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STITCH training workshop

STITCH can help your union
reach out to Latina workers

How can you create a more diverse union? What are the challenges faced by Latinas, women and immigrants, and how can Latina workers overcome them and become leaders? STITCH, fortified by  a Berger-Marks grant and years of experience with women workers in Central America, is ready and willing to help.

'I thought if I worked hard'. . .

“The U.S. is a place of justice… I thought if I worked hard and was a good citizen, I could advance. Then 9/11 changed everything. There was more abuse. I thought, I am a citizen, how can they hurt me? Force me to hurry? And pay me only $5? It can't be."

“They told me when I got pregnant that I couldn't work and had to go home. They didn't respect me until I showed my papers and had a witness and confronted them.”

These are among the issues women brought up in  workshops run by STITCH,  as part of  the Immigrant Rights Project it launched in the U.S.  two years ago.  STITCH now invites unions and community groups to partner with it, both to help train immigrant members to get more involved and  to help organizers reach  out to immigrant women.

Helping immigrant women gain respect

Even when immigrant workers join a union, they often feel left out. As workshop participant Carolina put it, “We need a space to address issues for women. In my union, men are the majority and women never attend the meetings because they feel intimidated by the men.”

Through the training, women said, they exchange strategies and learn how  to gain respect and  fight for their rights. STITCH also helps make women's voices heard in global debates on issues that impact them: around globalization, trade agreements, immigration policy, and global labor standards. Said one participant who had been in the U.S. for years: “I never thought that I had issues as an immigrant worker. This training was really important to recognizing those issues."

STITCH aims to not only help move women into permanent, formal union jobs and build a more inclusive movement for economic justice, but also to help break down divisions among women in the labor movement, and educate non-immigrant labor activists and organizers. 

Expertise honed over a decade in Central America

The STITCH programs bring home the expertise it’s developed  in over a decade of helping women organize in Central America. Many women  workers in the U.S. are faced with  the same problems they tried to escape by immigrating, whether it be  low wages and discrimination or insufficient childcare services and dangerous working conditions. (And on top of that, even legal immigrants can get caught up in raids and jailed with criminals.)

Commented a Unitarian activist who observed STITCH  training in Central America: “STITCH used an extremely thoughtful, participatory process to develop this curriculum, continually incorporating feedback from members of the Labor Advisory Group, who field-tested modules with their fellow women union members . . . The most exciting aspect of this curriculum is that it strengthens women's understanding of their rights and boosts women's confidence so much that they take on positions of leadership..”

Online resources, how to contact STITCH

Click here to see STITCH's training curriculum for the U.S., in both English and Spanish. 

A Stitch booklet, “The Other Immigrants,” is also available online. The AFL-CIO hails it as “a collection of six fascinating, often disturbing, interviews with Latinas about their experiences as immigrants in the United States.” When the book came out, one of the women profiled in it broke out in tears — she had never believed anyone would think her story was important.

On Facebook you can see STITCH’s new slide show video capturing the conditions maquila workers confront in Central America and those that poultry and other workers face in the U.S., and highlighting how STITCH helps build links.

If you’re interested in learning more about how STITCH can help your organizing work, don’t hesitate to click here to visit their web site and give them a call..