Threads of Resistance: Chinese Women and Transnational Labor Organizing in New York City's Chinatown Garment Industry

In 1982, more than 20,000 Chinese immigrant women in the garment industry filled the streets of New York City’s Chinatown to demand better wages, safer conditions, and contract protections. Led by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), the strike remains one of the most significant labor actions in Asian American history. This project analyzes how gender, ethnicity, class, and immigrant status shaped the organizing strategies that led to the strike’s success. Situating the strike within broader transnational histories of labor, migration, and political memory, it also examines how the political legacies and lived experiences of Maoist China and colonial Hong Kong informed the consciousness, language, and organizing strategies of Chinese immigrant women workers in the United States. By tracing the transnational political lives of working-class Chinese women, this study intervenes by centering these women as agents who reinterpreted socialist and feminist frameworks across both Chinese and American contexts of labor and diaspora.

The study asks three core questions: (1) How did identity categories—gender, class, ethnicity, and immigrant status—shape organizing strategies? (2) What transnational and comparative labor histories influenced mobilization? (3) What lessons from the 1982 strike might inform contemporary labor organizing among immigrant women? Methodologically, the project draws on prior scholarship, archival records, union publications, and oral history interviews conducted by the Chinatown History Museum (now the Museum of Chinese in America) and the Brooklyn Historical Society. The analysis focuses on twelve oral histories with former garment workers, union organizers, and community members in New York City, conducted between 1983 and 2008 in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, that have been translated and transcribed by the author. Oral histories were coded for age, national origin, immigration year and status, class, and English proficiency. Additional narratives from second-generation immigrants and union staff recalling others’ experiences reveal how intergenerational trauma and positionality mediate the construction and transmission of labor organizing memory. This project also examines the 1982 strike within a comparative history of West Coast labor movements, including the 1974 Jung Sai Strike in San Francisco, to contextualize the emergence of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and New Left rhetoric within Asian American labor organizing.

The poster visualizes findings across four sections: (I) Introduction, (II) Methodology, (III) Findings, and (IV) Conclusion. The Findings section examines transcoastal origins of ILGWU organizers, transnational “past lives” of women in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as militant organizers, and shared experiences of workers and union organizers. The Conclusion, titled “Afterlives of the Strike,” explores the movement’s enduring political and social legacies. Visual components include oral history excerpts with archival photographs, strike posters, protest ephemera, and migration maps showing how Chinatown factories were transformed into sites of struggle and solidarity. Examples include childcare and English tutoring centers created through negotiated demands, illustrating the spatial and social afterlives of the strike. Together, these visual and textual elements reveal how these women's success resulted from bridging linguistic, political, and generational divides to construct a shared language of class, gender, and everyday struggle.