Blogging Social Difference in LA: Week 7

The Marxian view of economic classes is that they are determined by what each class owns. The Bourgeoisie owns the means of production, while the Proletariate only owns their labor power, and it is these differences in class that determine urban form and function. The Marxian view claims that if we want to understand the spatial patterns of a city, we must first understand the differences that exist between the classes. In terms of production in a capitalist society the main goal of the upper class - those who own the means of production - is to produce a surplus value by exploiting the labors of the working class. As David Harvey puts it, "a class of capitalists is in command of the work process and organizes that process for the purposes of producing profit…The domination arises because the laborer must yield the capitalist a profit in return for a living wage." This system of producing surplus value at the expense of the workers is especially apparent in factories, where large scale production happens rapidly and the workers only make a fraction of the value that they add to each product. 

Los Angeles is a predominant city in the American fashion industry not only because of its many fashion schools and designers but because of the huge amount of clothing manufacturing that takes place in the Fashion District. The Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles spans 100 blocks and is packed full of textiles, men's, women's, and kid's apparel, jewelry, accessories, luggage, flowers, perfume, etc. for both wholesale business and retail shopping. Today I walked up and down Maple, one of the main streets in the area, but also explored some of the side streets which were equally packed with shops. Each store front I passed was spilling out onto the sidewalk, displaying the products they had to sell and usually accompanied by workers advertising the great deals and low prices they could offer you. I saw a few people bargaining with shop owners and a surprising number of ATMs in many of the stores (I'm assuming) to encourage cash purchases. An overwhelming majority of those working in the shops as well as shopping were Latino. 

Map of the Fashion District

It is this same Latino demographic who make these clothes in the many garment shops above the store fronts of the Fashion District. The article, Fashion Victims: Inside the Sweat Shops of Los Angeles states that "the workers are all newly arrived Latino immigrants; the owners tend to be Korean, Vietnamese or Iranian." It's interesting that racial divisions occurs among the different occupations within the Los Angeles fashion industry. 

While a lot of American production has been moving off shore and over seas, there has been an increase in apparel production in Los Angeles largely because of a large amount of (usually undocumented) Latino immigrants who are willing to work for extremely low wages. Behind the Label, is a book that examines the Los Angeles garment industry by Richard Appelbaum, a Sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara and Edna Bonacich, a professor of sociology and Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. Appelbaum shares some of the findings from the book in a lecture at UCSB. He states the garment industry is essential to the local economy of Los Angeles and accounts for 10% of the 300 billion dollar economy. The industry employs 160 thousand people, 120 thousand of which are sewing machine operators and primarily women. Unfortunately, these workers are often paid below minimum wage, and work for long hours in horrible working conditions. Appelbaum shares that a seamstress would earn on average about seven to eight thousand dollars a year (which is 2/3 of minimum wage) and that two out of three factories in Los Angeles have violations of wage and hour laws.

David Harvey in "The Urban Process Under Capitalism" sees the city as a site of cultural ideology that legitimizes capitalism. The American dream encompasses the domestic ideal of owning a car and a home, which for Harvey is part of the reason that capitalism is perpetuated. Workers trade their labor power for a living wage that enables them to purchase these necessary goods. In the case of garment industry workers in Los Angeles, the trade is a little different. Since  many of these workers are undocumented citizens, instead of working for a living wage, unfortunately they seem to be working for any wage they can make. The fashion industry is also regrettably a highly anti-union industry which leaves many of these garment workers unprotected from unfair working conditions. Luckily, Appelbaum and other activists are working hard to rectify the injustice of the garment industry. For example, the student anti-sweatshop movement has pressured many American universities (including all of the UCs) into forming new codes of conduct that guarantee that all apparel with the university's logo on it must come from factories that pay their workers minimum wage and provide clean and safe working conditions. Hopefully, further actions like this will help to improve working conditions for those in the Los Angeles garment industry.