Orange County Home Garment Work Targeted in Crackdown : Labor: Contractors and private homes are raided in an effort to curb a widespread but illegal practice.

Targeting Orange County’s vast underground network of home sewing operations, labor and welfare fraud inspectors this week are sweeping private residences and apparel contractors suspected of giving their employees work to take home.

The crackdown is part of a much broader effort by state and federal officials to curb abuses of labor and safety laws in Southern California’s garment industry, which has been growing rapidly in recent years amid retailers’ demands that clothing orders be filled more quickly. That growth has spurred intense competition among garment contractors, some of whom have tried to undercut rivals and meet the increased demand by tapping an immigrant community hungry for work.

While apparel work at home has long been prevalent in Los Angeles County and to a lesser degree in the San Francisco Bay Area, inspectors say the problem has become acute in Orange County. Many hard-pressed immigrants and refugees, especially in the county’s large Vietnamese community, are sewing at home to supplement income from other jobs and, in some cases, welfare payments, analysts say.

“Why is home work growing?” asked a labor inspector in Orange County who specializes in the Vietnamese community. “Employer and employee both benefit from it.”

Details of the sweeps taking place this week were not available Thursday. Jose Millan, the state’s senior deputy labor commissioner in Los Angeles, said about 40 federal, state and county inspectors are expected to raid more than 80 garment businesses and private homes, many of them in Orange County but some in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. They are expected to issue fines against contractors totaling more than $250,000.

Marianne Blank of the Cross Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove, which has helped thousands of Southeast Asian refugees find jobs, said home garment work “is just spreading unbelievably.”

Under state law, home garment work for pay is illegal. But on top of that, inspectors say, those who are sewing, cutting or doing other apparel work at home typically are paid only a fraction of the minimum wage and sometimes toil under sweatshop conditions.

Yet when clamping down on those practices, state labor officials got an unpleasant surprise: In the past year, 18 private homes in Anaheim and Santa Ana that were busted for doing illegal garment work produced business licenses from those cities, Millan said.

“It’s sad,” Millan said. “They’re saying they’ve got a business license from the city, so the business must be legitimate.”

Millan said he recently wrote to officials in Anaheim and Santa Ana asking for a list of those who have been issued business licenses for home garment work. Neither city has responded to his request, he said.

Officials at the business license agencies in Anaheim and Santa Ana said permits for home businesses are cleared with the cities’ planning departments.

John Borrego, senior planner at the Anaheim Planning Department, said he was not aware that his agency has approved these type of licenses, but added that it was not his department’s job to screen out garment work. “The only thing we do is make sure (home work) complies with the zoning code, and garment work isn’t specifically prohibited by the ordinance.”

Planning Department officials in Santa Ana could not be reached for comment.

That some people are able to get permits for home garment work is a big concern, labor officials say, because that, like the ads for home work found in ethnic newspapers, tends to lead people unfamiliar with U.S. laws to believe that such work is legal.

One Westminster apartment that inspectors visited Wednesday afternoon had three sewing machines on metal worktables next to the refrigerator. Overhead was a fluorescent light, and spools of thread were strewn on the floor.

The 40-year-old Vietnamese man who answered the door said a man and woman who shared the apartment with him sewed at nights and on weekends to supplement their pay from full-time jobs at electronics plants in Los Angeles. The man, who said he and his family were on welfare, said he did not do any garment work, but has considered it. “I didn’t know it was illegal,” he said through an interpreter.

Brian Taverner, head of the U.S. Labor Department’s wages and hours division in Santa Ana, said many of the people doing home garment work are employed by contractors and take the extra work home with them. Therefore, as the apparel industry has grown, so has home garment work, said Taverner, whose division has been involved in the sweeps.

In a statewide survey earlier this year, about 15% of garment sewing companies were found to be engaging in illegal home work.

As in Southern California as a whole, the number of garment workers in Orange County has climbed steadily in recent years. The Employment Development Department listed 8,700 workers at 511 garment firms in Orange County in the first quarter of 1994, the latest figures available. That was up from 7,725 workers at 470 firms two years earlier.

Federal and state officials have been trying to crack down on contractors as well as manufacturers to solve the home work problem. But in many cases, home workers are reluctant to disclose who has given them the work.