By Jessica Man
January 2026
Introduction: A Century of Exclusion
In 1882, the United States Government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, often cited as the first American immigration ban and the end of the era of open borders. However, this dubious honor truly belongs to the Page Act of 1875, which placed a blanket ban on the immigration of Chinese women, universally suspected of being prostitutes. Both the Exclusion Act and the Page Act remained in place until 1945, when the United States began to rely on China as an ally in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Then, in 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act finally eliminated America’s restrictive quota-based immigration system, allowing Chinese immigrants to enter the United States unrestricted once again.
Before 1882, most Chinese who arrived on the East Coast were men who settled in New York City along Mott Street and Canal Street.1 They brought with them traditional methods of organization such as the temple, kin-based guild (huiguan) and mercantile association, and continued to thrive even through the exclusion period. After 1965, however, many Chinatowns were energized by an influx of new Chinese immigration. Significantly, a great portion of the new Chinese immigrants were women who quickly entered the workforce. In New York, they found employment in Chinatown-based garment factories.
Chinatown, N.Y., 1913, retrieved from Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94505680/
Unions and the ILGWU
Like Chinese men during California’s gold rushes, Chinese women who worked in garment factories were unable to advocate for workplace safety improvements, benefits or higher wages due to the language barrier. They often came to the United States with no English proficiency and were not provided opportunities to learn.2 Their bosses took advantage of this lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge in order to underpay them, ignoring minimum wage laws, compensating workers only fifty cents per completed garment.3 Overseers and shift managers also routinely overlooked traumatic injuries such as hand wounds and punctures from sewing machine needles.4
In 1981, about 85 percent of the garment manufacturing workforce in New York City was female,5 and the unionization efforts of the 1970s had taken hold in New York’s new immigrant population. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which had championed the women garment workers of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, found its historically Jewish and Italian ranks full of Chinese and Latina women who refused to endure mistreatment and exploitation in the workplace.
American trade unions have complex relationships with race. For example, the AFL (later AFL-CIO) advocated for Chinese exclusion in the 19th century but was later involved in the cooperative interethnic United Farm Workers (UFW) strike of the 1960s. The ILGWU was formed and led by tradeswomen, particularly Jewish women, who defied gender expectations of submissive and non-confrontational behavior in order to organize strikes with more than 20,000 women workers.6 The Chinese garment workers carried on this legacy, asserting their worth and dignity by unionizing and striking for higher pay in 1982. Their struggle was also against the paternalism and racism of the union, which consistently overlooked the unique needs, community dynamics and organizing potential of Chinatown’s working women.
Organizing in New York Chinatown
The decision to strike in 1982 was not spontaneous. Chinese women in New York had been ILGWU members since the 1950s due to the considerable health insurance plan it provided.7 However, the new generation of labor organizers, including Katie Quan and May Chen, were invigorated by the political landscape around them. The 1965 Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement of the 1970s inspired Asian American New Yorkers to advocate for racial and cultural equity, including labor justice. Some of the Chinese American advocates working for the ILGWU to organize workers and confront bosses were the relatives of garment workers.8 Moreover, they had been involved with revolutionary leftist youth organizations like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and I Wor Kuen, both of which took direct inspiration from the Black Panthers.9 These organizers committed themselves to liberating and uplifting their communities as young people, and this determination followed them to their work with ILGWU Local 23-25.
In contrast with other early Asian American activist spaces, which could be chauvinistic and sideline women into “pink-collar” work, and American feminist circles, which focused on white women’s issues,10 union work allowed Chinese women to independently create and exercise their own visions of women’s liberation, which included dignity in manual labor, equal pay and cultural empowerment. The struggle that Chinatown’s garment workers faced was threefold. First, shop owners, who ran job sites on behalf of the garment manufacturing companies, were often community members who had close social ties to the workers. This meant they were beholden to corporate interests rather than community ones. Second, ILGWU leadership made openly racist and sexist statements about the workers11 and did not provide English education services to help workers interface with their non-Chinese representatives,12 which exacerbated existing cultural differences and created conflict on the floor. Finally, male Chinese representatives also tended to condescend to older female Chinese workers.13 This tension with the union as well as the shop owners magnified existing issues with the manufacturing company.
Police arrest TWLF striker Stan Kadani, 1969, UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library, https://calisphere.org/item/ab1109f1-f24a-48bb-bbc0-d2a9ccd1617e/
Note: Stan Kadani was part of the Asian American Political Alliance.
When female Chinese labor organizers collaborated with female Chinese workers, they were able to address gender-specific issues with compassion and social grace. They helped floor workers get deserved promotions and raise issues with shop owners and manufacturers on their behalf. But as manufacturers refused to meet demands for better pay, holiday pay and more working hours against the skyrocketing cost of living in 1970s Manhattan and the ILGWU refused to include Local 23-25 members in the negotiations, the workers continually had to take matters into their own hands, advocating for themselves on local Chinese-language radio, in the press and even with their own families.
Chinese American members of ILGWU Local 23-25 follow the election proceedings through a simultaneous translation system, retrieved from The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, https://www.flickr.com/photos/kheelcenter/5278905613
Tensions came to a head in 1982 when workers and labor organizers set up rallies to win support for a potential strike on June 24 and June 29. Both workers and organizers spoke in front of the crowd in Chinese and English, drawing inspiration from Chinese Communist pro-labor philosophy and the contemporary racial justice movements of the United States. They explicitly framed their struggle in terms of historical survival, oppression and exploitation,14 galvanizing 20,000 workers to walk off of their job sites on June 29, 1982.15 This swung a previously divided Chinatown’s public opinion firmly to the side of the workers. The cumulative pressure they placed on shop owners, union representatives and manufacturers paid off, and within hours of the strike beginning, nearly every shop in Chinatown had signed a union contract.
Conclusion: In Union there is Strength
Members of ILGWU Local 2329, ILGWU Local 23-25, and SEIU Local 1199 picket for a boycott on grapes. Several Asian Americans are present with placards in Chinese, 1970s, retrieved from The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, https://www.flickr.com/photos/kheelcenter/5279088717/in/album-72157625517455721
The women workers of Chinatown’s unionized garment workshops were up against an enormous challenge. Faced with racism from the ILGWU, division in their communities, exploitation from the companies and American stereotypes about the docility and submissiveness of Asian women, they nonetheless continued to organize around their demands and refused to back down. Tying their cause to worker’s and women’s liberation worldwide, the women workers of Local 23-25 defied every expectation placed upon them and drew on both collective organizational strength and the cultural bonds of kinship to win their contracts. To date, the 1982 ILGWU strike is the largest that has ever taken place in New York Chinatown, and its legacy continues to remind community members of the power they can exercise as a collective, even when the odds seem insurmountable.
To learn more about this and related topics, check out other free resources from The Immigrant Learning Center. We have a list of famous Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants and an essay about United Farm Workers (UFW) and the Delano Grape Strike — another immigrant-led labor movement in the mid-20th century.
We also have free resource bundles from our Teaching U.S. Immigration Series that feature lesson plans, primary sources and classroom-ready activities that can utilize this essay: “Immigrant Women and the Industrial Revolution” and “Justice in the Fields: Immigration and The Labor Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.”
About the Author
Jessica Man is a PhD candidate in History at the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. Her research interests include Asian American regional histories, Asian American religious life, race and ethnicity in pop culture, and critical refugee studies.
This essay is sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region Program, coordinated by Waynesburg University.
Endnotes
- Jonathan Kuo-Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (2001)
- Xiaolan Bao, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92, 2001, pg. 193
- River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, “How Chinese American Women Changed U.S. Labor History,” The Margins, May 1, 2019
- ibid.
- Bao, 110
- Cornell University, Kheel School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “History of the ILGWU: Early Struggles,” https://ilgwu.ilr.cornell.edu/history/earlyStruggles.html
- Bao, 153
- Bao, 194
- River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, “How Chinese American Women Changed U.S. Labor History,” The Margins, May 1, 2019
- Yen Lê Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, pg. 47-49
- Bao, 184
- Bao, 193
- Bao, 118
- Bao, 210-211
- Katie Quan, “Memories of the 1982 ILGWU Strike in New York Chinatown,” Amerasia Journal, 35:1 (2009):76-91.