Memory in Cloth
Safety and Solidarity for New York City Garment Workers
1980s. Courtesy of Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation, Cornell University.
Workers helping workers in a Chinatown factory. Yook Chee Hom (ILGWU Local 23-25 officer) shows the sewing machine operators a new style. There were hundreds of sewing factories and thousands of workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown from 1970 through the 1990s. In those decades, almost every Chinatown household had garment workers in their families. Can you find quilt squares to match some of the factory photos in this exhibit?