Sweatshops Won’t End Till Workers Have Power : *Labor: Garment makers will flout wage and safety laws unless unions protect employees.
A couple of weeks ago, state investigators announced that they had uncovered five cases of illegal industrial homework, some connected with contractors who sew garments for Guess? Inc. Guess has an agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor to monitor its contractors for violations and should have found these problems. What went wrong?
Imagine you are a garment worker in one of the thousands of small sewing factories in Los Angeles. You are an immigrant, a young woman with two small children. You work on piece rate, making pennies for each seam. You work from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. Your employer, a garment contractor, wants to pay you strictly by the piece, although the law mandates that he guarantee at least minimum wage and overtime. He devises illegal payment schemes. He gets you to punch the time clock an hour after you arrive at work and two hours before you leave, paying you the rest in cash. Or he changes your piece rate at the end of the day to make it look like you’ve been paid overtime. Or he makes you take work home to finish, off the books.
The manufacturer, such as Guess or Calvin Klein, sends inspectors who are either his own employees or hired from a private “compliance firm,” like Cal Safety Compliance. Before they arrive, your boss warns you: “Don’t say anything about not getting paid properly. Tell them you are guaranteed minimum wage and overtime, have never been paid in cash and know nothing of homework. If you don’t, we won’t get their work anymore and we’ll all be out of a job. Don’t betray me if you know what’s good for you.”
So you keep silent.
Now let’s examine the dynamics from the manufacturer’s viewpoint. You have constant deadlines to meet in the pressure-cooker world of fashion. You also need to keep labor costs down to a minimum to survive in the competitive global economy, which is the main reason why you use contractors in the first place: They keep the price of labor low. The Department of Labor is insisting that you bring your contractors into compliance. You send inspectors and there are hints of problems--a worker reveals that she has seen homework; piece rates on some tickets have been amended in pencil; the number of time cards don’t add up to the number of workers. What are your options?
Unfortunately, only one has teeth: stop sending your work to that factory. You know that your production schedule will be seriously hurt if you do, and you’ll lose money and retailer good will. You also know that finding a new contractor who can meet your needs isn’t easy, and chances are he will use the same tricks as the last one. And you suspect that he has to use them to make a profit, given the prices you pay him. So you are very reluctant to make good on the threat to stop using that contractor.
These are the harsh realities of self-monitoring in the apparel industry. Contractors use every trick in the book to hide violations. Can a manufacturer’s relatively untrained inspectors ferret out the problems? Can “professional” compliance inspectors, whose credentials are not checked by anyone, do any better? Meanwhile, the manufacturer’s only real sanction is to stop sending work, an action that ends up further victimizing the workers by leaving them without jobs. The Department of Labor, whose efforts to get manufacturers to take responsibility for conditions in their contractors’ shops were well-intentioned, doesn’t have the staff to monitor the monitoring. And the workers, who have everything to lose by blowing the whistle, for the most part dare not complain.
And so illegal homework was, once again, found connected with shops that supposedly were monitored by Guess and Cal Safety.
The truth is that the only effective monitor is a worker who can report violations without fear of retaliation--namely, one protected by a union contract. Unionization would enable garment workers to gain power. It is their powerlessness and exploitability that lie at the root of the sweatshop problem.
Industry leaders fear worker empowerment, because it would drive up the price of labor. But how can you eliminate sweatshops without paying workers a decent wage? All efforts, governmental or private, that avoid granting workers the power to protect their own interests are doomed.
