SEAMSTRESSES PLAY KEY ROLE
Co-op of 300 women making masks
Long before the virus shuttered storefronts across Montreal, entire blocks of the east end had fallen into an economic death spiral.
The pumps at a Ste-catherine St. gas station are dry and cracking, a brick building that once housed a bank is littered with graffiti and the only open shop on one block is a discount store called Dollard Donald.
But a revolution is brewing at the eastern edge of Hochelaga-maisonneuve. It has brought together more than 300 women from across ethnic and linguistic divides to make the masks that will protect tens of thousands of Quebecers from the deadly coronavirus.
“We were making summer dresses before this started. There were just four of us,” said Camille Goyette-gingras, the co-founder of Coop Couturières Pop. “Now we have 115 full-time members, earning a fair wage and doing their part to fight COVID-19.”
Goyette- Gingras sits at a sewing station in the middle of the pinkwalled workshop, surrounded by about 40,000 masks bundled in bags of 250. On Thursday, they’ll deliver 10,000 to the city of Montreal so they can be handed out to citizens in especially hard-hit neighbourhoods.
The co-op supplies nurses, orderlies and other front-line workers with masks and sells whatever is left to the public for $4 each.
After Premier François Legault called on all Quebecers Tuesday to wear a mask outside in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, the demand for reusable masks soared, according to pharmacies and retailers across the city.
“It’s been a whirlwind since we first put out a call for seamstresses (on March 23)," Goyette-gingras said. “Our Facebook message went out in French and English, we translated it into Mandarin. We reached out to the North African seamstresses in Little Maghreb and pretty soon the responses came pouring in.”
These women had been working in the trenches of Montreal’s fashion district. They spent their days hunched over a rattling machine, straining their backs and forearms to churn out dress after dress in exchange for no benefits and little more than minimum wage.
“This isn’t a job where you can just stop and check your phone,” said Goyette- Gingras, who worked in the fashion industry for years. “Speed is the name of the game.”
It is an aging workforce that disproportionately employs immigrant labourers with little to no job stability. But with demand for masks soaring, Goyette-gingras saw an opportunity for a better way forward.
Because it’s a co-op, each member is a partner in the business. They earn about $1.10 per mask and produce roughly 30 an hour in homes and tiny workshops across the city. Each Thursday, they drop the masks off at the storefront on Ste-catherine St. E. by the thousands.
Aside from the 115 full-time members, there are about 250 parttime seamstresses on the team and the co-op has fielded some 5,200 requests since this started. What encourages Goyette- Gingras is the amount of young women getting involved in a trade that, until recently, was aging itself into irrelevance.
“I used to run a factory where every one of my employees was over 50,” said Annie Dupont, another co-founder of the business. “Everyone wants to be a designer in fashion, but it’s the skilled labour of seamstresses that keeps everything together. We want to make it cool again and I think it’s catching on.”
Right now the co-op can make about 40,000 masks a week, but Goyette- Gingras says she’ll probably be able to scale that up to 70,000 soon. She says the work has been non-stop but is worth every drop of sweat she has poured into it.
“Within a one-month period, we’ve proven that a fair model can work and help people on the front lines,” she said. “I’m proud of what we’ve done.”