Burma Bibas Workers Get Severance Package

Seventy five workers at the Burma Bibas tie factory in Long Island City, Queens, are getting severance packages in the wake of the company’s decision to close its last remaining U.S. production facility. The severance package, negotiated by the union, gives workers up to $2,500 (depending on years of service) as well as three months of health insurance coverage. It’s a bittersweet victory, to say the least, for a place that had been a union shop for decades. For the workers, it’s an all-too-familiar tale in the apparel and textile industries: the company, which already makes its shirts abroad in cheap-labor countries like China, decided it was just “too expensive” to pay American production workers.

It’s a trend that started three decades ago in light manufacturing industries, like apparel, and then spread to other manufacturing areas, like auto parts, and in recent years to service industries, like finance and technology. These days you are almost as likely to be talking to a worker in New Dehli, India, when you call for tech support for your computer as you are to be wearing a shirt made by a worker in Bangladesh. The bottom line is the same, and for employers that bottom line is the bottom line: They will go anywhere and do anything to get the cheapest labor possible. Human rights abuses and starvation wages do not matter to them. It is, as it always has been, up to the labor movement to organize and fight and make rights and wages matter, and in this era of globalized production, the labor movement has to be global as well.