The El Monte Experience

Book excerpt

By: Penda D. Hair

Date: March 2001

Source: Hair, Penda D. "The El Monte Experience." In Louder than Words. New York: Rockefeller Foundation, March 2001.

About the Author: Penda D. Hair is a researcher affiliated with the Rockefeller Foundation. Founded in 1913 by John D. Rockefeller, the foundation focuses on improving opportunities for poor people.

INTRODUCTION

Immigrants have long served as a major source of cheap labor for manufacturing. As the apparel industry globalized in the 1970s, it was expected that fewer immigrants would be needed to work in the United States since it was now possible to shift labor-intensive production activities out of high-wage countries into lower-wage nations. However, many manufacturers discovered that they could save money by importing workers to the United States and keeping them in a state of semi-slavery in modern sweatshops.

Most American sweatshops are located in U.S. territories where U.S. labor laws do not apply. Saipan, an island in the Northern Mariana Islands, maintains a number of U.S.-owned garment manufacturing companies that export $1 billion worth of clothing to the United States annually. Employees working on the factory line are paid about $2 below the U.S. federally required minimum wage. The vast majority of the workers, about ninety-eight percent, are immigrant women from China, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Thailand.

These women are recruited by deception, through expensive recruiting fees. The workers are trapped in a state of indentured servitude until they pay off their travel fees. The workdays are seven days a week, twelve hours a day, with quota production requirements. The workers are required to live within the plant behind barbed-wire fences. Such working conditions received very little attention in the American media until the 1995 El Monte case revealed that similar sweatshops were being set up on the U.S. mainland and run by large Western transnational corporations.

PRIMARY SOURCE

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SIGNIFICANCE

The El Monte case prompted the California state legislature in 1999 to enact AB 633, considered to be the country's toughest law targeting sweatshop operators who abuse apparel workers. The law has not been as successful as legislators expected. Garment workers' claims for wages and overtime quadrupled in the five years after the law's enactment from 565 in 1998 to 2,282 in 2004. Advocates for workers asserted that the claims reflect only a small fraction of the thousands of garment workers denied pay. The money owed to underpaid workers in Los Angeles County alone was estimated at $81 million annually. Clothing manufacturers in Los Angeles Country produced $13 billion in goods annually as of 2005. Additionally, workers who go through the state claims process end up recovering only about a third of the money that they are owed, with the contractors paying an average of $1,589 on claims that averaged $5,175. California has registered about 5,440 garment manufacturers with only forty-eight companies suffering an application denial or a registration revocation between 2000 and 2005. The meager number of firms that have been disciplined indicates to some worker advocates that the state is not effectively administering the law. California has been criticized for conducting superficial investigations of sweatshops and for overseeing a protracted claims process, which averages about two hundred days to complete.

There are hidden costs to cheap clothing. When manufacturers spend little on labor, these savings are not necessarily passed on to the consumer. A t-shirt purchased in Thailand or Indonesia is often made by an employee of a large U.S. transnational corporation who contracted out the labor for a few cents an hour per employee. While Americans are told that this will allow them to buy such clothing at cheaper prices, corporate moguls make more money from this arrangement instead of the workers or the consumers. Additionally, these dynamics lead workers in developing nations to believe that they might make more money if they move to the United States They immigrate only to discover that they are trapped in low-level minimum wage jobs or more dangerous or repetitious manufacturing jobs that American citizens refuse.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Bonacich, Edna and Richard Appelbaum. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000.

Rosen, Ellen. Making Sweatshop: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002.

Ross, Robert J.S. Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2004.