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Laborers work behind a fence at a sweatshop in Saipan. Photo courtesy of Sweatshop Watch.

Underneath the exaggerated glamour of clothing advertising is an international industry of worker oppression. Image from Abercrombie & Fitch.

By Janet Ng &
Ji Hyun Lim

Fluorescent lights shine brightly on the objects up for sale. Oversized posters with scantily dressed models, who gaze into the eyes of their muscled male counterparts, toy with the imagination. Shiny racks hold the newest fashions, while seasonal items are hung separately, below signs that blare “REDUCED” or “SALE.” Music lingers. The elevators take shoppers from one theme to the next: juniors, sportswear, business, dress, couture.

The shopping experience is enticing. It is created to get consumers to open their wallets and spend big bucks. And spend they do. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that U.S. shoppers shelled out $14.025 billion for clothing and accessories in June 2001.

But behind the bright lights and big business lies the dark side of the garment industry.

Most urban shoppers overlook the small sewing factories, often hidden in small alleyways. Because piecework is often done in the home, and many of the workers are illegal immigrants, the exact number of exploited garment workers is unknown. However, it is estimated that nationally, there are some 600,000 sweatshop workers. Many are Asian American women.

In the Bay Area alone, there are some 20,000 sweatshop workers, mostly women from Hong Kong and China, according to Nikki Fortunato Bas, director of the nonprofit Sweatshop Watch. In New York, API women make up the majority of sweatshop workers, Bas says, and in Los Angeles, some 15 percent of sweatshop workers are API.

In addition, countless cases of worker exploitation have surfaced worldwide. The mainland U.S. situation is just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this year, Vietnamese employees of a factory in American Samoa said they received no wages, were refused medical attention, and received only meager meals of fried potatoes, onions and cabbage while they toiled in a factory owned by Daewoosa, a Korean company, making clothes for J.C. Penney Co. and other retailers. These workers had each paid about $5,000 to one of two Vietnamese government-owned recruitment agencies, in hopes of improving their families’ financial status. They were some of the nearly 32,000 workers that Vietnam sent overseas last year, generating $1.25 billion in revenue.

A factory worker in a sweatshop in Saipan. Photo courtesy of Sweatshop Watch.

Upon returning from Samoa, former Daewoosa worker Nguyen Thi Hong said she was glad to “have left that miserable life. I was very scared,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I’ll never work overseas again.”

Supply, Demand and the Right Price

Sweatshops are the product of a supply and demand chain. Retailers and manufacturers decide on bottomline prices, calculated to where they at least break even. Contractors attempt to keep labor costs low in order to make a profit, as well. David Orris, merchandise marketing and product development coordinator at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, says the fashion industry both creates and supplies demand. To that end, trends, demographics and customers’ needs are studied. The manufacturers develop products accordingly.

Orris also points out that the consumer determines the price for a garment.

“The customer is too savvy…totally bright, the consumer totally gets it,” Orris says.

A factory worker employed under UNITE!, Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Photo by Robert Gumbert, courtesy of Sweatshop Watch.

“We’ll go around the classroom and ask what the [students] would pay for an item and you’d be surprised how close everyone comes. They’ll come within a dollar or two. They know what things are worth.”

Sometimes retail prices are in line with right prices, Orris says. Other times they aren’t. The consumer pays for the store’s overhead: rent, utilities, fixtures, bags and sales associates’ salaries. Mark-up for most ready-to-wear items is at least double the cost. When determining prices, retailers also take into consideration losses from markdowns when merchandise is not selling quickly enough for the season.

“Markup is not profit,” Orris says. “Markup is what covers the expenses. You’re lucky if you have money left over. The more you sell, the more chance you’ll have of making a profit.”

Sourcing is key to lowering costs of garments, Orris adds. Manufacturers compete with each other by trying to reduce overhead costs. The prices of fabric, zippers, buttons, accessories — and labor — determine the cost to the retailer. The retailer will then decide if the retail price of the item will be desirable to the consumer, before producing it in mass.

By the time the clothing is on the racks, few think about how it got there — or where it was made.

Said one 19-year-old shop-aholic: “[We live] in such a big consumer culture that we don’t even care about where it was made more than we care about how it looks and the price.”

U.S. Sweatshops, Then and Now

For over a hundred years, manufacturers have mass produced merchandise and offered them at cheaper prices for consumers. Sweatshops cropped up across the United States at the turn of the 20th century in the advent of the Industrial Revolution. As business executives and their companies flourished, workers labored in cramped and unhealthy factory buildings, often working over 10 hours per day and receiving below poverty-level wages.

The garment industry became one of the fastest growing sectors of the manufacturing business in the United States.

Sweatshop Watch is a coalition of labor, community, civil rights, immigrant rights, and women’s organizations, attorneys and advocates committed to eliminating sweatshops in the garment industry. This images depict factory workers under UNITE! Photo by Robert Gumbert, courtesy of Sweatshop Watch.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911 brought labor conditions to the forefront of the public’s attention. Some 146 workers, mostly women, died because they were trapped behind locked doors inside the garment factory. Public outrage fueled the formation of labor unions to secure the rights of workers.

“Any discussion of sweatshops is an extension of the whole fight against slavery,” says Dennis Greenia, publications director of Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Co-op America, which aims to bring social justice and environmental sustainability into the economy.

“Since 1864, when Lincoln spoke about liberty in Baltimore, some people have interpreted [liberty] as the right of each individual to benefit from the fruits of his own labor. [But] others believe that it means their right to benefit from others and the community.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, sweatshops once again became the focus of public attention. Due to an immigration law that eliminated quotas, an influx of workers from Asia created pools of exploitable labor, Bas of Sweatshop Watch says.

Although laws protecting workers were passed, management still rents empty buildings or uses the basements of their homes as garment factories, evading any handing-over of profits or reports.

A unionized worker. Photo by Robert Gumbert, courtesy of Sweatshop Watch.

Today, under the laws and regulations of the Department of Labor, businesses must follow standards of wage, safety, and health and work conditions. Employers must provide pension and welfare benefit plans, safeguard employees from electrical hazards, fires, and machine and vehicle accidents. They must also use protective equipment. And employers have to provide a minimum wage of no less than $5.15 hour, as well as overtime pay.

If companies do not follow these standards, they are considered sweatshops — a case all too common, especially in San Francisco.

One example: a small sewing factory in Chinatown, where tucked behind a concrete façade is a wooden structure most don’t see. A long, straight hallway and a set of stairs end in a plain room. Wrinkled faces with strips of cloth tied across their noses look up briefly, then return to their machines. Rows of women sit hunched over, like stone fixtures. The air is still and thick. An absence of windows adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere. Only fluorescent lights flicker. Dust mingles with human breath as sewing machines hum rhythmically.

Some corporations encourage retailers and manufacturers to turn a blind eye toward the practices of their suppliers, Greenia points out.

Abuse Overseas

American regulations do not begin to address working conditions in Third World countries, where much of the clothing sold in the United States is now manufactured.

Some American consumers believe paying decent wages to overseas factory workers means paying them U.S.-equivalent salaries, which would cause prices to skyrocket. Greenia, though, says that’s a misconception.

“Companies pay overseas workers 11 cents, when just 15 cents would be a living wage,” he says. “Corporations like the Gap have identified that .0016 percent of their corporate worth is needed to eradicate 4,000 factories of sweatshops.

“But they think it’s too much to spend,” he adds.

The increase in prices for consumers would be 25 cents to $1 per article of clothing, Greenia says. That difference would most impact the bottom line of corporate profit.

He added: “It’s a myth that you have to keep the price down in order for consumers to buy. There have been studies that have shown that consumers would gladly pay up to $10 more for a pair of jeans if they knew that it didn’t come from sweatshop labor.

“Corporations are making a choice to increase profit by stealing labor from workers at the bottom of the supply chain.”

Working for Change

In 1996, former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich issued a report that found 283 garment contractors in violation of labor and minimum wage laws nationwide. In Orange County, Calif., investigators cited 80 percent of the garment shops for the same transgressions.

The Asian Law Caucus (ALC) helped draft and pass into law one of the toughest sweatshop laws in the nation. ALC led a statewide coalition that secured passage of AB633 in 1999. The law creates strict liability for manufacturers, who must guarantee payment of minimum wages and overtime.

While that is a step forward, garment contractors in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands have received criticism over the past several years from grassroots labor organizations and the U.S. Department of Labor. On the South Pacific islands of Saipan and American Samoa, workers reportedly live in compounds surrounded by barbed wire, where they are provided with bare minimum food and shelter. They are rarely allowed to leave the factories, Greenia says.

“The islands are the worst single cluster of offenders in the U.S. territories.”

Greenia describes workers laboring for 12 to 15 hours a day in 90°F sewing galleys. In one shop, some 50 seamstresses shared one broken toilet, he says.

“Conditions are so bad that in the mid-’90s, the government of the Philippines forbade any of its citizens to go work [on the islands],” Greenia says.

Though Filipino women still work in Saipan, the number has dropped, says Bas.

“More Filipino women speak English, so they’re more able to try and organize, and speak out,” she says.

Island Hell

Retailers and manufacturers pay contractors in Saipan to produce their brand-name labels. Since Saipan is part of U.S. territory, many can legally label their clothes as “Made in the USA.”

When AsianWeek reporters visited The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch in downtown San Francisco last week, they found labels reading, “U.S. Northern Marianas Islands” and “U.S. Marianas Islands (USA).”

The majority of laborers on the islands are not U.S. workers, however. They are migrants from China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Thailand. Bas reports that many pay up to $10,000 in recruitment fees, in hope of eventually immigrating to the United States.

Lured by the promise of a secure job in America, many immigrants dream of sending money to relatives back home. Most end up staying on the islands for years, sewing to pay back debts. Workers sign one-year agreements, but when employers withhold wages, employees are forced to renew their contracts to pay back their debts.

“[The workers] are trapped in a cycle of indentured servitude and can’t return home,” Bas says.

According to Greenia, in the last seven years, the value of U.S.-bound apparel shipments from Saipan increased from $100 million to $1 billion. U.S. census figures report that as of 1997, there were approximately 84 manufacturing establishments on the Northern Marianas Islands and 81 on Saipan.

Litigation

Organizations such as Sweatshop Watch, Global Exchange, and the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) filed lawsuits in 1999 against retailers on behalf of workers in Saipan. Three claims are currently in progress: the first, against retailers for using sweatshop labor and misleading the public about the conditions under which their clothing was made; the second, for back wages owed; and the third is a suit brought by a few hundred workers against contractors for their overtime wages.

In March 2000, 18 of the 26 U.S.-based clothing companies that had been sued for labor violations settled, paying $8.5 million in total and agreeing to implement independent monitoring programs. The eight remaining companies — including such labels as J.C. Penney, Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap — still refuse to settle.

Anti-sweatshop movements are working toward several goals, including that workers be paid a living wage, have an education, see hope for their families and communities, know their rights in the workplace and have the freedom to discuss them.

Says Bas: “We hope that the retailers and manufacturers who profit will ultimately agree to be responsible and do whatever it takes to ensure that workers are treated fairly.”