COMMENTARY : Manufacturers and Retailers Must Be Liable : Self-regulation and ‘honor codes’ won’t ensure that labor laws are followed all along the line in the garment industry.

The El Monte factory where Thai immigrants were found in virtual slavery sewing garments for major U.S. manufacturers and retailers is just the tip of the iceberg. While the El Monte operation was certainly more egregious than most, paying far below the minimum wage for 17-hour workdays, sweatshops flourish throughout the garment industry’s underground economy.

In Los Angeles, most garment workers receive less than the $4.25-per-hour minimum wage and no overtime compensation. Even in San Francisco, a city whose labor law violations are among the lowest in the industry due to strict law enforcement, nearly 40% of workers receive no overtime pay for 10- to 12-hour days. Only with the revelation of involuntary servitude behind barbed wire, however, has State Labor Commissioner Victoria Bradshaw admitted that current state and federal laws are incapable of curbing rampant abuses in the garment industry. Unfortunately, her cynical and misguided response is to call for private industry self-regulation.

While Bradshaw can be commended for her prosecutorial stance against the manufacturers and retailers who benefited from the El Monte factory, the same can’t be said for her commitment to holding them liable for conditions they create throughout the industry by demanding low contract prices.

Last year, Bradshaw opposed legislation passed by the Assembly and Senate that would have required overtime pay and discouraged manufacturers from contracting with factories paying less than minimum wage. In vetoing the legislation, her boss, Gov. Pete Wilson, blamed the exploited workers for the sweatshop conditions and suggested that harsher immigration laws would somehow stop labor law violations.

With the Bradshaw-Wilson team enforcing state labor laws, it’s little wonder that the greatest profiteers from sweatshops, manufacturers and retailers, have little incentive to change their practices.

Indeed, many manufacturers and retailers who were selling garments from the El Monte factory already subscribe to self-regulating devices like codes of conduct. Montgomery Ward, one of the major retailers scrutinized by state officials for its dealings with the El Monte factory, says it will not contract with those who employ “slave, prison or child labor, which violates state and federal law.” That policy, however, did little to halt the flow of garments from indentured women and men to Montgomery Ward before the factory was exposed by government officials. Only with the threat of liability for wages are the retailers enforcing their codes of conduct. Without state and public scrutiny, the codes of conduct are little more than public-relations ploys.

Officials have touted state and federal law that allows confiscation of goods produced in violation of labor laws as a way to hold manufacturers and retailers liable. But what use is confiscation when virtually all the goods made in the last seven years already have been shipped and sold?

Only by holding manufacturers and retailers jointly and fully liable for labor law violations will they begin to show enough concern about what occurs in their contract shops to put an end to abuses like those found in the El Monte garrison. How many more El Montes must there be before the governor and his labor commissioner see that?