted from the company’s restructuring. While a few younger, faster workers are making more now than they did before, and others are gradually making Barbara Mejia more as they learn the new tasks, some people have apparently not been able to adjust. Mejia said that while in the past there were fewer than 10 people making less than S5 an hour, recently she found between 60 and 70 people earning that amount. In an effort to get most of the wages back up over $5 an hour, the company laid off five workers who simply could not keep up and were slowing down the others.

In Mejia’s view, most of the problems cited by Calvillo’s group stem from generational shifts at the plant — older workers not being able to adjust to the changes — and from Calvillo’s personal dislike of her. Mejia said she standardized the seniority system a few years ago, and as a result, several of Calvillo’s friends lost their seniority. Mejia said union rules dictate that these women lose seniority because they had taken supervisory positions or layoffs; but ever since then, Mejia believes, Calvillo’s had it in for her. Mejia said she has repeatedly tried to get Calvillo to work within the union, but Calvillo has refused. “All she wants is her old job back,” Mejia said. “She told the shop steward, ‘If I get my old job back, all these problems will stop.’ ” Calvillo admits that regaining her job will help her but adds that it will do nothing to improve conditions for others in the shop.

Since Calvillo can’t have her old job back — nor, it appears, any job — and since the claims of her group are in litigation, Calvillo will certainly continue agitating for a while. Jose Bravo of the Environmental Health Coalition said he also plans to keep the pressure on the company to improve health and safety conditions. Given the fact that numerous tests and inspections have failed to turn up any serious health hazards in the plant, it’s doubtful, however, that worker complaints will have much effect on the way American Fashion does business, except, perhaps, to get workers better chairs and some ergonomic training.

Nevertheless, problems at the plant do go beyond the individual complaints of those in Calvillo’s group. Mejia concedes that the seniority system will need to be looked at again. The problem of the open staples has not been satisfactorily resolved; workers are still being pricked by partially dosed staples. And piece rates are an ongoing struggle. Mejia said some workers deliberately slow down or engage in sabotage, such as tearing off the tickets that identify the piece rates on each bundle of fabric. These actions interfere with the efficiency of other workers and are done in the hopes of making the company raise the piece rate (to make it appear as if it takes more time to do the job than the current rate allows). Mejia said she has had to move some of the newer, younger workers away from employees who were slowing them down.

Like breaking your arm and not telling anyone, sabotage is a sign that at least some workers are disaffected and do not believe the union can help them. They can’t speak out because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Instead, they act out their anger and frustration in quiet, subtle ways that are supposed to harm the company, but end up harming themselves and other workers as well. The sacrifices these workers made to keep American Fashion in business have clearly shaken their faith in both the company and the union.

Given the problems, it’s worth asking how committed the owner is to keeping this factory open in San Diego. Workers are well aware that their jobs could disappear at any moment. Kick Bunch, however, insists that American Fashion can’t move to a lower-wage haven like Mexico because “they can’t do down there what we do here. They don’t have the designers, the technicians, or the supervisors. It takes years to build the kind of quality team we have here.”

According to Bunch, American Fashion has not made a profit since the restructuring began. But he believes the company is now poised to begin making money, especially if the recession ends. He said he hopes to give the workers half their promised 45-cent raise in June and the other half in September. Even if he doesn’t, few workers will quit.

“Where else can someone with little education, few skills, and no English find a job?” asked Barbara Mejia. “If this place closed, these people would have nowhere to go.”

Mejia is probably right. But Jose Bravo of the Environmental Health Coalition has a word for this lack of alternatives. He calls it economic extortion.