This is a photograph of my great grandparents, they were garment workers in sweatshops – and it’s my garment worker great-grandmother wearing a shirtwaist, so that’s why it’s here in the Open Archive. I knew my great-grandfather – he lived to be 96, and I was 16 when he died, so I have a very clear sense of what those lives were like from his stories. He had walked, as a teenager, from Eastern Europe to England, and worked in sweatshops in the East End, and then took a boat from Liverpool to Canada. I feel enormously proud of the kind of labor that they did.

Tags: Garment Industry, Immigrant, Labor, Women