Guess Again: Revisiting the Last Major US Apparel Union Campaign at 25

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the last major union organizing drive in the United States apparel sector. unite ran a difficult five-year campaign against Guess jeans, the largest apparel label in Los Angeles’s then powerful apparel industry. Though the union used a complex web of strikes, boycotts, and employment law suits, victory eluded unite. This article recounts the multi-year fight through interviews with key union-side figures, supplemented with an analysis of contemporaneous press clippings and legal documents. Findings challenge existing scholarship on the campaign. The union was more innovative in fighting Guess than is often acknowledged, but failed to follow up on its efforts in the la sector, abandoning apparel workers to a race to the bottom. The piece also finds evidence that the core strategy of Guess might have been successful in mitigating effects of globalization on sectors with extensive supply chains.

Sentimental Solidarities

Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo surveys the history of fictional treatments of labor in US television and film and examines the frequently overlooked role played by sentimentality in media representations of labor and union organizing. Noting that sentimentality has been criticized for its deployment of suffering bodies as “other” objects for voyeuristic tears as well as for sometimes collapsing difference in an effort to construct empathy, Wanzo observes that documentary has often been a more welcoming space for the telling of sympathetic narratives about unions than Hollywood fiction films and television. This makes the depiction of labor and union organizing in Wanzo’s two case studies—the sitcom Superstore (NBC, 2015–21) and the primetime soap Homefront (ABC, 1991–93)—all the more exceptional. At a moment when labor issues are more relevant than ever, Superstore shows people why labor loses, but Homefront reminds people why labor won.