O.C. Garment Industry Is Target of Crackdown : Labor: More apparel contractors are exploiting job-hungry immigrants by illegally giving them at-home work.

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 labor and safety abuses 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.

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

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

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

“It’s a significant problem” in Orange County, said Jose Millan, the state’s senior deputy labor commissioner in Los Angeles. “It’s gotten worse because you’ve got so many more people willing to do this to earn a living.”

Stopping the practice is difficult, said a labor inspector in Orange County who specializes in the Vietnamese community, because “employer and employee both benefit from it.”

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

In clamping down on the practice, state labor officials have gotten 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 letters 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 department was approving that type of license but that, in any case, screening out garment work is not part of his department’s job. “The only thing we do is make sure (home work) complies with the zoning code,” he said. “Garment work isn’t specifically prohibited by the ordinance.”

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

That people are able to get permits for home garment work is a big concern, labor officials say, because, along with ads for home work found in ethnic newspapers, it leads 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 lamp, and strewn on the floor were spools of thread.

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

Brian Taverner, head of the U.S. Labor Department’s wages and hours division in Santa Ana, said that many people legitimately employed by garment contractors take work home to make extra money after hours. 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 makers in Orange County for 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 manufacturers as well as contractors to solve the home work problem. But in many cases, the workers are reluctant to disclose who has given them the work.

The problem is getting worse “because contractors are getting squeezed by the manufacturers,” said Steve Nutter, the western regional director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. “So they’re trying to save money by cheating workers, and they can cheat them the most at their houses.”