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Los Angeles Fashion District A Fire Trap For Garment Workers, UCLA Study Finds

Garment factories in the Los Angeles Fashion District are dusty, hot, poorly ventilated, vermin-infested and unsafe, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA

They are also fire traps, where managers block or even lock factory exits with employees inside. "I think we knew things were bad, but we didn't know they were this bad," says Mariela Martinez, an organiser with the Garment Worker Center, the organisation that conducted surveys with 307 garment workers for the study.

What most alarmed Martinez was that 42% of the workers reported that exits and doors in their shops were regularly blocked. Over the weekend while preparing for the report's release, Martinez and her colleagues watched the news of the Oakland warehouse fire that claimed the lives of 36 people at the converted artist studio known as the Ghost Ship.

"They were reporting about how there were only two exits in the warehouse. And the folks upstairs in the building, by the time they realised there was a fire, the stairway was blocked with smoke and they couldn't get down," she says. "I was thinking about the garment shops." Martinez says she has observed garment factories in which the staircase or doors were blocked or locked on several floors. "It's alarming to think what would happen if there were an earthquake or a fire." The UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education produced the study, called Dirty Threads, Dangerous Factories: Health and Safety in Los Angeles' Fashion Industry. The study focuses specifically on health and safety issues. It compares the management practice of blocking exits in L.A. garment factories to those of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York, which killed 146 garment workers in 1911.

The research team was made up of organisers and volunteers from the Garment Worker Center, and they surveyed workers before and after factory shifts, on the street and at bus stops. The report mentions the challenges of interviewing garment workers, who tend to be hesitant to discuss their experiences for reasons having to do with their precarious work arrangements and immigration status.

"We designed the survey so it was really quick to do outside the factory while people waited for buses," Martinez says. "We went out, explained who we were and tried not to ask too many questions about who the employer was."

The study found that 72% of respondents indicated their factories were poorly ventilated, a problem that made the interiors excessively hot throughout most of the year and polluted the air with dust that made it difficult to work, and even to breathe. Basic hygiene in the factories also was lacking: 47% of workers observed that workplace bathrooms were soiled and unmaintained; 42% reported having seen rats and mice in the factories where they sew, trim and press.

"This is right in the heart of the Fashion District of Los Angeles - 20 blocks from City Hall, if not less," says Janna Shadduck-Hernández, one of the study's authors, who is a project director at the UCLA Labor Center. "Take a nice walk past the bars and restaurants on Spring Street and you can see and hear these factories. You don't have to look too hard; they're all over."