One year ago this month, a powerful earthquake in Mexico City killed more than nine thousand people.

Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs because of the massive damage.

Among those hardest hit by the quake were women garment workers, who worked in sweatshops concentrated in the heart of Mexico City.

One year after the earthquake, Lucie Conger reports that some of the forty thousand seamstresses who lost their jobs are changing their attitudes about work.

On the fifth floor of a small offfice building in the heart of downtown, some thirty garment workers are back at work.

Just as before the earthquake they're working on an assembly line.

Each woman is specialized in one operation, like sweing cuffs or puttiing buttonholes on a fancy cocktail dress.

But there the similarities with their past work end.

The women here on Uruguay Street are running their own cooperative with machines they got from their former employer in a settlement when he closed his factory which was damaged by the earthquake.

About fifteen groups of women have formed cooperatives, setting up shop wigh equipment they received instead of an indemnification when factory owners shut down their former places of work.

Running their own business has meant big changes for these women.

All thirty-five women in this cooperative agree that they prefer working without a boss looking over their shoulder.

For Juana Arias, who used to cut patterns for dresses, not having a boss has given her the chance to develop new skills.

"Well, sometimes it's my job to solve some problems. I decide when to buy things.

For example, when we run out of thread and needles, that's my job to decide on things that are needed."

At the same time, since they set up the cooperative five months ago, the woman have had the chance to realize that the old system of working for the patron or boss man had its good points.

At the cooperative, the women only get paid when they complete a factory order.

Last Friday came and went without a pay-check.

Their incomes is low now, Because they're assembling dresses instead of earning more by producing ready-made dress of their own design.

There are other concerns as well.

While the seamstresses are grateful for the loans and technical assistance that they're getting from a Catholic Church Foundation,

they worry about repaying the loans and keeping up with operating expenses like rent and phone bills.

And leaving behind the tradition of having a boss is a difficult transition for Mexican women who are accustomed from childhood to responding to male authority figures.

Paula Socer, a leader at another seamstresses' cooperative.

"They don't like us to tell them what to do.

Since we are all owners, they think that we each can do what we want."

Other garment workers are still working under the control.

But after ther earthquake, many of the women began to question their position at work when they saw some factory owners moving more quickly to salvage machinery and cash boxes than to rescue trapped workers.

Dramatic events like these moved some four thousand seamstresses to join the september 19th Garment Workers' Union.

The women blocked traffic and marched to the presidential palace before getting official recognition as an independent union not forced to affiliate with the ruling party.

Through the union, the seamstresses are demanding that factory owners respect the law by giving overtime pay for extra work, allowing workers to take vacation, and providing standard benefits.

So far, nine factory owners have signed agreements with the union to guarantee workers' rights.

But the union continues to face hurdles.

Maria Hernandez worked in an illegal, clandestine sweatshop before the earthquake and is now press chief for the union.

"The bosses and the soldout unions are always pressuring the women who work here, threatening them, saying that they're going to close down the business, but that if they continue to organize, one day something is going to happen to their family.

And then they start firing people.

They offer them money to turn in the ones who are organizing, to tell them who the leaders are."

Manuela Purras is a seamstress who was fired in May for organizing the thirty-five women at the factory where she had worked for thirteen years.

Today she's operating a small business on the edge of the empty paved lot where the union has its offices in temporary quarters provided by the municipal government.

Here, alongside a busy thoroughfare, Manuela spends her days cooking tacos and selling them to passers-by to make a living until she can go back to work.

The union is fighting to get Manuela and her co-workers reinstated in their jobs.

Manuela Purras: "We've joined the union mostly because we want to see improvements in our working conditions.

I think that it will help us.

Well, economically it is helping us, and legally too, because at least until now it's not of those soldout unions."

The garment workers still have an uphill battle to fight, to secure a decent living for themselves and their children.

In the year since the earthquake, they've make important strides in assuring that they get a fair shake.

University students, lawyers and feminists have joined the seamstresses in their fight to set new terms at the work place.

The creation of new organizations, like cooperatives and unions, and the forging of new alliances between educated elites and popular groups may be the most lasting legacy wrought from the devastation left by the earthquake.

For National Public Radio, this is Lucie Conger in Mexico City.