During the past few years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has embarked on a special program that targets undocumented workers at garment factories for deportation. In 1996, the INS raided scores of sweatshops in New York City alone and arrested nearly 2,000 workers for illegal status. In some cases, garment companies - which depend heavily on undocumented workers -- have taken advantage of the raids by fingering union organizers for arrest.
And who is turning the workers in? In many cases the very agency that is supposed to be protecting them: the US Department of Labor. CounterPunch has learned that the Department's Wage and Hour Division has been reporting to the INS when it comes across undocumented workers in the course of its factory inspections. In other words, if workers complain to Wage and Hour about being cheated out of their overtime pay they're more likely to get deported than they are to recover the stolen money. "It has a significant chilling effect on workers and worker-based organizations," said Peter Rukin, attorney with the Latino Workers Center in New York. "We cannot assure a worker that information [given to Wage and Hour] will not be shared with the INS." Rukin only refers complaints to the New York State Department of Labor, which is prohibited by state law from giving information to the INS.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recalls that when he accompanied WHD inspectors to garment factories, the workers were frightened and sometimes hid when they arrived. "The commitment to ridding our workplaces of undocumented workers has been and continues to be a much higher priority than shutting down sweatshops," he says.
To understand the political economy of American sweatshops requires a brief history lesson. In the 1940s and 1950s, US garment workers were highly unionized and wages were at an all-time high. Salaries began to steadily decline the following decade as industry fled south to seek non-union labor and then plummeted during the 1970s as globalization took hold and companies found even cheaper, more exploitable workers in the Third World.
Government policies as well as economic forces have contributed to the downward pressure on wages. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration undermined the domestic garment industry by encouraging US firms to locate abroad and produce for export back into this country. The US Agency for International Development even provided subsidies for US manufacturers to relocate overseas.
Such policies have accelerated the downward spiral of the industry and dramatically reduced the number of domestic apparel jobs, which dropped from 1.45 million in 1973 to 750,000 in 1998. The decline in jobs and wages decimated the two big unions that represented garment workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (which merged to form UNITE in 1995). Not coincidentally, it was during this period that sweatshops began to regain their hold in the US.
As is the case abroad, domestic manufacturers and retailers pass onto subcontractors the problems of holding down wages and disciplining workers. A 1997 Department of Labor survey found that in New York City, where the industry is centered, nearly two-thirds of garment shops failed to comply with federal wage and hour laws. "The only ones who are making any money are the ones willing to steal from the government in taxes, cheat their workers in wages and cheat the union by not paying health and welfare benefits," says a Department of Labor official. "If somebody tries to comply with the law they will not make anything in this business."
Even as the industry pushes for lower labor costs, it is racking up billions in profits. And while retailers claim to have no ability to police the conditions under which their clothes are manufactured, they hold tremendous power, partly because of the industry's extreme concentration. The top 40 retailers control 80 percent of the market, and the top ten control 65 percent. This gives them the power to set pay scales for the entire industry.
The retailers could ensure fair wages if they wanted to, argues MIT political economist Michael Piore. "The ultimate challenge of eliminating the sweatshop is really a political challenge, not an economic challenge," he says. Piore, who has studied sweatshops in the US and abroad, explains that retailers closely monitor factory conditions but their concern is production standards, not working conditions. "There's something morally crooked about a system that cares more about quality than it does about human welfare," he says.
The Wage and Hour Division's contribution to this bleak state of affairs has been to further squeeze garment workers. The INS began targeting the industry in 1996 -- the same year that the Labor Department was at the height of its anti-sweatshop effort - and many of the shops it raided were, according to Mark Thorn, a spokesperson for the New York INS office, based on referrals by Wage and Hour.
Wage and Hour's cooperation with the INS stands in stark contrast to the chilly relationship it maintains with a sister agency, the Occupational health and Safety Administration. The GAO noted in a 199o report that the two offices barely communicated. Things haven't gotten much better since, according to an OSHA official in New York. He estimated that in 1997, his office got less than twenty referrals from Wage and Hour.
Enforcing workplace safety and fair wages is only possible if workers feel comfortable filing complaints with the government agencies that are supposed to protect them. But with garment workers knowing that a Wage and Hour inspection might well be followed up by a raid by the INS, they have no reason to come forward. "There is enormous pressure on a worker not to complain, because they think their job will be at stake," said Susan Cowell, the vice president of UNITE.
Consider a raid by federal agents on the STC sweater factory in Queens, New York several years ago. The factory's managers were forcing employees to work long hours without overtime pay and had threatened the workers if they tried to form a union. Unfortunately, the federal agents were from the INS - they'd been tipped off by Wage and Hour - and they carted off undocumented workers to jail and had deportation proceedings initiated against them. The INS agents brought along a list of pro-union employees, which was sent to them by a former INS district director for New York, Henry Dogin -- now a lawyer for the factory owner.
Some immigration advocates argue that undocumented workers are attractive to employers precisely because their precarious legal situation makes them powerless to protest against poor pay or work conditions. In fact, even documented workers sometimes claim to be illegal because it increases the chance that they will be hired says Wing Lam, a director of the Chinese Staff Workers Association
Meanwhile, the Labor Department's ongoing anti-sweatshop campaign has done little to stop abuses. Remember the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford scandal of 1996, when it was exposed that sweatshops in mid-Manhattan were manufacturing the TV-star's line of Wal-Mart clothing. Her fairy princess persona called into question, Kathy Lee shed public tears while husband Frank Gifford showed up at the factory handing out one hundred dollars bills to workers.
A fairy tale ending to be sure. But last December, another New York garment factory, producing not only for Wal-Mart but K-mart, Nordstrom and The Limited, was busted for sweatshop conditions. Retailers were monitoring the shop, but somehow missed the on-site labor abuses. So much for industry self-policing. CP
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