O.C. Garment Raids End With Record Seizure

Capping a week of raids on garment makers and Vietnamese immigrants’ homes, labor officials on Friday made what they described as the biggest-ever seizure of illegally sewn clothing at an Orange County house.

Federal and state agents raided 28 locations, including 11 homes, in the county, said King Cheung, a state deputy labor commissioner. The last was a single-story stucco home in Santa Ana with peeling trim paint and dust-encrusted blinds. Filling the house and garage were large plastic bags, stuffed with partially sewn women’s blouses and long dresses. More bags sat outside, between the house and a wall in a makeshift shed roofed with plastic signs.

Labor officials hauled off 64 bags of clothing. They said a normal raid on a home might turn up four or five such bags. Authorities also found six sewing machines, including four sophisticated factory-style models, in the house and garage.

Because of the potential for wage and safety violations, federal law bans the sewing of women’s garments at private homes, and state law bans home work on any garments.

Authorities found one worker at the home, Hieu Thi Vo. Through an interpreter, she said she was the only person sewing there. She said she had begun sewing in January and wasn’t aware that such home work is against the law. She and workers at other homes weren’t cited.

Cheung said contractors who employed the workers at the raided locations were cited for 22 violations of minimum wage, record-keeping, workers’ compensation, child labor and other laws. Brian Taverner, head of the U.S. Labor Department’s Santa Ana wage and hour office, said the contractor for the work at the Santa Ana house was Green Light Fashions of Long Beach. The clothes bore the label of Nina Piccolino, a medium-size Los Angeles manufacturer.

There was no telephone listing for Green Light. Greg Corzine, a principal in Nina Piccolino, said his company tries to police its contractors and knew nothing about any home work. He declined further comment.

Vo told authorities she worked from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., with breaks for lunch and dinner, at least 45 hours a week, and had been paid $850 a month in cash. That is less than the minimum wage of $4.75 an hour. Another worker had been paid a piece rate for sewing garments that worked out to about $3.43 an hour, Cheung said.

Efforts to enforce the law against home work increased in recent years after 72 Thai workers were found in an El Monte home working under what investigators said were slave conditions.

But violations appear to be increasing, particularly among Orange County’s large Vietnamese community.

Many Vietnamese have taken on such work to supplement welfare payments and, with welfare cutbacks on the horizon, are more likely to do so, said Thien Cao, a Garden Grove police liaison with the Vietnamese community.

Edna Bonacich, a UC Riverside professor who has studied the garment industry extensively, said contractors are caught in a double bind. An exodus of garment work to Mexico and other cheap-labor locales has meant less work in Southern California. At the same time, she said, retailers are increasing pressure to hold down costs.

“All of this leads to more illegality,” she said. “And the bottom of the illegal food chain leads to home work.”