In 1983, AIWA was founded to address immigrant women’s most immediate needs by teaching survival English to immigrant hotel workers in San Francisco.

In 1991, AIWA opened a branch office in San Jose in order to educate and organize the increasing number of immigrant electronics assemblers in Silicon Valley facing economic exploitation and toxic exposure in the high technology industries.

Over AIWA’s twenty five years, our members have built an extraordinary list of accomplishments—especially given that the work has been conceptualized, organized and carried out by limited-English-speaking, low-income immigrants. Some notable examples of our successes include:

  • The Garment Workers’ Justice Campaign (1992-98) focused on dressmaker Jessica McClintock, Inc. for failing to monitor subcontractors’ wage and working hour violations and demanding that she accept corporate responsibility. The campaign resulted in an agreement including a historic phone hotline for workers to report labor violations, and helped raise a national movement around corporate responsibility
  • The Community Equity Campaign (1999) secured equal access to government-owned facilities for low-income community members to hold literacy classes and meetings
  • Testimony of immigrant Chinese AIWA leaders (1999) was critical to passing the California Underground Economy Bill (AB 633), requiring manufacturers to ensure that subcontractors pay their employees
  • Along with the San Jose policy group Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) and legal nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, AIWA formed the 3-year High Tech Collaborative (2002-2004) to address low-wage abuses faced by immigrant women in the Silicon Valley electronics industry
  • The Ergonomic Improvement Campaign (2002-2006)Ergo Presentation identified unsafe garment workstations and worked to develop low-cost solutions. AIWA members won funding for the first-ever Chair Lending Library. This campaign inspired continued efforts to bring about industry-wide change by replicating our ergonomic workstations in more factories around the state
  • AIWA youth engaged in a successful School Campaign (2004-2006), which triumphed in the creation and hiring of the first-ever bilingual community assistant to serve the needs of Cantonese students and families at a high school with the district’s highest concentration of Asian immigrants
  • The ongoing Language Access Campaign (2006–present) seeks multilingual translation of the State of California’s Major Risk Medical Insurance Program (MRMIP) outreach and enrollment materials into languages other than English The program serves high-risk patients who cannot otherwise obtain health insurance and it currently has very little visibility in the immigrant communities surveyed by AIWA members.

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