I have returned to working for this union after about six or seven years. I have been back working for UNITE HERE for three and a half months. In that time, we've had two plant closures. One has basically just been announced, and we're probably looking at 400 or 500 workers. That's just in the time that I have been here.
In terms of whether or not they'll have a next contract so that they will be able to start literally the month afterwards, some of these manufacturing operations run so close that it's sometimes even hard to predict which ones are going to go down. But if we're looking at an average of 500 workers every three months, start counting backwards.
The fact of the matter is that it's actually more than that. Those are the manufacturers that we represent. Again, the apparel council estimates that about 25% of this industry is unionized. Lots of the other small owner-operator microshops, as they call them, have less than five workers we don't hear about, but they do account for a large number of workers as well.