Since our founding in 1998, global corporations have grown dramatically in power and industrial diversity to the point where they now control the labor standards in the industries where most low wage workers are employed in both the United States and Mexico.  Additionally, institutional infrastructures that play a role in the extent to which we have control over our own lives, such as banks, transportation systems, and prisons are also rapidly coming under the control of global corporations.

Written by Enlace Co-Director Joann Lo, published in Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, Fall 2006

Chicana_Latina_Studies_Journal_article_Fall_2006.pdf

A Book Featuring:
Joann Lo, Co-Director of Enlace; Kimi Lee, director of Enlace member Garment Worker Center; and others

Support Enlace!  Buy the book for only $10 (plus $5 for shipping and handling--or you can pick up the book at our L.A. office)!  Please email us at to place your order.

Sweatshop Slaves: Asian Americans in the Garment Industry is the first student publication to capture the role of Asian American workers in the sweatshop industry, highlighting 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. There is also special coverage of the infamous El Monte sweatshop, where seventy-two Asian American workers were freed from modern-day slavery in 1995.  The book is in English only.

For people who believe a viable movement for progressive social change requires the active participation of organized workers, it is alarming that fewer than 6% of the working poor in the U.S. are organized into unions.  Though this organizing need is urgent, most unions, with a few notable exceptions, don’t know how to structure themselves to attract these workers to become members.

Read the full article published by Social Policy Magazine (Summer 2005) by clicking here.

Read the exciting new article published in the IRC´s Citizen Action in the Americas online journal! Or download the printable PDF version.

In 1995 and 1996, I toured the United States and Mexico to explore the need and potential for collaborative efforts among multi-racial, multi-cultural, community-based low-wage worker organizing groups. I believed that many of the issues and problems we address in organizing low-wage workers are common to multi-cultural and low-wage communities everywhere.

It is true, as Stephen Lerner says, that a just society depends on a powerful workers’ movement driven by collective organization. And yes, non-violent civil disobedience is a necessary element of the movement: Without that intensity of commitment to the cause, there is no convincing evidence of movement. Every successful social movement has employed non-violent civil disobedience to change unfair rules that have unjustly bound people. Andale. 

The following outline serves as a user-friendly evaluation guideline for organizations focused on base building as the means to achieve just social change.