They powered Montreal's garment industry. One woman is trying to honour them
4 immigrant women share their stories of stitching a foundation for their families
The hands that operated Ida del Pinto Mosesso's bra manufacturing machine are elegant in her old age but riddled with arthritis after four decades of work in Montreal's garment district.
Mosesso's right index finger bends away from her, immortalizing the curve the underwire followed as she assembled bra after bra for eight hours a day.
"Now I can see the aftermath," she said, gesturing to her inner thighs. They also curve out from years of straddling the powerful machine.
"Several times at night when I sleep I remember the bras," she said, chuckling. "It's something that's stayed in my memory."
One day, in the late '90s, she showed up to Smart Brassieres Inc. for her shift only to find the doors locked. Just like that, the factory, like hundreds before it on the once booming Chabanel Street, was no more. It defaulted in 1999, according to Quebec's business registry.
Mosesso, who had spent 35 years doing piecework for the company (she worked at a different factory for another five years,) says she was never compensated for her last three weeks of work and lost her vacation pay.
For the last couple years, Margherita Morsella has collected testimonials from Mosesso and other former garment industry workers and used them to push forward the Women of Steel project, or Le Donne d'Acciaio in Italian.
It's an initiative she runs with a committee of women and community organizations that aims to promote and commission artwork celebrating the contribution of immigrant women to Canada's apparel industry.
"In our Italian community they give homage to all these business people, all these politicians [but] these women that are their mothers and their grandmothers, the women that raised them and made them become the successful people that they are today, they were never really recognized," Morsella said.
A first mural was inaugurated on Oct. 18 at the women's centre she helped create in 1978, the Centre des femmes solidaires et engagées (CFSE) in Ahuntsic, the neighbourhood in northern Montreal that borders the garment district.
Another is being planned in Little Italy, and Morsella's ultimate goal is to commission a statue that will stand the test of time.
"Factories have closed, they've become lost, they've been transformed into something else and it's like forgetting history," she said.
For most of the 20th century, the clothing industry was the largest source of manufacturing jobs in Montreal, says Melanie Leavitt, a director with the Mile End Memories historical society. She offers walking tours along St-Laurent Boulevard, tracing the history of the garment industry and the women who organized the workers within it.
"Montreal still is [Canada's] capital of the clothing industry, but it is just a fraction of what it once was," said Leavitt.
Another thing that's remained consistent is the workforce primarily being immigrant women, she added. At first, it was Eastern European and Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s, then Italians, Greeks and Portuguese after the Second World War and Latin Americans and groups from different parts of Asia from the end of the century until present day.
As one group built a financial foundation for their children, they exited the industry and left space for newer immigrants who had yet to learn French and English.
"This was one of the few workplaces that [new immigrants] were able to find employment," said Leavitt."Once there's a presence of your community in these factories, that then becomes a built-in network."
Sandra Lorusso found work at the Underwear Mills factory within a couple months of moving to Montreal from Italy in May 1967 after being referred by her sister-in-law. She's friends with Mosesso — though that happened later in life playing bocce — and also participated in the Women of Steel project.
Lorusso talks about her work at the factory with pride. She retired four years ago at age 69, saying that was mainly to keep her retired husband company at home.
"I liked what I did for work. I was good there. I can't say I was unhappy," she said.
Before her retirement, she was still able to add a top stitch up to 1,000 pairs of men's underwear a day.
"When you're there [in the factory] you don't think about it. But slowly when it comes into your mind you think, 'My God 42 years of my life — I spent almost all of it there than with my family,'" she said.
"We're immigrants but we did a lot for Canada. And in the end we weren't really appreciated for what we gave."
Morsella saw that first-hand working as a cutter's assistant when she was 16. The experience was cut short when she was mistakenly handed her male colleague's pay stub and found out he was getting paid more than her for the same job.
"It kind of like, you know, awoke me," said Morsella, who quit and later went on to form the CFSE's first committee along with six other young women to help Italian immigrants navigate living and working in Quebec.
Now a practising lawyer, she credits her mother's 30 years in the garment industry for the opportunity to do something else with her life.
"Their work is taken for granted," she said. "It's so symbolic of how women are always taken for granted."
Decline of the industry
When Josefina Hernandez started working at Montreal's Peerless Clothing factory in 1984, the garment industry was already sharply declining. She had just moved to Montreal from the Dominican Republic and was soon joined by her four children.
"You could see people's desperation because it wasn't easy having an income for who knows how many years and all of a sudden the company leaves to Mexico, China and who knows where else," said Hernandez. "It was sad."
With the globalization of trade, hundreds of companies were struggling to stay afloat competing with cheaper imports while mitigating the recession of the early '80s, explained Leavitt.
Like Mosesso, Hernandez's body bears scars from her time at the factory — in the shape of a "little worm" along her wrist just under her thumb.
It's the aftermath of a surgery to treat calcific tendinitis from sewing buttons on 426 to 513 pairs of suit sleeves per day, five days a week. That's what Quebec's Commission des lésions professionnelles found after Hernandez filed a workplace injury complaint in 1998.
"The more production you did, the better your cheque," she said.
As a single mother of four, Hernandez often ate lunch at her desk to maximize her pay, since she was paid around $3.50 to $4 hourly.
Hernandez changed jobs from sewing buttons to steam pressing shoulder pads when her wrist became too uncomfortable, but then developed asthma.
After 16 years at the factory, she left.
"I couldn't stand it anymore, I was feeling too ill," she said.
Peerless Clothing ended up compensating Hernandez for the workplace injury. She says she doesn't hold any hard feelings toward the company. She came to Montreal with four kids who all went on to become professionals, and is now the matriarch in a family of 42 people.
"I'm very grateful [to the company] but I'm also not dumb," she said. "Because I'm grateful to the company doesn't mean I'll let myself get stepped all over."
The garment industry saw an acceleration in its decline after 2005, said Leavitt. Today, most of Canada's clothing manufacturing jobs are still in Montreal but they barely add up to 16,000, according to a 2022 report by the non-profit Mmode.
The industry is no longer as visible as it used to be when several Montreal streets were lined with factories and flooded with workers. But that doesn't mean its workers have to retreat into history as well.
Morsella is working to ensure that isn't the case.
"We want to create momentum," she said.
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