Garment Industry Targeted in Statewide Crackdown

Fifty state labor-standards inspectors on Wednesday began a two-day sweep through scores of California garment factories in what officials described as an unprecedented effort to discourage widespread child labor, underpayment of wages and workers’ compensation fraud.

The inspectors, many of them fluent in Spanish or Asian languages, began making the unannounced inspections Wednesday morning in Los Angeles and Orange counties, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento.

Lloyd W. Aubry Jr., director of the state’s Department of Industrial Relations, said the investigators were joined by others from divisions specializing in work-safety violations and workers’ compensation.

It was the first time that inspectors had hit all of the state’s major garment centers simultaneously. They will be able to reach only a small fraction of the 5,500 garment factories licensed by the state and the hundreds more that operate illegally.

But state officials said they were trying to send a message to the industry.

“They have to clean up their act,” said Jose Millan, a senior deputy labor commissioner as he watched two other staff members comb through payroll records and question women as they sat at sewing machines in a shop near 7th Street and Maple Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. “There will be more of these sweeps in the coming year,” he said. “Are the companies willing to take the gamble?”

Officials indicated that more than 100 factories, selected either by past citations or tips from informants, will have been inspected by the end of today.

By noon Wednesday, inspections of 21 shops had produced 29 citations for penalties of $239,000.

In past years, state and federal agencies have staged sporadic raids on handfuls of sweatshops in California’s urban centers, often with little effect. Contractors who were driven out of businesses by fines were quickly replaced by new companies. Other firms simply accepted the fines as the cost of doing business. Sweeps of the Los Angeles garment industry--which involved pulling inspectors away from their assignments in other industries--dwindled under state budget pressures.

Regulators say that garment contractors, under intense pressure from manufacturers to keep prices low, routinely exploit a large pool of vulnerable workers, the vast majority of whom do not speak English or do not belong to a union. Legislative efforts to make manufacturers liable for their contractors’ activities have failed.