Crackdown on exploitation

The US Government says some Saipan garment workers are being virtually held prisoner. David North reports.

THE US Department of Labor has cracked down on what it regards as the exploitive labor practices of a major group of CNMI garment factories whose prod ucts are sold on the Mainland.

The Department has charged that garment workers are overworked, under paid, and forced to live in unsanitary conditions while being held virtual

prisoners by their employers.

The workers toil 11 hours a day, six days a week, and work eight and a half hours on Sunday. That adds to 74.5 hours a week, or 322 a month, about twice as long as the average work week on the Mainland. Further, they are not paid at the higher (overtime) rates for work beyond 40 hours a week, as Mainland law stipulates.

The workers are supposed to get 52.15 an hour, the minimum wage set by the CNMI government, but the US Labor Department says that the average worker gets only $1.63 an hour, gross, and that is further reduced by a series of deduc tions, many of which the Department finds questionable.

Some of these deductions are manda tory savings, but other deductions are contrary to law (such as $75 to $l2O a month for “management fees”). With the deductions figures in (and excluding the remittances home) the workers’ hourly wages are reduced to between 74 cents and $1.04 an hour, PIM calculates on the basis of the Department’s stat istics.

While a deduction from a worker’s wages for housing may be appropriate under some circumstances, in this case the $lOO-$ 150 per month deductions were made despite a provision in the contracts between the employers and the workers saying housing would be free.

When the garment workers are using their housing, they work and live in fenced and guarded compounds, and many of them sleep in converted ship

ping containers.

The amount of money at stake in this dispute has been estimated at $2O million; this is the amount of back wages that the Department of Labour calcu lates are due some 1,350 workers. A lawyer for the owners says that the figure is more than twice too high.

The principal owner is Willie Tan, a US citizen of Chinese ancestry; he and his relatives own American International Knitters Corporation and four other firms which ship sweaters and sportswear to Mainland retail stores. Some of

America’s best-known fashion labels are on these garments.

The battle between the Labor Depart ment and Willie Tan has been a long one. The Department first investigated the case. Then, on behalf of the workers, sued Tan for backwages in July.

Subsequently the Federal District Court in Saipan ordered Tan to put up $400,000 in bonds to guarantee that if back wages are found due, money will be available, and to prevent Tan from shipping any workers (and potential witnesses) back to China or the Philip pines without the Court’s consent.

In this connection, the Department released an affidavit filed by one of the workers and subsequently translated from the Chinese. It recounted that the worker had received, seen by two Labor

Department investigators, two cheques

for back wages from the factory. We pick up the story from the workers’ statement:

‘You enforce your laws as stable as a mountain ... against all danger I appeal to you for help'

“. . . At that time [a management per son] told me to keep the checks (cheques) safely; someone will collect from me later on. That night, at around 8.30 pm [a management person] came to my post and demanded the checks from me. I told him that it stated on top of the checks that nobody can demand these checks from me ... he replied that “this paper is of no use to you ...”

“I saw that he had a few checks in his hand, so I gave my checks. I was afraid that if I refused there’d be problems for me. I don’t know any laws, I was thinking to telephone you people. But after witnessing 12 of the workers who refused to return the checks, and they received many threats, therefore I did not telephone you.

“I learned that you enforce your laws as stable as a mountain. So against all danger I appeal to you for help. I hope you will secret for me that we will not come to any harm. Until then.”

There are virtually no Chamorros involved in any aspect of the conflict.

The workers are largely Mainland Chin

ese, although there are some Thai, some Filipinos and some from FSM; the owners are Chinese with US citizenship; and the enforcers are Mainland US government officials.

Saipan decided to encourage the manufacture of garments but, in essence, decided not to use its own workers in these plants. Instead Saipan has allowed the business to be run by off-shore interests, who, in turn were allowed to bring in powerless “guest workers” to actually make the garments. It is as if the CNMI government simply carved off a piece of the island and permitted Main land Chinese wages and working con ditions to exist, all the while producing clothes marked “Made in the USA”.

This last point upsets some people in the Mainland clothing industry who have been investing in a large advertising campaign on behalf of US-made gar ments; that their advertising dollars are helping to sell garments made in Saipan’s

sweatshops.

On the island, there are more than a dozen other Saipan clothing manufac turers, wondering whether the Depart ment of Labor will be able to make a precedent. As Allan McCann, the De

partment’s principal investigator in

Guam and CNMI said recently “I’ve never reviewed a company that didn’t have violations in the two years that I’ve been going to Saipan.”

On the Mainland, both employers and the unions are watching to see if the Labor Department can bring the rate of oay up to the local (CNMI) legal rate of $2.15 an hour. The Mainland minimum is $4.25 an hour.

On both the Mainland and in the islands there is another observer, Juan N Babauta, the elected Washington Rep resentative of CNMI. “If Willie Tan is in violation he should be held accountable for those violations,” Babauta said.

“It is about time that we treated our alien workers humanely, paid them their rightful wages, and put them in clean

housing.”

The Mainland rules apply in full to both Hawaii and Guam, as does the Mainland rate of $4.25 an hour.

The minimum is set industry-by industry in American Samoa by a joint Mainland-Island panel appointed by the Secretary of Labour and the Governor of American Samoa. There the principal ndustry is tuna canning, and its rate is 52.87 an hour, though most workers are paid a few cents more per hour. (The issue there is the setting of the rates, not their enforcement; see PIM July, 1991.) In CNMI the rate ($2.15 an hour) is set by the local government, but enforced by the federal authorities.

In Palau (as in the Associated States) local option prevails. □