Sweatshop Bill Puts Heat on Manufacturers

Assemblyman Tom Hayden plans to introduce legislation this week aimed at cleaning up sweatshops by making garment manufacturers more responsible for the treatment of the workers who sew their clothing.

“It’s like a Dickens novel,” the Santa Monica Democrat said of ongoing wage, hour and child labor abuses in the Orange County and Los Angeles garment industries. “You have primitive, 19th-Century sweatshops underpinning an economy that is super-opulent, with the rich being in most cases completely unaware of the source of their clothes.”

Hayden, the chairman of the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment, said he would introduce the bill by Friday, the deadline for new legislation. But even as he began drumming up support for the measure, he warned that new laws alone would fail unless consumers and retailers begin applying conscience to their fashion sense.

“If the people who care about animal rights would only add workers’ rights to their immediate agenda, you’d have quite a movement going on the West Side (of Los Angeles),” Hayden said.

Officials with two garment trade groups said the state should spend enough money to enforce existing laws before passing new ones.

The last round of garment industry reforms, passed in 1980, required sewing shop owners to register with the state and pass an exam covering state labor laws, said Joe Rodriguez, executive director of the Garment Contractors Assn. of Southern California. The licensing fees were to have been earmarked for enforcement, but have instead been siphoned off into the general fund, Rodriguez said.

Bernie Brown, president of the Coalition of Apparel Industries of California, said his group has supported a wide array of reform bills but warned that over-regulation would doom the $6-billion-a-year Los Angeles apparel industry.

“We are trying, very desperately trying to clean up the act in our industry,” Brown said. “(But) if indeed there’s a liability act we can’t live with, we’ll just move out of California.”

In the past year, federal and state regulators have uncovered a nest of sweatshops paying workers as little as $1 an hour to sew clothing bound for Southern California’s priciest department stores.

Labor inspectors found that one 7-year-old boy had spent hundreds of hours helping his mother, a Mexican immigrant, sew designer clothing in their Santa Ana home for wages that averaged $1.45 an hour.

But Brown said publicity given such dramatic cases has obscured the fact that most apparel businesses are law-abiding.

Still, some officials and labor leaders say the problem with existing labor laws is that they make it relatively simple to fine sweatshop bosses, but nearly impossible to punish manufacturers who profit from the sweatshop system by having their clothing sewn at rock-bottom prices.

Sewing shop owners complain that some manufacturers pay them so little per garment that they cannot pay their workers the $4.25-per-hour minimum wage and survive. But legitimate manufacturers, who may have up to 100 sewing contractors and subcontractors scattered across Southern California, say they haven’t the means to police the labor practices of dozens of independent businesses.

The U.S. Department of Labor in Santa Ana, which began a crackdown on Orange County sweatshops last summer, has tried to attack the problem with a dual approach: requiring sweatshop owners who underpaid workers to repay the back wages, and using the 1938 “hot goods” law to prevent manufacturers from shipping across state lines clothing that was made in violation of federal labor law.

Since last summer, the department has filed suit against nine suspected offenders and obtained consent judgments from four of them. As part of the legal proceeding, the department is for the first time holding manufacturers accountable for the abuses of their suppliers.

Hayden’s bill would take a similar approach on the state level by strengthening the “joint liability” provisions of state law.

The California law does make manufacturers liable for labor violations by their contractors, but only if the manufacturer knew of the abuses.

“We want to define (liability) in such a way as to give the manufacturer an incentive to know,” Hayden said.

The exact wording of the liability clause was still being hammered out by lawyers Tuesday.

Even if the law passes, Hayden said, “This is such an entrenched problem, and has been going on for so many decades, that people will find ways to avoid the letter and spirit of any law like this. So we need a broader strategy.”

Among other things, the law should provide for disclosure of the names of companies cited for abusive labor practices, he said.

“The consumer has to start asking the retailer, ‘Who makes these clothes and where are they made?’ and have a sense of morality in their clothing selection,” Hayden said. “And the manufacturer has to know he’ll be liable all the way down the line for labor violations. That’s the goal.”

Brown said there is no question that a few unscrupulous manufacturers squeeze their contractors and then turn a blind eye when the contractors underpay their workers.

“They go out and shop around, and they bleed (the contractor) to the last dime until they go out of business,” Brown said. “In many cases they are taken advantage of, there is no doubt about it.”