Thread by @SarahTaber_bww, who's ready for garment industry teaLos Angeles Apparel, which is more or [...]

who& #39;s ready for garment industry tea

Los Angeles Apparel, which is more or less Dov Charney& #39;s project to clone American Apparel after they kicked him out for serial sexual harassment, fostered a COVID outbreak of 300+ cases in its shop & at least 4 deaths.

Garment shops share a lot of the same characteristics that make meat plants hot spots for COVID transmission.

There& #39;s close quarters & they& #39;re loud (people have to shout to be heard -> more respiratory droplets).

But there& #39;s something that can make them even worse than meat plants:

Handling fabric releases lint- tiny short fibers that float around in the air. They irritate your nose, mouth, & throat and make you cough & sneeze a lot.

This shows up even at fairly small scale. I did a zoom call with @sarah_k_mock last week during the weekly measure/cut run to keep the sew team supplied w fabric. It was "only" 160 yards but had to take cough breaks bc of the lint LOL

(normally I wear a mask for that, but, Zoom)

There are lots of reasons I& #39;m having sewists make the masks at home, instead of renting industrial space.

But infection control is a big one. I put on the ol& #39; workplace safety hat & looked at what it would take to COVID-proof a sew shop.

You have to assume there& #39;s at least one asymptomatic person in the shop at all times. And that it spreads through the HVAC.

You basically have to put the sew shop inside a negative-pressure tent with HEPA filters & move air from floor to ceiling so fast there& #39;s a breeze.

That& #39;s actually pretty straightforward.

Auto & appliance shops use negative-pressure tents all the time for painting. It& #39;s called a spray booth. You can get them on eBay.

It& #39;s ~$2-5Kish to set up an area the size of a 2-car garage. Not bad for death prevention.

Now, I& #39;m a 1-person food & worker safety consulting shop. I don& #39;t have a lot of liquidity or preexisting facilities. With the resources I have available, setting up an in-person sew shop would definitely result in people catching COVID at work.

So I DIDN& #39;T.

But clearly not everybody has that combination of infectious disease insight and. like. shame

A lot of folks already had garment shops & wanted to get themselves declared "essential businesses" so they could stay open & keep selling their usual stock.

That& #39;s my personal theory as to why

1) every single clothing company now makes masks

2) a lot of these clothing co& #39;s masks fit poorly

3) why they& #39;re giving them away &/or supercheap.

They& #39;re not good masks, they& #39;re just potemkin masks for keeping sweatshops open : /

Btw this is NOT a thread about how everyone should buy expensive boutique masks bc it& #39;s a social duty.

Masks should be affordable!

They should just, also, like, work. And not infect the people making them in the process.

This is not a "small is beautiful" story.

I started with a broken 1982 sewing machine and 2 yards of Abraham Lincoln soft porn fabric 4 months ago. There& #39;s no way in hell tiny DIY shops like me are going to make enough masks, affordably, for 330M Americans. That& #39;s a pipe dream.

I managed to find both fabric suppliers, and a distribution partner (hi @DFTBArecords), that do things the way I would feel comfortable doing them: actually doing the real work of social distancing.

That& #39;s why my masks ship slow af sometimes D:

I wish we had taken workplace safety more seriously before this, bc then none of this would have been as much of a shock. Big shops would have had an easier time transitioning, & shops that were already doing it right wouldn& #39;t be slammed to the point of immobility by new demand.

Above all I wish we had a better approach to "fair trade" than this "small is beautiful" DIY bullshit.

I& #39;m doing it and it& #39;s no good.

We need big, employee-owned institutions that have the knowledge & skills to run safely bc they were already doing it before disaster struck.

I& #39;m super proud to have scaled up from nothing to almost 2,000 masks made in 4 months.

Meanwhile this shop that& #39;s killing people moved half a million in May alone. : /

Small can& #39;t compete with scale & we shouldn& #39;t try. We need to learn how to scale competently. Period.

We have this idea that you can EITHER treat workers right OR have scale & affordability, and that& #39;s also bullshit. You can do both.

Toyota, QuikTrip, Mercadona, & other employee-centered companies do it all day every day.

Does my mask shop fall into that "small-scale, higher-priced" model: yeah. Because it& #39;s 4 months old.

That& #39;s part of being a very new business. And I think it& #39;s ignorant & embarrassing how we portray sustainable businesses as something that can& #39;t grow up beyond that baby stage.

and reading articles about this LAA shop is like filling out a racist bingo card

here he is talking about how "my shop is full of sick people because COVID is hitting the Latinx community harder"

I WONDER WHY THAT IS, MR SWEATSHOP DUDE https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/los-angeles-apparel-coronavirus-workers">https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/c...

Hundreds Of Los Angeles Apparel Factory Workers Have Contracted The Coronavirus And Four Have Died

Public health officials said the company initially refused to cooperate with an investigation into an outbreak at the factory, and at one point tried to prevent officials from entering.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/los-angeles-apparel-coronavirus-workers

"They just live in crowded conditions"

couldn& #39;t possibly be related to how your standard pay rate is $0.03-0.05/mask, could it https://news.yahoo.com/dov-charney-los-angeles-apparel-200234305.html">https://news.yahoo.com/dov-charn...

Workers Rights Group Calls Out Dov Charney’s LA Apparel Factories for COVID-19 Issues

Garment Worker Center members report a lack of testing, social distancing and sanitizing practices at the factories.

https://news.yahoo.com/dov-charney-los-angeles-apparel-200234305.html

Not to be crass or anything but I& #39;m paying my folks $8/mask & this goochstain& #39;s billing himself as ~pro-human rights~ at (let& #39;s be generous and say the 3-5 cents is for doing 1 out of a 20-step process) $1/mask

some ppl have all the audacity & others believe it, is what gets me

honestly I don& #39;t even know what the point of this thread is

I& #39;ve done my time in garment shops & factory lines and I& #39;m just really pissed at who gets to run them & how. maybe that& #39;s the point

anyway here are some nice masks my team made. eat at arby& #39;s

https://www.etsy.com/shop/FunkyFreshNoFogMasks">https://www.etsy.com/shop/Funk...

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