Garment Workers

Downtown Los Angeles. Vernon. Huntington Park. South Gate. Roughly 45,000 people sew, cut, and press in this county — most of them women, most foreign-born, and most working in shops that keep no real records.

If you were hurt doing this work, you have a claim. The absence of a pay stub does not change that. It changes how the case is built.

You do not need pay records to have a workers' compensation claim.

California calculates your benefits on earning capacity — what your work was reasonably worth — not on what a cash envelope said. Where wage records are missing or falsified, the law provides a specific method for getting to a fair number.

And piece rate has been illegal in California garment manufacturing since January 2022. A carrier should not be permitted to use unlawful piece-rate earnings to hold your benefits down.

What the government has documented

This is not anecdote. It is the federal and state record.

The U.S. Department of Labor's survey of Southern California garment contractors found:

• Wage and hour violations in 80% of investigations
• In over half the cases, employers paid part or all of wages off the books, with payroll records deliberately forged or not provided
• 32% of contractors were still paying piece rate after California banned it
• Wages as low as $1.58 an hour
• Over $892,000 recovered for 296 workers in one enforcement round, and $1.1 million for 165 workers in another

And a UCLA survey of Los Angeles garment workers found:

Over 40% of workers reporting blocked exits, in 2026, in Los Angeles. That is a fire risk profile, and it is why acute catastrophic injury in this industry is not hypothetical.

What the work does to the body

Sewing machine operators

Cutters and pressers

Cutters stand for hours, bent forward over the table, gripping and pushing a heavy vibrating straight knife — producing lumbar disc disease, hand-arm vibration syndrome, shoulder injury, and carpal tunnel. Cutters also take the most severe acute injuries in the shop: lacerations and amputations from straight knives, band knives, and die cutters.

Pressers reach repeatedly forward and overhead with steam press handles, in heat — producing shoulder and elbow injury and heat illness.

The acute injuries

Needle punctures through the finger are so routine that most go untreated — and untreated punctures produce bone and tendon sheath infections. Falls on cluttered floors. Struck by falling fabric rolls. Burns from presses and irons. And, given the blocked-exit findings, fire.

The claim nobody files

73% of these workers report excessive dust.

Cotton and synthetic fiber dust causes byssinosis, chronic bronchitis, occupational asthma, and reactive airway disease. Add formaldehyde resins in permanent-press finishes, azo dyes, and solvent spot cleaners.

A garment worker with twenty years of exposure and a chronic cough has a compensable occupational lung disease claim, and essentially nobody is filing them.

Piece rate is illegal — and that helps your claim

SB 62, the Garment Worker Protection Act, took effect January 1, 2022. It:

• Bans piece-rate compensation in garment manufacturing. Workers must be paid at least the applicable hourly minimum wage.
• Provides damages of $200 per employee per pay period in which the worker was paid by the piece, plus compensatory damages.
• Extends joint and several liability beyond the contractor to the manufacturer and to "brand guarantors" — including retailers who contract for private-label goods — for unpaid wages, damages, penalties, and attorney's fees.

Three ways that matters to an injury claim:

It destroys the low-wage defense. A carrier cannot fairly build your benefit rate on earnings the Legislature has declared unlawful.

It creates a solvent defendant. The contractor may be judgment-proof or gone. The manufacturer and the brand are neither.

It generates evidence. A wage claim file with the Labor Commissioner is a record of your actual hours and earnings — usable in the comp case.

Building your benefit rate without pay records

This is the technical heart of a garment claim.

Where there are no reliable wage records, California's ordinary wage formulas cannot be applied, and the law falls back on earning capacity — the sum that reasonably represents what you were able to earn.

That number is built from:

• Coworker declarations about hours, output, and pay practices at the shop
• Your own contemporaneous records — piece tallies, notebooks, texts, photos of bundle tickets
• A wage claim file with the Labor Commissioner, if one exists
• Federal or state investigation files covering the shop
• The shop's own production records
• And the legal minimum you were entitled to — at Los Angeles minimum wage across forty to sixty hours with overtime, that figure alone is usually far above whatever the carrier calculated

Always check the statutory floor. For a worker whose recorded earnings show $5.15 an hour, the minimum temporary disability rate — $264.61 a week in 2026 — frequently exceeds what the carrier came up with.

And count everything. A second shop. Take-home piecework, which is compensable employment even though it is entirely undocumented.

If the shop closed

Garment contractors are undercapitalized, frequently uninsured, and they dissolve.

That is not the end of the claim. Three routes:

The Uninsured Employers Benefits Trust Fund covers workers whose employer had no coverage.

A civil action against the uninsured employer, where the injury is presumed to have resulted from the employer's negligence, the burden is on the employer to rebut it, and contributory negligence and assumption of risk are not available as defenses.

And the manufacturer or brand, on a joint or special employment theory where they controlled production standards, did on-site quality control, or had an exclusive supply relationship — plus § 2810.3 joint liability where a labor contractor supplied the workers.

One useful fact: garment manufacturers must be registered with the state. An unregistered manufacturer is strong evidence of a shop operating outside the law entirely — including on insurance.

If you are undocumented

Your immigration status does not affect your eligibility for workers' compensation. California Labor Code § 3351 covers all employees regardless of status, and the California Supreme Court has confirmed it.

And threatening your status is itself unlawful. Labor Code § 244(b) and § 1019 make it unlawful to report or threaten to report immigration status in retaliation for exercising labor rights — and under § 1019 that can cost an employer its business license. Labor Code § 6310 protects safety complaints.

We say this plainly because fear is the reason most of these claims are never filed. Los Angeles County also accepts anonymous garment facility complaints without asking about immigration status, at (800) 777-9995.

And if you were told you are an independent contractor: a sewer working in the contractor's shop, on the contractor's machines, on the contractor's schedule, doing the contractor's core business, is an employee under California law. The label does not decide it.

Frequently asked questions