Clean Up the Sweatshops

Sweatshops are generations old in the garment industry, where extreme competitiveness among clothing manufacturers melds with the needs of immigrants to scrape out even the meanest of livings. Traditional enforcement has focused on unannounced sweeps by inspectors from one sweatshop to another, looking for wage, child labor, home sewing, overtime and other violations.

But, as a recent Times series pointed out, many sweatshops that had been concentrated in downtown Los Angeles are moving to the suburbs and Orange County. That makes the task of those charged with protecting such workers harder still.

Overwhelmingly female Latina and Asian immigrants, they toil either in small industrial parks or rent sewing machines to work in their own homes. Few know that commercial home sewing violates both state and federal laws. Nearly all work for far less than the minimum wage. Some get their children to help. But workers seldom speak up about wages or working conditions for fear of being fired. Some also fear deportation; still others are silent because they illegally supplement their incomes with welfare payments.

The system that breeds such misery must be attacked on many fronts. Gov. George Deukmejian--who had dismantled Cal/OSHA before it was reinstated last November by a vote of the people--has never made enforcement of labor laws a priority. So the state must do more to enforce laws already on the books to protect workers, especially those who work at home.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division in Santa Ana has dusted off a 1938 “hot goods” statute forbidding shipment across state lines of any product made in violation of federal labor laws. Using the law, authorities are cracking down on four Los Angeles manufacturers who were shipping to retailers “hot goods” made in Orange County sweatshops that allegedly violated minimum wage and other laws. That’s a good start.

The Bush Administration also must abandon its effort to lift a 47-year-old ban on sewing women’s clothes in the home. Garment union officials, testifying on the proposal in Los Angeles last spring, said that if the ban were lifted, even more women would be vulnerable to unscrupulous and exploitative contractors.

There is another way to get at the problem: Manufacturers who knowingly cooperate with contractors who hire workers at illegally low wages should be publicly exposed. Then retail buyers--who have no other way of telling under what circumstances the clothes they buy are made--can exert pressure on the manufacturers to clean up their act.