NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Eric Frumin, UNITE
MR. FRUMIN: Good morning. My name is Eric Frumin, and I am with UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. I am with the union's health and safety department at the union's headquarters in New York City. UNITE is a product of a recent merger between the two long-standing unions in the apparel and textile industries, the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. We represent about 300,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada, and they make clothes and textile products in some of the more famous brand names in the retail market: Levi Straus, Liz Claiborne, Fieldcrest-Cannon. We also represent workers in other industries outside of traditional textile/apparel production, such as K-Mart distribution centers and the Xerox Corporation manufacturing plants.
I want to thank OSHA and NIOSH for allowing the apparel and textile industries to have a workshop of its own here today. The apparel industry particularly, as distinct from the textile industry, is afflicted by very high rates, notoriously high rates, of ergonomically related disorders on a par, often in the same order of magnitude, as those in the auto assembly industry and even in meat packing.
And so it is important that this conference devotes some attention to the conditions of this industry, even though the industry has not gotten the attention that some others have.
The apparel industry is in crisis for a number of reasons. It faces a scourge of low road competition. It faces not only a bad image, but a bad reality of outright worker abuse and exploitation by employers who have no business being employers. And it faces a traditional history in some sectors of the industry of very poor labor-management relations.
On the other hand, the industry has many good things to talk about, and one of them is the work that workers and union members and leaders and employers do in the area of ergonomics. We are here to tell some of the success stories here this morning.
Hank Lick from the Ford Motor Company made a point when he spoke at the welcome about how ergonomics helps out companies and their unions and workers in a variety of areas, such as improved quality and improved worker training. We will hear about some of that today, and it is important to keep that in mind.
The structure of the workshop will be that it will be moderated by my co-chair, Pat Hirschberg. We will have three presentations. We would like you to hold your questions until the end, because then all the presenters will be available for questions. And if we can stick to our time, maybe even make up a minute or two, we should have a good 20 minutes or so for questions and answers.
In addition to that, when the workshop closes, the union presenters will be here for a little while to do a briefing for some press people and to show a longer version of a videotape that you will see a condensed version of during one of the presentations. There are also some educational materials in back we want to encourage you to take.
So with that, I will turn the session over to Pat Hirschberg, who is with the OshKosh B'Gosh Company. She will moderate the rest of the workshop.
Thanks.
