Welcome to BASE21

by Tram Nguyen, ColorLines associate editor

The efficient yet laborious path that creates Korean barbecue beef or Mexican carne asada and moves it from the kitchen, to the server, to the customer's table feels familiar enough, whatever corner of Los Angeles' many ethnic enclaves you may wander into for lunch. This is the underside of the well-worn, sweat-stained story of mom-and-pop, immigrant businesses: their success often comes on the backs of those more recently arrived and worse off. In L.A.'s bustling Koreatown, with about 300 restaurants inside an approximate five-mile radius, these small businesses seem the embodiment of a model minority's entrepreneurial industriousness.

But fueling this industry is an underground army of almost 2,000 Latino and Korean workers who cook, serve, and clean in sweatshop conditions for sub-minimum wages. Largely unregulated and ignored in the past, this enclave economy is a layered example of the hardscrabble success of some immigrants and the bone-weary survival of others--but it's not going unchallenged in Koreatown.

For the past three years, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA) has wrestled with the local restaurant industry, one restaurant at a time, to comply with labor laws. The workers and organizers of KIWA are trying to draw a multiracial class line through Los Angeles' fissures of racial tension, class conflict, and immigrant struggle. A Korean American-run organization, KIWA has attacked the exploitative practices of Korean businesses--and members have been called traitors by compatriots for their efforts. This chorus grew louder when they sided with Latino as well as Korean workers. KIWA's industry-wide campaign to build a Koreatown restaurant workers' association, a groundbreaking joint effort of Latino men and Korean women, asserts an alternative vision of worker dignity and organizing in the midst of fierce employer resistance. It's been a fight all the way.

The Class Line

KIWA started out with a deliberate political strategy of building a base in the Korean community from which to set forth a progressive agenda. Organizers didn't want just to improve conditions among low-wage workers, but to foster a working-class identity among Korean immigrants that would stretch across race and ethnicity to include solidarity with other workers.

"Part of KIWA's mission is to build a working-class consciousness so Korean workers understand that their interests are distinct from those who are exploiting them," said Mark Toney, executive director at the Center for Third World Organizing, who researched KIWA for his doctoral dissertation. "Seventy-five percent of Korean immigrants are workers, not entrepreneurs, and the majority of them are low-income. They need to have a political voice that is distinct--to represent externally that it's not a monolithic community."

In 1991, L.A. was already shot through with media-fed racial tension between African Americans and Korean Americans. The city would flare into the riots that came a year later after the trial of police officers who beat Rodney King. People of color in L.A. were being pitted against each other and, if they were immigrants, getting screwed in exploitative industries, often by employers from their own communities. These were the issues on the minds of Roy Hong and Danny Park when they founded KIWA in 1992.

"Unless minority communities have alternative leadership that critically challenges this fostering of racial tension by the dominant force of society, we cannot counter it in an effective manner," said Hong, KIWA's executive director.

KIWA's first act was to demand emergency aid in the wake of the riots for Korean workers who had lost their jobs as stores went out of business. Other actions, such as siding with garment workers against the Jessica McClintock clothing company, poised the organization as one of the few to articulate a working-class agenda from an Asian American perspective. Their early efforts, much of which took place within the insularity of an ethnic community, had implications that rippled beyond the Koreatown microcosm.

“When people think of the Asian American community, they don’t think of the immigrant working class as the main voice. KIWA plays a very major role in redefining politics within the Asian American community,” said Glenn Omatsu, an Asian American studies instructor at UCLA and longtime supporter of the organization.

To circumvent Koreatown's prevailing conservative ideology, the organization opened its doors to workers with a simple offer: you've got a problem, come to us. It became clear through the steady stream of translating, filing labor grievances, and counseling that the restaurant industry harbored the worst abuses and offered the ripest opportunity for action.

"People worked 10 to 12 hours a day, and the employer didn't provide food. How can you work for fuckin' 10 hours and not get fed! In a restaurant!" Hong exclaimed. "Why aren't government enforcement agencies coming into ethnic enclave economies? They don't want to do anything about it--it's racism. Years and years of laissez faire, no regulation caused these employers to become monsters."

The restaurant campaign was launched in 1997 to haul the entire Koreatown industry up to fair labor standards. This has involved filing hundreds of worker complaints and boycotting dozens of restaurants, publicly shaming them into paying thousands of dollars in back wages.

It all began with Cho Sun Galbi, a Koreatown institution for barbecue beef and the first major battleground for KIWA. A Korean cook there had been fired for asking KIWA to help with his employment contract.

"Strategically, our approach was, this is going to be an industry-wide campaign, so let's go after the biggest fish in the industry by making an example out of it," remembered Paul Lee, KIWA's lead organizer. "Cho Sun Galbi was the wealthiest and ritziest restaurant in the community. The owner was the vice-chair of the Koreatown Restaurant Owners' Association. When we had a chance to take them on, it was like a perfect fit."

Six months of bitter conflict at the picket line followed as the restaurant management and their supporters confronted KIWA-organized protesters: little old ladies throwing elbows, flying spit, and boycotters getting pushed off the sidewalk onto Western Avenue, all while the LAPD looked on idly-- KIWA had hit a raw class nerve with the community.

"It was a very controversial time. The whole industry was abuzz. It was the first time in our community that any organization was publicly and directly confronting another institution," Lee said. "So in the beginning, almost everybody got a chance to taste another person's spit."

As it became clear that Cho Sun Galbi wouldn't beat the KIWA boycott, the other members of the Restaurant Owners' Association reckoned they were better off pulling out rather than risk becoming the next target. The Association disintegrated, and Cho Sun Galbi reinstated the cook with back wages. KIWA had won its first major victory.

Latinos as Key

The workers of Koreatown's restaurant industry are about 30 percent Korean and 70 percent Latino, so KIWA soon realized that the Latinos were key to the success of their efforts.

However, notes Victor Narro, director of the Workers' Rights Project at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), tensions between Korean business owners and Latino employees, already strained, worsened after the Los Angeles riots.

"I find there are a lot of stereotypes about Koreans because there are a lot of owners out there treating workers badly. Every time Koreans exploit a day laborer, the word gets out, like `don't trust a Korean,'" Narro said.

KIWA's first big effort to organize Latino restaurant workers came with the 1998 boycott of Baek Hwa Jung. The boycott, seeking back wages for three Latinos who labored 12-hour days for months at $2.20 an hour, signaled an important message to Koreatown residents. KIWA was going to advocate for all low-income workers in the area, regardless of nationality. The organization was showered with "traitor" accusations. "How could you as Koreans do that to other Koreans?" Paul Lee remembered critics asking him.

After five months of weekly pickets, the restaurant finally agreed to pay $14,000 in back wages. Since then, KIWA has organized extensively among Latino workers, collaborating closely with CHIRLA.

“KIWA is doing race work at a grassroots level in the area where there could be the most conflicts in the most marginal situations,” Omatsu said.

Dealing with Difference

The typical restaurant set-up--with Korean waitresses and cooks and Latino cook helpers, busboys, and dishwashers--is an employer tactic to keep the groups divided, organizers said. In some restaurants, Latinos are paid less and receive worse treatment than Koreans. But there are also restaurants that pay minimum wage only to Latinos on the assumption that they are more likely than Korean workers to file complaints if they don't get fair wages.

Coming into an environment laden with racially tinged disputes and malcontent, KIWA's approach is to break down racial and ethnic perceptions between the workers and build up a shared class identification that stretches across race lines. In this way, they see the restaurant campaign as a crucial form of racial justice work.

"You cannot talk about race without class and look at class without race. If you do that, you fall into the trap of racializing, or the other side of the coin, become ethnocentric or nationalistic," Hong said. "We strongly feel that worker organizing should not be categorized as just an economic justice issue. It's not. It's the most effective way for workers to build racial unity."

In a classic example, organizers have encountered many conflicts among workers over the issue of sharing tips. Latino workers complain that Korean waitresses don't share their tips with Latino bus boys. Without context, this situation could easily be interpreted through a potentially damaging cultural rationale--that Koreans are selfish and don't share tips because of prejudice against Latinos. But KIWA tries to educate about the structural causes that keep bottom-rung workers bickering over nickels and dimes.

The waitresses, many of whom get paid a salary of about $600 a month, need every extra tip dollar to get by. Though supportive of tip sharing, KIWA raises the bigger issue of why the boss isn't paying all the workers better.

"We take a potential ethnic/racial issue and turn it into a class issue. And by getting the workers to come around to fighting for better working conditions, not just the tips, then we begin the process of fighting that same owner and developing a bond between the two groups," Lee said.

Bringing together Korean women and Latino men, all first-generation immigrants and most non-English speakers, generates particular challenges for workers and organizers building a united front against employers. Latino men bring with them the experience of Korean employers calling them derogatory names and using disrespectful language. Korean women are overcoming cultural and gender barriers that have kept them from interacting as colleagues with men, especially of another race.

Paul Lee stresses the importance of understanding each ethnic enclave's distinctions and unique characteristics. In Koreatown, that means realizing that Korean women are often trapped in the enclave economy by language and cultural barriers; therefore the threat of employer blacklisting makes it difficult for them to join worker associations. Latino men, on the other hand, can work in restaurants across the city, and their mobility in the industry presents another challenge in getting them organized. The Korean women are mostly wives and mothers, often the primary breadwinners in their families. Many of the Latino men left behind families they are supporting in Mexico or Central America.

Despite these differences, workers said the urgency of their common concerns overshadows any discomfort they initially feel with each other.

"The problem isn't between Korean and Latino workers. The problem's with the employer," said Rom·n Vargas, a former dishwasher who's now one of the co-organizers of the workers' association. Vargas came to KIWA seeking support after getting fired from a hotel restaurant where he worked 12-hour days for less than $2 per hour.

Worker meetings, taking place at 8 a.m. on Sundays (early enough for most to get to work afterward, late enough for the women to take care of children and husbands in the morning), are a demonstration of the flexibility called upon from everybody. With headsets and written agendas, everything is translated into Korean and Spanish.

"When we look at the economy, we see who are the ones doing this kind of low-wage work. They're not white Americans, they are immigrant workers," said Jung Hee Lee, a former waitress and the association's other organizer. "I think we play such an important role in U.S. society."

Since the restaurant campaign began three years ago, Koreatown's restaurant industry has, painfully and stubbornly, changed for the better. The industry had a 97 percent rate of non-compliance with labor laws in 1997. A recent KIWA survey showed a drop to about 41 percent non-compliance among the area's restaurants. Just as importantly, word has spread among owners that they can't exploit with impunity.

"Some of the stuff we hear, that we like a lot, are rumors about certain owners cursing us behind our backs," said Paul Lee. "That's a positive change, whether they're admitting their wrongdoing and voluntarily changing or they're changing because they realize they have no choice."

Worker Centers Thrive

The Restaurant Workers Association of Koreatown is one of numerous independent worker centers that have sprung up in different parts of the country during the past 20 years. These immigrant-identified associations don't want to be subsumed within unions, which they criticize for failing to reflect the multicultural reality of workers or to address ethnic enclave economies with truly substandard labor conditions. As comprehensive worker centers, they go beyond unions in not only improving working conditions and wages but also building worker power that ties into a community-based agenda for racial and economic justice.

"We need labor to be on our side. They have all the resources," said Victor Narro. "There's going to have to be a lot of alliance building. But these (worker) movements also have to be respected as autonomous immigrant workers forming their own collective actions."

At CHIRLA, Narro has helped establish associations for domestic workers, day laborers, and gardeners where workers take the leadership, bring in resources, and sustain their own movement with support from the parent organization. Plans are underway for a new garment workers' center providing Latino, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese workers with a place for advocacy, legal advice, and political education.

Eleven is Not Lucky Number

KIWA currently is in the middle of a protracted dispute with Elephant Snack Corner, a Korean fast-food place that stiffed eight Latino workers out of an estimated $210,000 in wages and overtime.

Every Friday since the beginning of summer, a band of 15-20 local activists and workers have been picketing at the street corner in front of Elephant Snack. Customers used to take up two benches outside the restaurant waiting for a table. Now both the benches and most of the tables inside are empty. The sign above the restaurant has recently begun advertising an "11th anniversary sale" with slashed prices.

"Eleven is not a significant number in Korean culture," Paul Lee remarked dryly.

Despite the combined squeeze of street protests and a KIWA lawsuit, the owner has refused to give in. And so KIWA continues slugging it out with this restaurant, the way they have with others before.

"After three years, the restaurant owners tell us now employers have to worry about what employees think. That change means dignity and respect on a daily basis," reflected Roy Hong. "Why is that? Because we beat the hell out of some employers."