ABSTRACT
On a day in late June, 1995, in Miami Beach, Florida, eighteen-year-old Judith Viera stepped up to the podium at the founding convention of UNITE!, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, to tell her story. Viera told the delegates attending the convention: “We need your help.…We want to have rights where we aren’t abused anymore and aren’t threatened with job loss for being in the union. We want to be able to work in the day so we can go to school at night. We want the bosses to stop treating pregnant women badly.” 1 Viera described her co-workers’ struggles to form a union at the factory where armed guards denied entry to anyone without an identification card. The men who worked as guards, Viera said, carried out full body searches of those they did allow to enter, the majority of whom were women between the ages of fifteen and thirty years old. Viera discussed the regimen of severely limited bathroom visits and forced birth control at Mandarin International, a factory producing clothing for the U.S. market, subcontracted by companies such as the Gap, J.C. Penney, and Eddie Bauer. She also told delegates about the mass firing of more than 300 Mandarin workers and a lockout of over 5,000 garment workers at the San Marcos Free Trade Zone after their most recent attempt to form a union that was recognized by the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor. 2
