UNITED STATES: Critics Link Immigration Laws to Sweatshops

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 26 1996 (IPS) - Enter an apparel manufacturing plant in New York’s Chinatown, or Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and you will find dozens of immigrant women toiling in cramped, unhealthy and often locked quarters.

The sweatshop — the crowded and unsanitary manufacturing plant so common in the 1930s — was thought to have declined in recent decades.

“We thought that sweatshops were a thing of the past — but sweatshops are back, and back with a vengeance,” said Ron Blackwell of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) at a conference this week at New York University.

In particular, UNITE contends, the penalties against hiring undocumented immigrants has sparked a resurgence of sweatshops in the garment industry in every major U.S. city.

Since Congress enacted the Immigration Restriction and Control Act in 1986, more immigrant workers have been trapped into conceding to lower wages and worse working conditions, says Muzaffar Chishti, head of UNITE’s Immigration Project.

By threatening sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants, Chishti says, the government has actually given employers a powerful tool with which to silence immigrant workers who lack proper documentation. As such, he argues, they have faced a worsening of labour conditions — and more sweatshops.

“Undocumented immigration has not been reduced,” Chishti notes. Instead, he argues, “we have a segregated labour market in which undocumented workers are now easy prey.”

According to the government’s General Accounting Office (GAO), some 2,000 of New York’s 6,000 garment shops in 1994 were sweatshops. That same year, the GAO estimated that 4,500 of the 5,000 garment shops in Los Angeles were sweatshops.

The definition of sweatshop itself is subject to debate. Professor Michael Piore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that, more than just low wages, sweatshops are marked by their crowding, lack of exits and unhealthy and unsafe conditions.

The GAO has set the government’s definition of a sweatshop as “an employer that violates more than one federal or state labour law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labour, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation or industry registration.” A chronic or multiple violator of labour laws also qualifies, the GAO says.

Whatever the definition, sweatshop workers — some 75 to 80 percent of them women — know best what the conditions there are like.

Dong Ying Yi, an immigrant from China who used to work at a unionised garment shop, says that, in recent days, many workplaces like hers have become non-union shops that do not observe U.S. labour laws.

“We work over 10 hours a day with no overtime (pay),” Dong says. “Sometimes, we have to work after dinner, until one or two past midnight…wihtout a break.”

Despite those hours, she adds, her wages are much lower than when she worked in a union workplace. In 1980, Dong says, she earned 40 to 50 dollars for an eight-hour working day; now, she receives only some 30 dollars for more than 10 hours work — less than the 4.25 dollar-per-hour legal minimum wage.

“Many working places are renovated from warehouses and garages,” she says. “They are very hot in the summer, but chilly in the winter…There was only one big door (in my shop), but it was always locked by the boss.”

“Conditions are just terrible,” agrees Bertha Morales, a garment worker from Central America. “Our bosses constrict us, and they treat us like slaves.”

But the worst thing, Morales says, is that when workers try to organise, employers prod the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) to raid the workplace and deport all the undocumented workers. “The INS is treating our workers like criminals,” she says.

“The immigration law is an ultimate barrier” to labour organising, says UNITE Vice-President Susan Cowell. “When (employers) have lost a campaign, they will call in the INS.”

The horrors of modern sweatshops were brought to light last year when the U.S. Labour Department raided a garment shop in El Monte, California. There they found some 75 Thai women locked into slave-like quarters, assembling clothes for huge retail firms.

Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the New York-based National Labour Committee, connects the drive to lower wages and health and safety standards in the United States to the large retailers’ dispatch of work overseas to countries with far fewer labour rights.

UNITE estimates that some 70 countries make apparel for U.S. companies — including Bangladesh, where workers earn an average of 20 U.S. cents an hour, and El Salvador, where wages are 56 cents an hour. In Central America and the Caribbean, Kernaghan says, there may be as many as half a million women sewing clothes for the U.S. markets — many of them not even teenagers.

On a visit to El Salvador last year, Kernaghan saw children working day-long shifts stitching clothes for U.S. companies like Fruit of the Loom and the Gap, and taking pills to stay alert. The Gap has since decided, under consumer pressure, to strengthen its Code of Conduct and monitoring of workplaces in El Salvador.

Ultimately, argues UNITE Vice-President Cowell, sweatshop conditions in the United States and abroad will only decline if the largest retailers are targeted. Since corporations spend so much on their image, she contends, an effective campaign can begin by making consumers aware of which retailers contract from firms that violate basic labour standards.

Kernaghan notes that just such a campaign, in a matter of months last year, prompted the Gap to sign an accord allowing for independent human-rights monitoring of its El Salvador plants.

A poll last year conducted by Virginia’s Marymount University indicated that 75 percent of U.S. shoppers would avoid stores known to sell goods made from sweatshops. Of the respondents, 84 percent said they would pay an additional dollar on a 20-dollar garment if it was not made through sweatshop labour.

Chishti adds that the largely immigrant sweatshop workers will remain powerless until the employer sanctions passed in 1986 can be repealed. In the current Congress, which is considering restricting legal immigration, that prospect is unlikely.