8. The Garment Worker Center and the “Forever 21” Campaign

2017 ◽  
pp. 154-164
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 0160449X2198942
Author(s):  
Jessica Garrick

In response to the growing absence of unions from the private sector, community-based organizations known as worker centers have emerged as a new front in protecting and organizing workers. Scholars generally argue that worker centers have converged on a model of combining service provision with organizing and advocacy, supported primarily by funding from foundations and government agencies. I draw on interviews conducted with worker center staff, a dataset compiled from their public materials, and secondary research to add to the existing literature and to argue that a clear categorization of worker centers can be derived by attention to their primary workplace strategies. First, worker centers can be meaningfully distinguished by whether they attempt to raise standards in specific industries versus responding to problems in individual workplaces. But they can also be distinguished based on the extent to which they view public policy or winning agreements with employers as the primary route to systemic improvements. These divergences in strategy echo Progressive-era debates about the role for the state in redressing workplace ills. Similar to that era, strategic differences among today’s worker centers are driven less by ideology and more by the distinct structural challenges facing workers in particular political and economic contexts.


Author(s):  
Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff ◽  
C. Eduardo Siqueira ◽  
Rosalyn Negrón ◽  
Natalicia Tracy ◽  
Magalis Troncoso Lama ◽  
...  

Structural inequalities in the U.S. work environment place most immigrants in low paying, high-risk jobs. Understanding how work experiences and influence the health of different immigrant populations is essential to address disparities. This article explores how Brazilian and Dominican immigrants feel about their experiences working in the U.S. and how the relationship between work and culture might impact their health. In partnership with the Dominican Development Center and the Brazilian Worker Center, we held five cultural conversations (CCs) with Brazilians (n = 48) and five with Dominicans (n = 40). CCs are participatory, unstructured groups facilitated by representatives from or embedded in the community. Brazilian immigrants focused on physical health and the American Dream while Dominicans immigrants emphasized concerns about the influence of work on mental health. Dominicans’ longer tenure in the U.S. and differences in how Brazilians and Dominicans are racialized in the region might account for the variation in perspectives between groups. Future studies should further investigate the relationship between health and how immigrants’ work lives are shaped by culture, race and immigrant status.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingyu Fu ◽  
Wei Fang ◽  
Shan Gao ◽  
Jianhao Hong ◽  
Yizhou Chen

Abstract Wearable augmented reality (AR) can superimpose virtual models or annotation on real scenes, and which can be utilized in assembly tasks and resulted in high-efficiency and error-avoided manual operations. Nevertheless, most of existing AR-aided assembly operations are based on the predefined visual instruction step-by-step, lacking scene-aware generation for the assembly assistance. To facilitate a friendly AR-aided assembly process, this paper proposed an Edge Computing driven Scene-aware Intelligent AR Assembly (EC-SIARA) system, and smart and worker-centered assistance is available to provide intuitive visual guidance with less cognitive load. In beginning, the connection between the wearable AR glasses and edge computing system is established, which can alleviate the computation burden for the resource-constraint wearable AR glasses, resulting in a high-efficiency deep learning module for scene awareness during the manual assembly process. And then, based on context understanding of the current assembly status, the corresponding augmented instructions can be triggered accordingly, avoiding the operator’s cognitive load to strictly follow the predefined procedure. Finally, quantitative and qualitative experiments are carried out to evaluate the EC-SIARA system, and experimental results show that the proposed method can realize a worker-center AR assembly process, which can improve the assembly efficiency and reduce the occurrence of assembly errors effectively.


Author(s):  
Kim Bobo ◽  
Marien Casillas Pabellon
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document