After El Monte, an Upswing : * Labor: Conditions are better, but unscrupulous independents bear watching.
Two years ago, law enforcement officials burst into a compound in El Monte and found 72 Thai garment workers hunched over sewing machines. Some worked grueling 17-hour days. They were forced to live in squalid conditions, as many as eight adults in a single bedroom. If they tried to escape by scaling barbed wire fences, they were beaten by their employers. They were paid about 70 cents an hour.
Today that El Monte sweatshop is gone and its proprietors are in a federal prison. Most of those 72 people now work in safe conditions for a fair wage.
El Monte pricked the nation’s conscience. Apparel companies increased monitoring of factories that supply their clothing. Consumers began asking hard questions about the source of the clothes they sought to buy.
Government redoubled its efforts. The U.S. Labor Department’s wage and hour division bars anyone from shipping goods made by workers who were denied a minimum wage or fair overtime pay. We also published a list of 34 companies--what we call the industry’s “Trendsetters”--committed to complying with the law and insisting that their cutting and sewing contractors and subcontractors do the same. In April, President Clinton helped cement a landmark agreement among two dozen companies and organizations to adopt an industry code of conduct and to launch new, independent monitoring of work sites.
In Los Angeles, according to one survey, firms with monitoring programs had considerably fewer minimum wage violations--27% compared with 67% of unmonitored shops. Another study found overtime violations in 75% of unmonitored California garment factories but in only 39% of monitored factories.
Since the El Monte incident, the average Los Angeles garment worker has received a 20% pay increase--about $1,800 per year. Thanks to stepped-up enforcement of minimum wage and overtime laws, garment workers in Los Angeles are getting paid what they deserve.
Nonetheless, we’ve got much more to do before we permanently sweep sweatshops into history’s dustbin. The Department of Labor has only about 800 investigators nationwide to ensure that companies comply with minimum wage and overtime requirements--800 cops for 6.5 million work sites that employ more than 110 million people.
And the garment industry is difficult to oversee. While the industry consists of many good corporate citizens who respect the law and treat workers well, the bad guys are truly bad--and their practices truly shadowy. The unscrupulous employers lurk in the economy’s underworld, closing down at the first sign of law enforcement and then quickly setting up shop under a new name in a new location.
But by working in partnership, government, consumers, labor unions, religious leaders and industry can stop the lawbreakers and allow good companies to compete fairly. And by the third anniversary of El Monte, I hope we can celebrate ever greater progress.
