In 1979, a group of Chinese restaurant workers and a couple of workers from other industries came together and founded the Chinese Staff & Workers' Association (CSWA). Unlike unions, which are often single-trade or narrowly defined as an "employees" organization, CSWA started with mostly male, restaurant workers, but rapidly expanded to include garment and construction workers, caregivers, disabled workers, retirees, and youth. Today CSWA has a membership of over 1,300 workers from various trades and ages, injured and non-injured, documented and undocumented and a leadership composed primarily of women. We have two centers, one in Manhattan's Chinatown the other in Brooklyn's Sunset Park Chinatown. CSWA is the first contemporary workers' center bringing together workers across trades to fight for change in the workplace as well as in the community-at-large. CSWA is not a service organization nor does it follow an advocacy model, since neither model is fundamentally concerned with developing a base. Many of the anti-sweatshop initiatives established by advocacy groups are consumer-driven and often male-led. CSWA believes that these campaigns fail to organize the people who produce the product itself, instead relying solely on campus activists. CSWA flips this on its head by placing workers at the center of organizing campaigns and recognizing workers as agents for change rather than treating them as victims. Since its inception, CSWA has successfully fought for increased space for daycare; won a landmark case against the City of New York to stop a luxury development from being built in Chinatown that would have displaced low-income residents while putting forth a new environmental perspective that includes the people as part of the environment; pushed for the passage of manufacturer accountability legislation in 1998; and recovered over $10 million in owed back wages and overtime pay. Unlike most labor groups that focus on wages, CSWA continues to go beyond the economic needs to fight for the community's health and control of time. CSWA has raised consciousness and broadened its membership especially among new Chinese immigrants such as Fuzhounese workers and emerging trades such as home health attendants. Most importantly, CSWA is able to link the individual, immediate needs of people to collective, long-term demands. CSWA brought the issue of sweatshops here in the United States into the forefront of the national agenda. CSWA's anti-sweatshop work was nominated as an outstanding example at the 1997 Philadelphia Presidential Volunteer Summit. The onset of the September 11th tragedy has presented our organization and our community with unprecedented challenges. Our emergency response program has been able to put the true needs and priorities of low-income communities, particularly the issue of health, on the forefront of a statewide and national campaign to expose the government's racist, anti-poor policies. CSWA continues to organize aggressively on many different fronts, especially in the three largest industries in our community - garment, restaurant, and construction. Garment workers have held manufacturers and retailers accountable for non-payment of wages and recovered more than a million dollars in owed wages, setting the direction for domestic and global efforts against labor rights violations in this industry. Our Restaurant Workers' Organizing Committee continues to involve new cases of workers standing up against illegal firings, intimidation, tip-stealing, and have not only taken on unscrupulous employers but exposed colluding landlords and banks. Through our Garment Workers' Health & Safety Project, women workers have been steadily organizing injured and disabled workers to hold government agencies accountable, expose locally, nationally, and internationally, abusive working conditions here in the U.S. and curtail long, crippling work hours. Our most significant accomplishment of all is the involvement and leadership development of youth, injured and disabled workers, and women.

Chinese Staff & Workers Association (CSWA) Phone: (212) 334-2333 Email: cswa@cswa.org