Garment Firm Is Hit With 17 Safety Charges : Workplace: Clothes Connection is appealing the citations. INS also is investigating the company.

While unloading boxes last year at Clothes Connection, a 33-year-old laborer named Jose had his big toe crushed by a forklift. The company, a garment manufacturer, sent the injured worker for treatment at a nearby clinic, where a physician dressed the wound.

The toe developed gangrene, however, and a month later it was amputated. Yet when Cal/OSHA paid a surprise visit to Clothes Connection in late December, safety inspectors learned that the company had never reported the incident.

Although California law requires immediate notification of fatalities or serious injuries, Jose’s case never was investigated. His was one of 135 accidents last year at Clothes Connection that required medical attention, which health and safety officials say is a large number for a company of its size.

The company, which employs about 1,300, had no record of more than half of those incidents, the agency found after analyzing independent medical reports. Failing to report and log injuries was among 17 violations that the state’s occupational safety and health administration has alleged against Clothes Connection, fining the company about $13,000.

Company President and owner Sharon Stephen has refused to comment on the citations, which Clothes Connection is appealing. Rick Stephen, her father and owner of California Connection, a sister company in Los Angeles, said Monday that he was unaware of the Cal/OSHA inspection.

But Cal/OSHA’s thick file on the company and interviews with workers and union representatives trying to organize at Clothes Connection paint a grim picture of a factory where hundreds of immigrant workers are toiling for minimum wage under harsh supervision and unhealthy, unsafe conditions.

Labor law violations in the garment industry are hardly new. In the last two years, federal and state labor officials have assessed more than $8 million in fines against hundreds of garment companies in the state, most of them in Southern California, for abusing minimum-wage, overtime, child-labor and other regulations.

Few of those companies have been as large as Clothes Connection, and few have received as many serious citations from Cal/OSHA. In 1994, Cal/OSHA inspected 182 garment makers in the state. The average fine per company was $1,145.

Clothes Connection, whose workers are mostly Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants, is also being investigated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency confirmed. Earlier this month the company fired more than 200 workers--including Jose--according to people familiar with the company. Those sources said the firings were triggered by the INS investigation and the employees’ inability to produce work papers.

Clothes Connection manufactures mainly women’s blouses that are sold to discount retailers, including Kmart and Wal-Mart.

Cal/OSHA officials first visited the company on Dec. 28 after receiving a complaint from a worker. Inspectors made three subsequent visits in January.

Inspectors said the company had no health and safety specialist on site, not even a nurse’s station, which is not required by Cal/OSHA regulations but is customary at large industrial sites.

Cal/OSHA officials reported that Clothes Connection managers said they did not have the state forms on which companies are required to record injuries, for 1990, 1991 or 1992. The logs for 1993 and 1994 were incomplete.

The personnel manager at Clothes Connection said that, because of improved safety programs, there was just one injury in the second half of last year, according to Cal/OSHA inspectors. The inspectors said they also contacted Clothes Connection’s workers’ compensation insurer, Pacific Rim in Woodland Hills, which verified that the garment firm had not filed any injury claims in the second half of 1994.

But reports that Cal/OSHA obtained from nearby East Edinger Medical Clinic, where Jose was sent and where Clothes Connection has an account, show that 75 employees received treatment--some more than once--from July to December last year. The most serious appeared to be the amputation, although eye lesions, sprained ankles, rashes and allergic reactions were also treated by East Edinger doctors.

Most of the workers at the factory earn minimum wage or slightly more, with no medical insurance coverage or other benefits, employees and union representatives said.

Just how many of those workers are illegal immigrants is not known. INS officials declined to comment on the case. People familiar with the company, however, said that immigration officials first visited Clothes Connection in mid-1994 and that, in a more recent visit, the company was supplied a list of workers whose resident or work status could not be verified.

Clothes Connection faces penalties of as much as $1,000 per worker if INS inspectors can prove that it knowingly hired or employed unauthorized workers.

Allegations of labor abuses by the company have spurred the United Food and Commercial Workers union to launch an organizing effort. Last week the union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Clothes Connection managers of threatening workers. The company has not yet responded to the union’s charges, a labor board spokesman said.

Jose, who asked that his last name not be used, expressed bitterness toward his former employer. He blames the company for his injury, which he says occurred because the driver of the forklift had not been properly trained.

In an interview, he said he still has difficulty walking. “I feel betrayed,” he said.

Times correspondent Hope Hamashige contributed to this report.