Lai ha
Hong Kong industries started to decline at the end of the 1980’s. With factories closing one after another, this factory girl who gave her whole life to just some few steps in making garments found it too painful to even cry. Lai Ha, with her own hard work and enthusiasm, was an exception to the rule. Her whole life has been closely tied to garments. When she was small her mother brought home outsourced piece-meal garment chores, and she would help to cut the thread knots. By 1973 Lai Ha was 13; she borrowed an ID card from an older classmate, and started work at the then largest garment factory, Pegasus. Starting from the most junior position, she learned folding collars and ironing; by age 14, she was going step-by-step towards her goal. “There was an older girl who went to a proper school to learn dress-making, and when she came back, she taught us and collected tuition fees. Those who learned together with me were already senior factory workers doing sewing machines, I was the only junior worker”, Lai Ha called. The happiest moments in those days were for her to earn money to buy cloth and to make new clothes for herself during lunch time. After a hurried lunch she would use the factory’s sewing machine to make clothes. “I was the envy of other co-workers. I had new clothes to wear every three days; I made all of them by myself”, Lai Ha says proudly.
Working at the Workers’ Union
In those days, many co-workers were afraid of new styles of dresses. Their wages were counted by the pieces they produced, and new styles required adaptation so that there would be less income for the first few days when styles changed. On the contrary, Lai Ha loved changes, since this meant she could learn making more dress styles. With her hard work, Lai Ha eventually worked in positions requiring the highest skills, to create sewing samples for the whole factory to follow and to be mass-produced. “I often persuade my co-workers that they should not work only at one position. When we are 30 years-old, we are not so physically fit anymore, and if we know only one job, it is easy to be eliminated!”, but the co-workers only had their eyes on how much they could earn at the present moment, and did not take Lai Ha’s advice. Before they could get old, in the 1990’s, Hong Kong factories started to move north across the border, and many workers were stranded, with salaries owed to them. By that time, Lai Ha has alr dy left the garment factories and was working as a full-time officer in the Workers’ Union, to fight for workers’ rights. “Having worked a whole eighteen years in the garment factory, there was a struggle upon leaving; but at that time the union needed people who had a will to do things”, Lai Ha said. Having joined the union, Lai Ha still made use of her sewing skills and designed and sewed shopping-bags for the union to raise money, and she also sewed suits and dresses for her family. As Li Ha said, clothing for her is a life-long obsession.
