A labour union that aggressively pushed for an end to sweatshop conditions in the U.S. garment industry is now under fire for abusing workers after complaints from many of its own union members.

When the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) started its campaign to expose garment companies that violate workers’ rights, few expected the union would itself be exposed for labour problems.

But testimony delivered in recent weeks to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, however, has provided just the latest support for why UNITE is, as the left- wing ‘Village Voice’ dubbed it earlier this year, ‘The Union from Hell’.

Maria Ramirez, a UNITE member who worked for the California- based Sorrento Coats, told Congress that after Sorrento workers decided last year not to remain a union shop, they were threatened by local UNITE officials with the loss of their jobs. Ramirez claimed that one UNITE representative told her simply, “With us, you eat beans; without us, you eat s—.”

Another Sorrento worker, Petra de Leon, told the Committee that UNITE officials threatened to pull work from Sorrento as long as the shop did not allow union representation. After Sorrento in fact lost a major production order, de Leon said, she suffered financially and was unable to keep her house.

Some of the testimony that has come before Congress in recent months have resulted from efforts by Congressional Republicans, often hostile to unions, to embarrass the highly visible UNITE, said one labour expert who recently also testified before the Committee.

However, exposure also “puts UNITE on the defensive, and shows the hypocrisy of their claims to defend workers,” argued Robert Fitch, a union analyst and professor at New York University. Fitch contends that UNITE – a new union that includes the remnants of the defunct International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which Fitch called “moth-eaten by corruption” – has repeatedly turned against the workers it seeks to represent.

In general, UNITE’s critics say, the union has done as little to defend the rights of immigrant workers to be paid at least the U.S. minimum wage (currently 5.15 dollars/hour) and overtime wages as the factory owners themselves.

According to Wing Lam, executive director of the New York-based Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA), unpaid wages and other labour violations actually occur as frequently, if not more so, in UNITE-affiliated shops as in non-union factories. “Chinatown is 90 percent unionised, but 80 percent of those workers make below minimum wage (salaries),” Lam argued.

In one case, a garment worker who sewed clothes in New York in a UNITE-represented shop, said that the union did not help the workers in that factory to retrieve thousands of dollars of unpaid wages. Instead, the worker said, “they only demand(ed) that the boss pay us a small, small portion of our wages … I only got back one-third of my owed wages. I am still owed 1,913 dollars.”

At the same time, the New York worker added, the local UNITE representative got the workers – who spoke Cantonese, but did not understand English – to sign a document in English, waiving all further rights to pursue their unpaid wages.

That case is not the only time UNITE has been accused of misleading the many Spanish- and Cantonese-speaking women who have come to dominate garment production in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Trinh Duong, a New York labour activist fluent in Cantonese and English, told Congress that UNITE interpreters attending a Mar. 31 hearing on sweatshops in New York provided an “inaccurate and incomplete” translation of comments by garment workers and experts, like Fitch, who were critical of the union.

“Instead of translating the testimony, the translator attacked the character of the witnesses testifying at the hearing,” Trinh wrote in a signed statement submitted to Congress in April. Chinese workers critical of UNITE were identified by the interpreters as “new immigrants who did not know anything and are just being used,” Trinh said.

UNITE has not responded to several IPS requests for comment. But some of the union’s defenders point out that many of its critics – including the Republican-led Congress and groups like the right-wing National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has represented the Sorrento workers – have a political agenda against the union.

Significantly, several newspaper advertisements criticising UNITE this spring – which included testimony from some Sorrento workers – were paid for by Guess?, an apparel firm which has itself been the target of complaints from UNITE and the U.S. Department of Labour.

The Labour Department has repeatedly fined Guess? for labour violations, including the illegal use of home-based labour for the stitching of its apparel. UNITE, meanwhile, focused on Guess? as one of the major firms cited for labour abuses in its high-profile campaign against sweatshops.

The union’s publicity-conscious tactics – which have included pickets outside Guess? outlets by celebrities like the rock band Rage Against the Machine – may have created a backlash in which some garment firms are now pointing the spotlight back at the union.

UNITE, however, still has its defenders. “My experience with UNITE in Los Angeles has been that it has a genuine commitment to improving workers’ lives and an acute awareness of the formidable challenge of organising in this industry,” argued Julie Su, staff attorney for the California-based Asian Pacific American Legal Centre.

“Attacking the union is tantamount to blaming the medicine for not curing the disease, (while) ignoring the disease,” Su told Congress last month.