Sweatshops Continue But Nobody Is to Blame
Los Angeles has the dubious distinction of being the sweatshop capital of the United States. While the apparel industry accounts for as much as 10% of the region’s booming economy, its 140,000 workers labor under 19th-century conditions.
Because manufacturers and retailers who design and sell clothing do not own the factories that make the clothing, they are able to maintain the fiction that these factories are independent contractors. When a factory fails to pay its workers, the retailers and manufacturers who profit from their labor disclaim all responsibility for the workers’ plight: It is the factory owner--typically an immigrant from South Korea or Mexico--who is blamed.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Last year, U.S. Labor Department officials testified that 61% of Los Angeles’ 6,000-7,000 garment factories had wage and hour violations. Unpaid workers were owed an average of $3,631 in back wages--a substantial sum in an industry where the typical worker makes less than $8,000 annually. Overall, Southland garment workers were cheated out of $73 million in unpaid wages.
According to the state division of Occupational Safety and Health, 96% of all factories have health and safety violations. Some are “minor”--bathrooms without running water or workers boxed in by piles of clothing. But half of all violations could lead to serious injury or even death. These include the absence of machine guards to cover sewing-machine belts and pulleys and illegally locked exits that prevent workers from escaping in a fire or earthquake.
This is a sorry state of affairs that public pronouncements, government intervention and quick-fix gestures have done little or nothing to change. To understand how such conditions can persist in a thriving industry, it is necessary to understand how it is organized. The apparel industry is a giant pyramid, with a small number of businessmen at the top who profit from the industry and a large number of workers at the bottom who make the clothing. Retailers sit at the apex, placing wholesale orders with manufacturers who, in turn, rely on independently owned contractors to fill those orders. The contractors employ the workers who occupy the bottom layer.
This pyramid structure is no accident: It was created by retailers and manufacturers to reap the benefits of cheap labor, without having to assume legal or moral responsibility for sweatshop conditions that can result.
In fact, retailers and manufacturers exert near total control over their contractors. Manufacturers, and increasingly retailers, provide the factories with fabric, determine what will be made and closely monitor the quality of the clothing as it is being sewn. Moreover, they dictate the price paid for each piece. Because there are thousands of tiny factories competing with one another, factory owners must take whatever prices are offered--and those prices have not increased in years, despite a 35% increase in the minimum wage. When retailers and manufacturers squeeze contractors, contractors squeeze their workers--and the modern sweatshop is born.
This system of independent contracting provides tremendous flexibility for retailers and manufacturers. It also results in unstable work, impoverishment and harsh conditions for workers. To end the scourge of sweatshops, the production system itself must be changed.
Workers have long fought to make manufacturers accountable for factory conditions. In Los Angeles, for example, Thai workers found in near-slavery in an El Monte sweatshop in 1995 have spearheaded a successful effort to establish clear lines of accountability. The workers recently won more than $4 million from the major companies who benefited from their labor--companies that initially denied any responsibility.
Inspired by such victories, college students have organized a growing anti-sweatshop movement across the country. Sparked by student protests on more than 100 campuses last year, colleges from Duke and Harvard to the University of California and Occidental agreed to limit the use of their names and logos to sweatshop-free apparel. Students are demanding that campuses adopt codes of conduct to govern the $2.5-billion collegiate licensing industry, which pays colleges and universities sizable royalties in exchange for the right to use campus logos on caps, sweatshirts and other items. For example, the proposed codes of conduct call for full disclosure of the names and addresses of all factories involved in production. It is impossible to hold manufacturers accountable for conditions in factories when the identity of those factories is hidden from public view. By adopting codes of conduct, colleges and universities will prevent their licensees from hiding behind a veil of secrecy.
Another way to end secrecy is to end the legal fiction that contractors are completely independent of the retailers and manufacturers that hire them. Retailers and manufacturers exert strong control over the production of their goods; why should they be able to turn a blind eye when their contractors break the law? They should be made jointly liable with their contractors for workplace violations.
Assembly Bill 633, recently signed into law by Gov. Gray Davis, makes a preliminary step in this direction. This measure, hammered out in negotiations between anti-sweatshop activists and apparel-industry representatives, stops short of establishing the legal principle of joint liability. It does, however, impose a “wage guarantee” on manufacturers and some retailers (those who make their own clothing lines), who must now assure, along with their contractors, that workers are paid minimum wage and overtime. The Labor Commission is authorized to enforce the measure and revoke the registration of any manufacturer who fails to pay an award. This law is no panacea. Nonetheless, it recognizes the manufacturers’ responsibility for sweatshop conditions and puts needed pressure on the industry to monitor itself.
Next month, the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” will open at Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance. This powerful exhibition presents the long history of sweatshops, including a re-creation of the El Monte “slaveshop.” It also offers some hopeful solutions.
Sweatshops will not disappear until retailers and manufacturers take responsibility for the factories that make their goods. In a vital and thriving industry that adds $30 billion to the L.A. economy, this hardly seems too much to ask.
