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. 

In the past fifteen years, an anti-sweatshop movement in the U.S. has emerged that has high-lighted the poverty-level wages, poor working conditions, and absence of basic rights of apparel workers in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean who produce for brand-name U.S. companies.  Like other anti-sweatshop groups, USLEAP seeks to hold U.S. apparel and retail companies accountable. 

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 hardly any have been able to win collective bargaining agreements that improve wages, benefits and working conditions beyond the minimum levels already established by law.

USLEAP engages directly with U.S. companies at the request of workers in the region.  Engagement may be discrete or take the form of public campaigning. USLEAP focuses on linking North American initiatives (e.g. codes of conduct, independent monitoring, and the student anti-sweatshop movement) to specific and viable worker campaigns in Central America and Mexico.

On this project, 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, the Maquila Solidarity Network, Sweatfree Communities, USAS, Witness for Peace, and the Workers Rights Consortium.