The Working Poor (14 page)

Muncie was not gentle, though. “I miss my house, and I miss my friends,” Caroline lamented, “but I had so much overhead, I’m glad to be out of that.” After six weeks with her daughter-in-law, she found a small apartment in a public housing project in a hard section of town. “It’s not the best neighborhood,” she observed mildly. It was riddled with drug dealers and prostitutes, and a shooting had just occurred two blocks from the convenience store where she was working. “Jobs don’t pay nothing around here,” she had discovered. Her hourly wage, $5.45 without benefits, meant a downward slide even from the $6 at the Vermont plastics factory more than a quarter century before. “I just can’t get ahead,” she said.

Six months later, Caroline’s skill in hunting for government aid brought her a couple of important finds. First, she was accepted into public housing in a safer neighborhood. “It’s really nice,” she said. Second, she managed to get Medicaid to contribute over $400 for a new set of false teeth, provided that she could come up with $322 to cover the balance. She did not have that kind of money in her anemic bank account, so her older daughter gave her a loan. The teeth gave her confidence. “They fit nice, and I still got to get used to them,” Caroline reported hopefully. Once they felt comfortable, she planned to try them out in a few job interviews. She found work at a convenience store, went to $7 an hour, and was training
to be an assistant manager. That was the optimistic side of her balance sheet.

The debit side was severe, however. The benefits of moving to Muncie were beginning to look dubious. “I think it’s harder to make friends here,” she observed. “I don’t get out much.” The finances were harder. She was stunned by Indiana’s income tax (New Hampshire had none), plus the city and county taxes. Her low wage didn’t keep up with the outflow. “I’m broke,” she said flatly. Furthermore, the reason for the move—Amber’s life prospects—now seemed less certain. She was learning more, but Caroline could no longer afford the $140 a month for Amber’s reading tutoring. Besides, Caroline said, “the school told me I was wasting my money.” Amber would never learn to read.

Money may not always cure, but it can often insulate one problem from another. Parents of means could have addressed Amber’s difficulties without uprooting themselves and discarding their assets. They could have purchased services; brought their own skills to bear; and walled off their house, their jobs, and their lifestyle from the intrusion of hardship. In the house of the poor, however, the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles
seep into one another.

Luxury is produced by humble hands. Not only in the squalid factories of “developing” countries but on American soil too, wealth and poverty intersect. Where immigrants have come seeking lives of plenty, they bring their deprivation with them, creating islands of hardship amid the surging tides of prosperity. For a paltry wage, albeit one far greater than at home, they feed and clothe and comfort the Americans they wish to emulate.

So it is in potato fields and sewing lofts, in cleaners and restaurants, and in the manicured gardens of suburban affluence. In Los Angeles, among shabby blocks around Spring and 8th, garments to be sold lucratively on Fifth Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard are sewn together by struggling Mexicans and Thais, Hondurans and Koreans. By the time the graceful dresses and tasteful blouses are pressed and hung on mannequins in glistening windows, all the stains of suffering have been erased.

A New Yorker can wander the sprawling expanse of Los Angeles
searching in vain for a city. Vast stretches of low houses and warehouses, broad highways and scattered factories spread carelessly eastward from the Pacific as if land were an infinite resource. The garment district, however, is an exception; it has a taut urban feel. Structures are tall enough to cast shadows across streets, and streets are filled with a rainbow of complexions, a babel of tongues. Even without approaching the cluttered vibrancy of Manhattan’s garment district, this neighborhood would make a New Yorker feel almost at home. Hand-pushed trolleys hung with clothing weave in and out of truck traffic among buildings exhausted from hard use. At lunchtime, creaky elevators traveling down from ten, twelve, thirteen stories disgorge the industrious, the slick, the honorable, the corrupt—in sum, a global population, the faces mostly Asian and Latino with smatterings of black and white. A couple of taco vans take up strategic positions in an alley and along a parking lot; workers and their bosses eat lunch quickly, then return to lofts crammed with sewing machines and bolts of fabric.

In her nine years since coming from Mexico, Candalaria worked here, moving from one to another sewing job as small companies appeared and evaporated like beads of sweat in the wind. She was quick, and she had better have been, because she was paid by the piece: three-quarters of a cent for each fly she sewed with a machine onto a pair of jeans. The arithmetic was coldly simple. “I have to do a hundred flies to get seventy-five cents,” she noted. To make California’s minimum wage, which was $5.75 at the time, that added up to 767 flies an hour, allowing her just under 5 seconds for each fly. “I’m pretty fast at this,” she bragged, much faster than workers new to the industry. “I can do four cuts a day; each cut is twelve hundred to sixteen hundred pieces.” At the highest end, that came out to about $6 an hour for an eight-hour day.

There was a catch, though. Her supervisor, a Vietnamese woman named Anh, kept track of the difference between Candalaria’s piecework earnings and the minimum wage. If she didn’t make the minimum wage on a certain day, Anh paid her anyway, and Candalaria owed her the difference. If she made more than the minimum wage, she owed Anh the excess. Even though this put a ceiling on her wage, it was a better deal than the below-minimum piecework pay that many garment workers received. Those who could not maintain the pace were fired.

Candalaria started work at 7 a.m., but Anh didn’t let her punch in until 9 to make sure the records showed fewer hours. So quick and nimble were

Candalaria’s fingers that Anh accused her of fabricating tickets to exaggerate her production. The allegation led to arguments, and Candalaria once pulled out the notebook in which she had listed her hours. “The boss tried to take it from me,” she remembered, “and tried to get me to sign something saying I’d faked the tickets.” Constant chicanery gave the sewing loft the uncertainty of a dusty marketplace where no price was fixed and no bargaining power was had by the seller. Without immigration documents, Candalaria had no legal right to be in the United States or to sell what the American economy needed: cheap labor at the bottom rungs of production. So she had stayed in this sweatshop for a year and eight months. Was there a chance of finding a better job? She laughed at the silly question, and so did several men who were sitting with her. They worked at various sewing companies.

“When I put a label on a pair of pants, I get four cents,” said Juan. This, after his nine years of experience in the garment district. “They pay a total of $2 to all the people who work on a pair of pants.”

“I produce loops,” said Jesus. “I get nine cents per pair of pants. Most of the factories don’t pay minimum wage, but for people like Juan, he’ll be able to reach that level. Someone who’s new can’t do that much.” The inexperienced, those with less dexterity on the sewing machine, made as little as $3 an hour, he said.

Paying so little may seem like a boon for a boss, but he isn’t always delighted. Low piecework wages reflect low productivity, and the sewing factories have deadlines to meet. Juan’s employers, therefore, “expect workers to produce enough to reach the minimum wage,” he explained, and they fire anyone who consistently falls short. When the state raises the minimum wage, the employer usually raises the required speed of production and leaves the rate per piece unchanged, workers’ advocates report. That circumvents the law, of course—the law enacted by government, that is. More potent is the law of economics. Global manufacturing has put the five thousand sewing factories in Los Angeles in cruel competition with those in Honduras, Cambodia, and other Third World countries where living standards and labor costs are exceedingly low. Mexicans get about $4 a day for factory work; in Cambodia, where teachers earn $15 to $25 a month, Cambodians who sew garments get $30 to $45 a month, or 16 to 23 cents an hour. One response has been to import some features of the Third World into the United States.

Few American demonstrators against globalization and the World

Trade Organization seem aware that if they want to protest sweatshops, they don’t have to look for exploitation in poor nations; they can find more immediate targets by walking along 8th Street in L.A., where the bad publicity would surely provoke speedier results. Protesting globalization is like protesting the monsoon season. What’s the point? The rain is going to come anyway, and it yields both hardship and benefit—destructive flooding that also produces enough water to grow rice. The best approach is to channel it, control it, prevent it from inundating the defenseless.

That is what several organizations in California have done since they formed a coalition called Sweatshop Watch
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to lobby and litigate on behalf of garment workers. The organization has persuaded some laborers to overcome their fears of deportation and to expose both their direct employers—small sewing shops—and the larger, brand-name designers and manufacturers. Those big names often hire the abusive sewing contractors to do their dirty work by underpaying workers to assemble garments. In 2000 a Latino couple and their daughter, who were paid as little as $3 an hour, won a settlement of $134,000 from three manufacturers, John Paul Richard, Francine Browner, and BCBG Max Azria. The manufacturing firms had hired a private company to monitor conditions at the sewing contractors but did nothing when the monitor reported problems.

The most infamous case to date began in rural Thailand in the late 1980s, when Thai con artists recruited impoverished young people, most of them women, with promises of well-paid sewing jobs in the United States. Upon arrival, the workers were practically enslaved in a two-story apartment complex in El Monte, just east of Los Angeles. They ate, slept, and worked behind razor wire and windows covered with plywood. For seventeen or eighteen hours a day, they were forced to sew and assemble clothing for major American manufacturers, including Tomato, Clio, B.U.M., High Sierra, Axle, Cheetah, Anchor Blue, and Airtime. The apparel was sold at Sears, Target, May’s, Nordstrom, Mervyn’s, Miller’s, and Montgomery Ward.
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The workers’ wages amounted to less than a dollar an hour, from which the Thai organizers subtracted the cost of groceries, inflated by a factor of four or five. Without medical care, the laborers suffered from various ailments; because of untreated gum disease, one had to pull out eight of his own teeth.

“They were told that if they tried to resist or escape, their homes in Thailand would be burned, their families murdered, and they would be
beaten,” writes Julie Su, one of their lawyers.
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They were shown pictures of a man who had been badly battered after an escape attempt, and they were threatened with the dreaded Immigration and Naturalization Service if they complained—threats that came true, in a way. In 1995, seven years after the involuntary servitude began, and three years after the INS had received its first report on the problem, federal and state agents finally raided the place, “freeing” seventy-one hapless workers only to imprison them in a federal penitentiary pending deportation. The INS, bound by law to detain and deport illegal immigrants, thereby reinforced the intimidation commonly used by employers to enforce their workers’ silence. The official toughness “could only serve to discourage workers from reporting labor law, civil rights, and human rights abuses, and push operations like El Monte further underground,” Su argues. “The INS, we asserted, ought not conspire with exploitative employers.” It took an entire week of vehement demonstrations by Sweatshop Watch members before the tormented Thai workers were released by the immigration agency.

In the end, their captors were jailed for two to seven years, and the workers won $4 million settling a civil suit. Most significantly, the manufacturers, who were two steps removed from the El Monte factory, did not escape responsibility. That was a breakthrough against high-rolling brand names that try not to sully their labels.

In the usual routine of the garment business, the manufacturer, or designer, draws the pattern and uses huge jigsaws, run either by hand or by computer, to cut thick stacks of fabric along the lines of the pattern. The cut pieces of clothing are then shipped to a contractor whose employees sew the pieces of each garment together, often on an assembly-line basis. It is at that level of assembly that most abuses occur. The contractor charges the manufacturer a per-garment price, and so is motivated to keep labor costs close to the bone. The manufacturer throws up his hands in a mock pretense of ignorance and helplessness over his contractor’s relations with his employees. In the El Monte case, however, lawyers for the Thai workers argued successfully in court that the manufacturers could not plead such ignorance, having delivered cut pieces to a couple of small contractors in the garment district with demands for such a quick turnaround of finished apparel that they had to know the work would be farmed out to some larger operation—in El Monte, as it happened. The Thai laborers were joined in their lawsuit by the contractors’ Latino employees, who were badly underpaid. It was a rare instance of inter-ethnic cooperation in

Southern California, where workers’ rights campaigns are usually organized into separate movements by Koreans, Latinos, Cambodians, and others.

Publicity over abuses led to state legislation in 1999 holding clothing manufacturers and retailers responsible for their sewing contractors’ compliance with minimum wage and overtime laws. Enforcement has been less than thorough, however: A year after the law was enacted, state and federal investigations found that only one-third of the sewing contractors inspected in Los Angeles were observing labor laws, down from 39 percent the year before.
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