Katie Quan

Katie Quan is a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, a former chair of the center, and a former labor organizer. In 1982 she was one of the organizers of the historic garment workers' strike in New York City's Chinatown.

Biography[]

Quan was born and raised in San Francisco.^[1] In 1975 she moved to New York City, where she worked as a seamstress in a Chinatown garment factory. After joining the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union Local 23-25, she became active in the union, organizing work stoppages to negotiate better prices for piece work.^[2] In 1982, she helped organize the successful garment workers' strike.^[3] She went on to become the international vice president of the ILGWU, and its successor, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).^[4]

In 1992 she chaired the founding convention of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. She began working for the Labor Center in 1998, eventually serving as chair and associate chair, and in 2000 became a governing board member of the Worker Rights Consortium. She co-founded the International Center for Joint Labor Research at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China in 2010, and co-directed the center for four years. She received a Fulbright grant in 2014 to study China's apparel supply chain at Peking University.^[4]

Quan's comic web series, GenerAsian, has been exhibited at SF Zinefest, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Chinese Historical Society of America. Her collective, This Asian American Life, provides emerging artists with creative resources and opportunities to thrive.

Quan contributed a chapter, Women Crossing Borders to Organize, in “The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor,” edited by D.S. Cobble and published in 2007 by Cornell University Press. She focused on three labor organizing campaigns that had not been comprehensively studied before including a Sara Lee garment factory in Mexico that involved a campaign asking consumers to pay 10 cents more per garment in exchange for Sara Lee agreeing to pay the workers a minimum of $10 per day. The other campaigns involved Tainan Enterprises apparel manufacturer and Securitas security services. In each case, international support was key to labor's success. ^[5]

References[]

Further reading[]

• Milkman, Ruth (1993). "Organizing Immigrant Women in New York's Chinatown: An Interview with Katie Quan". In Cobble, Dorothy Sue (ed.). Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. pp. 281–298. ISBN 9780875463018.

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