Clotheshorse of a Communist Color

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 15, 1999 | by Charles A. Cerami

Beijing is exploiting a loophole in federal law by setting up sweatshops on a U.S. protectorate and producing apparel under appalling conditions but imprinted `Made in U.S.A.'

The People's Republic of China is using its own citizens and other Asians -- working under slave-labor conditions and being paid slave-labor wages -- to produce and ship mountains of apparel and other goods to the United States at cutthroat prices. And since the Red Chinese are doing this in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI -- a group of 14 small Pacific islands -- they legally can sew in clothing labels that say "Made in U.S.A."

Some of this apparel already hangs in American closets -- it includes men's shirts, women's dresses, slacks, robes, baby clothes and sweaters. But an American who slips on one of the sweaters might shiver if he or she understood the inhuman conditions under which the garment was produced.

Most of the workers are young women -- virtually girls -- who are brought to the islands under false pretenses. They are told they will be going to "America" and will be working in an "American" factory. But when they get to the islands, they are put to work in factories built by the Red Chinese, staffed by Chinese overseers, under conditions as bad as anything in Red China, say witnesses. Some work 18 hours a day and live in crude barracks surrounded by barbed wire.

A recent Insight article touched on this Chinese practice as an example of the kind of circumvention of U.S. trade laws that might occur if a free-trade pact with certain African nations were approved (see "Trade Bill No Help to Africa or U.S." Nov. 23, 1998). Fairly warned, Congress turned down the African trade bill, but further digging into the Marianas situation has revealed a much more extensive system of abuses than previously believed.

In testimony given to a Senate committee last year, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called it "... a massive, low-wage, indentured alien-worker program." He said that aliens now hold more than 90 percent of the private-sector jobs there, with the 28,000 local inhabitants being outnumbered by the 37,000 indentured alien workers. Meanwhile, 14 percent of the locals are unemployed and 35 percent are living in poverty. Some local farm laborers work for less than $1 per hour.

As Insight goes to press, word comes that a leading Manhattan law firm -- Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach -- is filing three class-action lawsuits in New York, Los Angeles and the Marianas capital of Saipan on behalf of the abused workers. The legal actions are targeting not only the manufacturers in the Northern Marianas but also a list of leading U.S. companies that import the products, including Ralph Lauren, The Gap Inc., J.C. Penney, Sears, Nordstrom and others. Most of the companies either have declined to comment or have said that they are not responsible for the actions of contract suppliers.

The lawsuits, on behalf of some 40,000 current and former garment workers, are seeking more than $1 billion in unpaid wages and damages, charging the Red Chinese enterprises with perpetrating physical abuse, indentured servitude, forced abortions and unsafe working conditions. Fainting from the sweatshop heat is common, food often is spoiled and bug-infested and workers are dragged from rest-room stalls if they exceed a four-minute time limit.

The main island, Saipan, became well-known during World War II when its people endured Japanese occupation and periods of heavy fighting. Later, as the people of these islands formed the CNMI, Washington was impressed with their declaration that they shared America's view of the individual's proper role in society, respect for law and belief in the democratic way.

"Our islands are developed under the American flag," one Marianas leader, Pedro A. Tenorio, told a U.S. Senate committee in 1976. "Our children are educated under the American system of education. Our economic development is patterned after the American economic philosophy...."

And Marianas Sen. Edward Panhgelinian said, "The values are human rights. The people of the Marianas have for too long been dominated by autocratic powers.... The coming of the United States, on the other hand, changed all this." That was then.

The Marianas, which are only 600 miles from mainland China, sought "an association with the United States." In 1976, Washington signed a formal agreement to give the indigenous inhabitants U.S. citizenship and granted the right to ship their products into the United States free of duty or quotas. It even waived U.S. immigration and minimum-wage laws to allow a transition period for the establishment of local industry. These latter concessions in the CNMI agreement proved to be an opening for abuse.

Allen Stayman, the Department of the Interior's director of insular affairs, tells Insight that "the local immigration and labor departments have been conducting a fundamentally abusive indentured-worker program that is inconsistent with American values." It is Red China's overwhelming role in the CNMI economy that is the basis for this harsh assessment. While some 30 foreign-owned garment factories exist in the Northern Marianas, the Chinese factories have the lion's share of the increasing billion-dollar annual shipments into the United States. U.S. Customs estimates that revenues lost through the CNMI loophole are upward of $200 million, and the number of U.S. jobs lost at the present level of shipments is 18,000 to 20,000.