Return of the Sweatshop
Mort, Jo-Ann
Every year since 1911, union members have assembled in front of a building on Washington Place and Greene Street in New York City on March 25. The building is cloaked in black. A fire engine...
...Kamali is an exception as a high-priced, high-profile designer using nonunion sweatshop workers...
...Today, just blocks away — and, in fact, throughout New York City — sweatshops with similar conditions abound...
...If we go in and organize these shops, the supply of work will simply be cut off...
...The enormous increase of imports has not only forced unfair wage competition in the United States, it has led to a severe loss of American garment and apparel jobs and a decline of membership among the two main garment unions, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU...
...Contractors, owners of the small sewing shops where manufacturers may send their work to be assembled, are less likely to be bound by the union...
...In New York, they are not legally responsible for labor and health violations in their contractors' shops...
...Ironically, on this year's anniversary of the Triangle Fire, the Reagan administration announced new and lenient laws concerning homework...
...piles of fabric sit near boilers and gas burners...
...They are mostly undocumented workers and don't have bank accounts or legal recourse...
...What can be done to do away with sweatshops...
...As a union organizer describes it, "Wherever there is a homework situation, there is sure to be child labor...
...The women employed by Kamali would receive assistance from sisters, daughters, neighbors, anyone who came in to help...
...I have never seen a homeworker earn over $2.50 an hour," says Danahy...
...New immigrants from Korea, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Latin American countries—both legal and illegal—are willing to work for low wages and in conditions that are poor by American standards, but much better than in their native lands...
...During both terms of this administration, a relaxation of homework laws has been a goal...
...Sweatshops are usually contained entities in a community, with Dominican bosses hiring Dominican workers, Haitians hiring Haitians...
...every day, the workers would leave the shop carrying duffle bags...
...Manufacturers often contract out work with little knowledge of how that work gets done...
...Even looser regulation during the Reagan years and the flood of low-wage imports—the apparel industry in this country is competing with labor costs as low as twelve cents an hour in the Third World—have intensified the problem...
...This new glut of sweatshops has given rise to illegal or racketeer "unions," which protect the contractors from the ILGWU or ACTWU...
...Kamali was running sweatshops in workers' homes in Queens and in Washington Heights, with workers earning less than two dollars an hour...
...A fire engine ladder reaches toward the eighth floor in memory of the women who were trapped there when the Triangle Shirt Waist fire exploded seventyseven years ago...
...As Joe Danahy, organizing director of the ILGWU, puts it: "Sweatshops are a state of mind...
...This bill would increase the authority of the state to deal with illegalities and is being supported by the unions...
...The "union" represents about five thousand workers in sixty shops in the area around Williamsburg and Bushwick...
...In the early Reagan years, sweatshop investigations declined by over 20 percent since the Carter administration...
...The problem of sweatshop regulation was brought under control in the 1930s and 1940s, and the regulation held up until the early 1970s...
...A similar law went into effect in 1981 in SUMMER • 1988 • 365 California...
...Assemblyman Frank Barbaro, chair of the State Assembly Labor Committee, has just introduced Governor Cuomo's program bill into the state legislature...
...They vary, but a sweatshop usually SUMMER • 1988 363 means a combination of several things, including piece-rate or payment below the minimum wage, few or no health benefits, unsafe working conditions, mandatory homework, and unregulated working hours...
...In many cases, there are also violations of child labor laws, no tax withholding, and cash payment or no payment at all, especially when illegal immigrants are involved who have no legal recourse to force payment...
...It's difficult to document, since sweatshops are illegal, but union officials estimate that there are several thousand in the five boroughs and North Jersey, affecting about 150,000 workers...
...In the words of one union organizer, another disaster is waiting to happen...
...Already, the New York State Chamber of Commerce and the employers' associations are lobbying against the new bill...
...They were working all day in the shop and all night at home...
...Today, with under 200,000 workers in the international and greater resistance to curbing imports, the problem of sweatshops increases...
...In New York, a new state task force has been conducting investigations into abuses...
...Some of the senior workers were provided with Blue Cross/Blue Shield benefits by the shop owner to maintain a steady workforce...
...A highly publicized example of homework exposed in the last few years was an operation being run by high-priced, trendy designer Norma Kamali, who was fined $10,000 by the New York State Department of Labor for labor violations...
...Over 85 percent of the state's manufacturers and contractors have complied with registration...
...366 • DISSENT...
...Concentrations of five hundred shops each have been documented in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx...
...These tiny sweatshops keep running virtually twenty-four hours a day...
...Shops in the West Thirties even advertise on street lamps, calling for workers to work day and evening shifts...
...Now that Ganz is in jail, and with pressure from the organizing efforts of ACTWU and the ILGWU, 1718 has improved somewhat...
...In 1969, when the ILGWU had a peak national membership of 450,000, the union could control standards of contractors and manufacturers by stopping work...
...The Reagan administration is already looking at ways to allow homework in high-tech industries...
...The bill would give the Labor Department the authority to penalize individuals who knowingly assist owners of sweatshops...
...They have a young kid running the union now, filing grievances and running around sounding like Walter Reuther," says the ILGWU's Danahy Where there are sweatshops, there is usually industrial homework...
...In the middle of the garment center," says ILGWU organizer Katie Quan, "I saw a shop where they were making handloom sweaters with about a dozen Chinese workers...
...How big is the problem...
...They were given flat rates of seven or eight dollars for doctor visits, had no access to grievance procedures, and had no union contract...
...Danahy, however, says he even knows of one in the middle of Iowa, where a third generation of women works for fifty-seven cents an hour...
...Today, over 90 percent of that state's workers are covered by workers' compensation, and wage violations are greatly reduced...
...This makes the manufacturers responsible for their contractors...
...In many cases, without knowing they belonged to a "union," workers at shops "organized" by 1718 had two dollars taken out of each weekly paycheck...
...In New York City today, is it really possible that sweatshop conditions exist, comparable not only to the turn-of-the-century sweatshops, but to the shops of Taiwan, the Philippines, El Salvador...
...Yet, although sweatshops are usually clustered in neighborhoods with new immigrants like Washington Heights and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, there are clusters of shops in the garment center, in full view of midtown...
...They must be shut down for good...
...The answer is: yes...
...Union observers say that the homeworkers attached to the illegal shops have increased almost ten times since 1981...
...Without government help, unions can't halt the illegal operations...
...Union sources say that the force pushing for these changes is George Bush, so a Bush administration could mean more attempts to halt regulation...
...The sweaters were of very high quality, the type to sell in Bloomingdale's for eighty dollars or more...
...I've seen them earn as little as fifty cents an hour or just not get paid at all...
...Today's sweatshops are physically not very different from those of the turn of the century: ventilation is poor...
...But, by then, changes in the industry and a letup on regulations brought sweatshops back to New York City...
...These are totally underground operations," says a union official...
...Homework and sweatshop work can't be regulated for quality, which discourages most top designers...
...Regulatory laws are already on the books, but are largely ignored...
...Today, sweatshops are found mainly in major urban areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and New York...
...In Reagan's second term the decline has steepened...
...One 364 • DISSENT of the more notorious of the illegal unions, Local 1718, United Production Workers, was run by a Williamsburg resident named David Ganz who is currently serving a prison term for embezzlement of funds...
...In these shops, a two-tier system develops, where the Koreans are considered a tier above their Hispanic co-workers...
...there are no fire exits...
...At 5:30 p.m...
...They operate in the open, hanging out signs in Spanish, French, or Chinese...
...The Koreans, although they also hire Korean workers, have begun to hire Hispanics, since many Koreans come to this country via South America where they learn Spanish en route...
...Didn't sweatshops disappear with the organizing success of the garment unions, with federal regulations, with organized opposition to child labor and worker exploitation...
...But it has only fifteen investigators, a number much too small to tackle the immense problem...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
