Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 14, 1993 TAG: 9309220317
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DERRICK Z. JACKSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Their reticence is understandable. If you represented Claiborne and the Gap - on the Forbes 500 with $219 million and $211 million respectively in annual profits - you would be sneaking out the door, if not running away from every reporter in sight. These companies are fleeing from the dirty little secret that comes when you take the tags off your pricey new threads.
Your clothes will say, ``Made in the U.S.A.'' The difference is that "U.S.A." in this case really means United Sweatshop Agencies.
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, on the island of Saipan, some our best-known companies are having up to 20 percent of their clothes made there. Saipan is part of the Northern Marianas, a U.S. territory. To spur industry there, our government let the island leaders set its own minimum wage.
For the past nine years, that minimum wage has been $2.15; the U.S. minimum wage of $4.25. Just try getting a baby sitter for $2.15.
Just as American automobile workers have watched the future slip away to Mexico, the garment industry has found explosive profits far away from the 50 states and yet can add the insult of calling the products American-made. In the United States of the $4.25 minimum wage, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that apparel workers will lose at least 50,000 of their 1 million jobs, and textile machinery operators will lose at least 14,000 of their 289,000 jobs over the next decade.
In the United States of the $2.15 minimum wage, business is booming. According to The Times, 23,000 workers produce up to 20 percent of the clothes for some U.S. firms. We reject Chinese immigrants at the borders of the continental United States and even get Mexico to help send them back. In the Marianas, the United States welcomes cheap Chinese labor so openly that many workers do not realize until it is too late that they have entered a flytrap.
For their $2.15 an hour, many of the workers live in camps of plywood shacks with barbed-wire fencing, no electricity or running water but plenty of watchful guards. Women are imported to be prostitutes for the tourist trade and are kept virtual captives by their pimps.
The Times told of Masadur Rahman, who sold the bulk of his land in Bangladesh to pay for a $4,000 fee that would give him an ``American'' construction job that would pay $1,500 a month. The recruiter took the $4,000 and shipped Rahman to America all right.
In Saipan, he topped out at $250 a month. He was allowed to come to the U.S. territory to have his labor exploited, but he cannot immigrate to the 50 states. Neither can many similarly deceived workers return home, because they do not make enough money for the return ticket or for the debts owed back home to pay for the ``recruitment'' fees.
Levi Strauss received what amounted to faint praise in the Times piece. Strauss cut itself loose from the worst of the local contractors, Willie Tan. The U.S. Labor Department forced Tan to agree to pay $9 million in back wages and damages. Tan paid workers as little as $1.63 an hour and worked his employees up to 90 hours a week.
But five other plants still make Levi shirts, presumably at the $2.15 wage.
The Northern Marianas, as a response to negative publicity over working conditions, says it will raise the minimum wage 30 cents a year for the next seven years. When you consider that Liz Claiborne and the Gap together cart off $430 million in profits, that is loosening the chains much too slowly.
Until the minimum wage of the Marianas matches ours, the United States is a country extracting maximum profit from a colony of minimum humanity.
\ Derrick Z. Jackson is a columnist for the Boston Globe.
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