Chinese workers in New York’s garment districts are fighting back against factory owners who regularly deny them back wages – a practise, they say, which continues despite union representation and U.S. labour laws.

“It looks like a conspiracy – a conspiracy of silence,” argued Peter Kwong, professor of Asian studies at New York’s Hunter College. “The public ought to be outraged. This is not America, and this ought to be stopped.”

Groups like the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) and the Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA) are lobbying the U.S. House of Representatives for a new law that could allow workers to sue manufacturers for unpaid wages. Currently, they can only fight with the subcontractors who hire them for the wages – a struggle that can become complicated if those firms close down.

As one Chinese garment worker testified to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week on condition of anonymity, the U.S. Labour Department could only retrieve some 1,500 dollars out of 10,000 dollars he was owed after his boss “closed down the factory and ran off.”

If a factory owner shuts shop – and sets up business under a different name elsewhere – the Labour Department can only ask for the repayment of three months’ worth of back wages, he was told.

“If the existing law is really like this, it is no wonder why there are a lot of bosses in Chinatown who do not pay workers,” the garment worker testified. “We still do not know when we will get paid. If every boss could run off without paying our wages, then we workers will all starve to death.”

“In the garment industry, bosses do not pay workers,” another Chinatown labourer agreed. “According to my own understanding, this is very common.” In her own unionised shop, she said, the boss owed seamstresses as much as 10,000 dollars in back wages – but the Department of Labour was unable to help, and the AALDEF has tried to sue for the back wages.

The problem of unpaid wages in the garment industry has loomed as large as that of cramped, sweatshop conditions in cities like New York – particularly for recent immigrants from China or Central America who speak little English.

A 1997 Labour Department study found that, of 94 New York garment companies that were investigated, 59 (or 63 percent) violated the U.S. Fair Labour Standards Act — by paying workers less than the legal minimum wage of 5.15 dollars an hour, withholding overtime pay, or both. Investigators found that more than 1,400 garment workers in those companies had been cheated of at least 412,300 dollars in back wages last year.

The worst results were in New York’s Chinatown section, where almost nine out of every ten shops searched were found to be violating wage and overtime laws. The CSWA contends that shop owners regularly withhold wages and overtime for the workers there because they know that the Chinese-speaking, immigrant workforce is largely unable or unwilling to complain to officials.

Chinatown shop owners pay their garment assembly workers only some three dollars an hour, more than two dollars an hour below the legal minimum, said CSWA Executive Director Wing Lam – a problem, he added, which organised labour has done little to combat. “Chinatown is 90 percent unionised, but 80 percent of those workers (in both union and non-union shops) make below minimum wage,” Lam said.

One Chinese worker testified to Congress that an employer once paid her only two dollars an hour, but initially handed her five dollars an hour so that her recorded hourly wage would appear higher.

“Each time when I got paid, I (had) to give the boss cash to make up the difference,” she said. “I asked the boss why he had to go through this charade, (and) he said the manufacturer (which subcontracted his shop’s labour) made him do this.”

Laws like the Fair Labour Standards Act, which regulates payment of workers, are not being enforced properly, argued Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. “These workers are victims of a failure of federal labour officials to enforce existing laws,” he said.

“The government pretends to do something, without addressing the question” of widespread abuses of wage and working condition standards, Lam argued. But few believe the government is up to the task of monitoring firms that violate those standards. “They’re grossly under-funded,” Barbara Briggs, senior associate at the New York-based National Labour Committee, said recently of the Labour Department.

Robert Fitch, a union consultant who has investigated conditions in Chinatown, told IPS that the department has been “quite open that they are no longer going to enforce the law.”

Instead, he said, labour officials and unions like the Union of Needlework, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) are adopting a programme of “consumer consciousness” which rewards some firms that comply with standards with ‘No Sweat’ labels and stigmatises others that do not comply as sweatshops.

That effort has snared some big manufacturers connected to subcontractors which violate labour laws – such as Guess Jeans, which has repeatedly fallen foul of the Labour Department and UNITE. But Fitch contended that, as long as officials place their emphasis on making consumers aware of conditions, “there is really no (direct) pressure on the subcontractors to improve.”

Some members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, including ranking Democrat William Clay of Missouri, are urging that Congress at least support the push by some Chinese workers for a law that would allow them to sue the manufacturers directly for back wages – rather than fight endlessly with subcontractors that could close shop.

However, the Republicans – who have a majority in Congress – are resisting efforts for new legislation, sources say. Arturo Silva, a spokesman for the House Committee’s American Worker Project, said that the Republicans were proposing instead to explore how the Labour Department is enforcing existing standards.

“These workers don’t need another promise from Washington,” Hoekstra argued last week. “They need the protection already available to most Americans.”

As one expert familiar with the Congress debate argued on condition of anonymity, “I think (the Republicans) are trying to embarrass the Labour Department, but I don’t see any prospects for real change.”