WASHINGTON — The Clinton administration is stepping up its enforcement of labor laws in contract sewing shops, places it views as rife with workers toiling for sub-minimum wages and a problem it wants apparel manufacturers to better police.
“The industry has a very high rate of violations,” said Maria Echaveste. As administrator of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, she is the nation’s top cop insuring employees are paid the $4.25-an-hour federal minimum, plus overtime for working beyond a 40-hour week.
To highlight the government’s new enforcement focus, the Labor Department will hold a conference March 11 in New York to discuss the status of the estimated 750,000 women workers in the apparel industry, the bulk of the industry’s 1 million work force. A broad-based audience is expected for the conference, including academics, contractors, women’s advocacy groups, industry executives and garment workers themselves. Tying in with Women’s History Month, it will be held at the Labor Department’s office at 201 Varick St., and preregistration is required.
Echaveste, who brings to her job childhood experiences of helping her migrant farm worker parents in the fields of California, will be the keynote speaker.
Sewing shops, the workhorses for many brand-name apparel manufacturers, are sharing Labor’s enforcement spotlight with agriculture, two industries traditionally considered difficult for investigators to penetrate because of the seasonal nature of the work.
Although Echaveste said there is no data on the extent of garment industry wage compliance — there are only 800 investigators nationwide to monitor all industries — there is more than anecdotal evidence that there is a severe problem.
“We know that every time we investigate contractors in California or New York, better than 50 percent of the time there are violations and usually it’s better than 75 percent,” Echaveste said in an interview.
As part of its garment industry campaign, Echaveste last month held a brainstorming session in Dallas with Wage and Hour regional administrators from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and Philadelphia to coordinate a national strategy.
She gave each of her lieutenants marching orders to use the federal “hot goods” provision to force manufacturers to monitor contractors for compliance with wage laws. Under the provision, investigators can seize apparel, or hot goods, made by contractors in violation of federal wage and hour laws. When threatened with seizure of goods, manufacturers often pay the back wages of their contractors.
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“What we’re trying to do is identify larger manufacturers with sufficient reputation that they’re going to be concerned about their contractors,” said Echaveste, formerly a New York bankruptcy attorney who was President Clinton’s national Latino coordinator during the 1992 campaign.
Although two years ago the Labor Department under the Bush administration announced it would emphasize a hot-goods strategy, only the Los Angeles and San Francisco regional offices employed it with continued success.
Last year, by invoking the hot-goods provision, Labor investigators there retrieved $1.6 million in back wages owed to garment workers. In Los Angeles, agreements were also reached with several leading manufacturers — including Guess Inc. and Z. Cavaricci — to monitor contractors for compliance.
In the New York garment center, investigators for two years have been honing a hot-goods strategy. However, Doris Wooten, regional wage and hour administrator for New York, pointed out that because of the size and complexity of the industry in New York, it could still take another two or three years to get a firm handle on the proper investigative techniques.
“It’s been one of the industries where the results aren’t high because you don’t get the cooperation from workers. But that’s changing,” Wooten said.
Still, last year, the local wage and hour division recovered $341,617 in back wages for sewing shop workers using the provision.
This year, Wooten noted, she’ll be deploying garment industry strike teams in late March or early April to suspected contractors in northern New Jersey, the Bronx and downtown Manhattan.
In turning up the heat on the garment industry nationally, Echaveste said, the Labor Department is also
- Linking investigators by computer to share information.
- Asking federal attorneys to respond faster to requests to file for court injunctions blocking shipments of hot goods.
- Launching 12 teams of investigators across California to 125 sewing shops to measure the rate of contractor compliance, with statistics to be analyzed by the University of California.
- Evaluating a San Francisco Junior College garment worker education program as a model to use in other regions.
In addition, Echaveste is examining ways to deemphasize the Labor Department’s requirement to share information with the Immigration and Naturalization Service about employers who hire undocumented workers.
“Unfortunately, the association with INS has made a lot of workers fear wage and hour investigators and has really hampered enforcement for the most exploited workers because they are afraid to rely on us. They don’t know what their rights are,” she says.
Although the administration is pushing manufacturers to take on the responsibility to monitor their contractors, one effort by the San Francisco Fashion Industries Council, representing 150 manufacturers, isn’t scoring high marks with Echaveste. The council has developed a model contract, formalizing what is usually put forth in oral agreements in negotiating work with contractors.
“The contractors here have always been of a mindset, like squirrels, that they take all the work they can regardless whether workers can do it in an eight-hour day, because they don’t know when their next work will come,” said council president Paul Gill, an owner of children’s wear maker Mousefeathers Inc., Berkeley, Calif.
Likewise, he said contractors underbid because of ignorance about the length of time needed to complete a job.
Echaveste is concerned about the contract, which was initially embraced by her boss, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and which has since come under fire by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Missing from it as originally proposed is a so-called “time-study” provision detailing the time it would take to complete a garment and rework it, if needed. The contract now emphasizes a flat fee.
“I consider that very critical because if you know you’re paying 50 cents a seam and it takes 20 minutes to do what’s supposed to be done, I know you’re not going to meet the minimum wage requirements,” Echaveste said.
She noted, however, that manufacturers who sign the model contract are still subject to hot-goods violations.
Gill said the contract will be helpful in clearing up violations among legitimate sewing shops, giving investigators more time to go after unscrupulous players.
When it comes to manufacturers monitoring contractors, Joseph Rodriguez, executive director of the Los Angeles Garment Contractors Association, representing an industry with 150,000 workers, asserted it is a feasible concept. It doesn’t have to be a complex process, he contended, but what’s needed is involvement by top executives.
“In some cases, I think the heads of the manufacturers don’t know what’s going on,” Rodriguez said. “The word just comes down from the top to the production staff to get the lowest possible price, who then go after the illegal contractors in order to chase the lowest possible dollar.”