Sweatshop (Maquiladora Worker) Project

This project supports the basic rights of and economic justice for apparel workers in Latin America producing for the U.S. market.

Since its roots in the early 1990s, an anti-sweatshop movement in the U.S. has emerged that has highlighted the poverty-level wages, poor working conditions, and absence of basic rights of apparel workers in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean producing for brand-name U.S. companies. Like other anti-sweatshop groups, USLEAP seeks to hold U.S. apparel and retail companies accountable, as well as governments.

USLEAP’s primary area of focus is the empowerment of the workers themselves. While levels of physical abuse and incidents of child labor have diminished in recent years, only a handful of workers have been able to organize unions and only a handful have been able to win collective bargaining agreements that improve wages, benefits and working conditions beyond the minimum levels already established by law. The greatest advances in Latin America in the past decade have been achieved in the collegiate apparel sector due to the work of the United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium.

USLEAP engages directly with U.S. companies at the request of workers in the region. Engagement may be quiet or take the form of public campaigning. USLEAP works closely with a wide range of groups and unions, including the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF, the global union federation of apparel worker unions), the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, Maquila Solidarity Network, Sweatfree Communities, USAS, and the Workers Rights Consortium. USLEAP works to link North American initiatives (e.g. codes of conduct, independent monitoring, and the student anti-sweatshop movement) to specific and viable organizing campaigns in Central America and Mexico.