Garment Industry Seeks to Import Foreign Workers

Southern California garment manufacturers are seeking permission from immigration authorities to import workers from foreign countries to replace employees allegedly lost as a result of the new immigration law.

One Los Angeles company has already won preliminary approval to bring in 40 workers from the Philippines for seven months, and six other firms have applied to import seamstresses from that country for a year, according to government officials involved in processing the applications.

Other companies are seeking to bring in workers from Guam and Mexico.

If approved, it would mark the first time large groups of unskilled workers would be legally imported for temporary, non-agricultural labor, according to government officials and immigration lawyers. The garment industry, which employs between 90,000 and 100,000 workers locally, has traditionally imported small numbers of specialized employees--such as silk seamstresses--for permanent jobs.

Union officials oppose the requests on the grounds that, if granted, they would depress wages, entrench poor working conditions and hamper efforts to unionize garment workers.

Josie Gonzales, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer, predicted that if garment companies are permitted to bring in guest workers, hotel and restaurant owners, who also have complained of shortages linked to the immigration law, will follow suit.

Historically, garment manufacturers have had a readily available supply of low-wage workers here, many of whom were illegal aliens. But the employers assert that the situation has changed dramatically in recent months.

“There’s been an actual loss of warm bodies in the area,” said Garth Ward, president of Fashion Sportswear Inc. and of the Garment Contractors Assn. of Southern California Inc., a trade organization. “We’ve dropped from 140 employees to 65.”

Ward and other industry officials say workers have left in anticipation of being fired or in fear of being apprehended by government officials because they are ineligible for amnesty under the new immigration law.

Yong Kim, president of Always Best Co. Inc., which makes knitwear and swimwear on South Main Street in Los Angeles, said he lost 45 workers from El Salvador, Mexico and Nicaragua between May and the end of July and has been unable to find workers here to replace them. The Department of Labor and the INS approved his request to bring in 40 workers from the Philippines, but Kim’s efforts to obtain new employees ran into a snag in Manila.

The State Department has delayed final approval pending receipt of the names of the workers to be imported, according to Jean Arellano of the Los Angeles INS office.

Virginia Son, labor attache of the Philippine Consulate here, said qualified sewing operators in Manila are ready and willing to come to the United States to work.

“We are just fitting into a vacuum,” she said in an interview.

The Garment Contractors Assn. held a seminar on the legal import of workers Tuesday night at the Biltmore. Son and officials from the Labor Department and the INS made presentations at the meeting.

Meanwhile, representatives of two unions that represent garment workers protested outside the hotel. They did not deny that some employees may have left their jobs, but they asserted that the employers could easily find new local workers if they offered better wages and working conditions.

Many garment industry workers in Los Angeles are paid at or slightly above the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, and most receive no additional benefits, such as health insurance or paid vacations, said Steven T. Nutter, regional director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.

“We view the new program (to bring in foreign workers) as an attempt to legitimize and guarantee sweatshop conditions in our industry,” he said. Nutter said the new “guest worker” program bears striking parallels to the controversial “bracero” program used by American agribusiness to bring in foreign workers from 1942 to 1964. The foreign workers received low wages and were often housed in unsanitary labor camps. Unionization of workers was virtually impossible.

The program was abolished in 1964 as a result of protests over working conditions.

‘We think a bracero-type program is incompatible with having good working conditions in the garment industry,” Nutter said.

According to Paul Nelson of the Labor Department’s alien certification unit in San Francisco, before an employer can import temporary workers, the department has to determine that there is a lack of available, qualified workers, that the employer offers prevailing wages and working conditions and that jobs will be temporary.

Nutter noted that the criteria permit employers to bring in garment workers from abroad without having to provide medical insurance or paid vacations because such benefits are not the norms in the industry.

“We should not be importing poverty into this country,” he said.

Nutter said that if the workers did not receive company-paid medical insurance, they would have to utilize public facilities, such as County-USC Medical Center.

For the past several months, manufacturers and contractors in Los Angeles’ $6-billion apparel industry have expressed concern about a diminution of their work force as a result of the new immigration law. A company can be fined from $250 to $10,000 for employing illegal workers under the law.

Mickey Villarreul, a Huntington Park immigration consultant who works frequently with apparel companies, said she knew of three garment firms that had in recent weeks fired 100 or more workers who were not eligible to work under the new law. She said the firms will now try to bring in workers from Mexico.

Labor Department officials in New York and Philadelphia, two large garment manufacturing centers, said they had received no applications yet to bring in temporary garment workers from abroad.

Under the law, a temporary worker can reapply to stay for up to three years with the same employer. Some workers also obtain permanent labor certification if they can demonstrate that there is a particular need for their skill that cannot be met by domestic workers.

The action by Southern California garment firms comes a week after it was disclosed that an U.S. company had arranged a program to import Chinese agricultural field workers to the United States on a temporary basis.

It may take some time before there is a clear definition of what constitutes “temporary work” in the garment industry. Richard Panati, a Labor Department official in Philadelphia, said that in his opinion, garment industry jobs generally are continuous in nature and quite different than agricultural jobs.

“After the crops are harvested, the jobs disappear,” and the workers go back to their native countries, he said. However, Nelson, the San Francisco Labor Department official, said there is some work in the garment industry--for example swimwear manufacture--that has peak seasons comparable to crop harvesting.

“The garment industry will readily admit it has used illegal labor for a long time,” said J.T. Watson, an INS official in Los Angeles who reviews applications for import of temporary workers. “They think they’ll have labor problems in the short run. How many labor certifications (for temporary workers) will get approved I don’t know.

“If they go out and recruit people at a decent wage and decent benefits, they may find people in L.A. I don’t know.”