That expensive blouse you’re wearing? It may have been sewn by a Filipina garment worker laboring in a factory owned by a Hong Kong mogul on a western Pacific island. The Northern Mariana Islands, a territory of the United States, offers the possibility of an American label — Made in Saipan (USA), Made in Northern Mariana Islands (USA), or simply Made in USA — to garment manufacturers, and throws in a unique exemption from U.S. minimum-wage and immigration laws.
Anti-sweatshop leaders and some members of Congress have long sought to increase wages and protect the islands’ garment workers, most of whom are women, from what amounts to indentured servitude. But their efforts were repeatedly stalled in Congress. And who was among the biggest opponents of reform? None other than the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose tentacles reached deep into House Republican leadership. And who was one of the loudest congressional cheerleaders against reform? Tom DeLay, who praised the islands as “a petri dish of capitalism.”
Turns out that this petri dish of capitalism, so supported by conservative legislators, is actually a bastion of indentured servitude, with a side helping of coercive abortion and sex tourism.
Coming from rural villages and the big city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers began their sojourn in the Marianas with a huge financial deficit, having paid recruiters as much as $7,000 to obtain a one-year contract job (renewable at the employer’s discretion). Many of them borrow the money—a small fortune in China, where most are recruited—from lenders who charge as much as 20 percent interest.
In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay annual company supplied housing and food expenses of about $2,100 without working tremendous hours of overtime. Before being able to save her first dollar, a worker who owes, say, $5,000 to her recruiter has to work nearly 2,500 hours at Saipan’s current minimum wage—which equals six more 40-hour workweeks than exist in a year.
And that’s assuming she gets paid. Increasingly, workers are filing formal complaints that they have not received their wages, with some women going without paychecks for over five months. Still, workers at RIFU and other Saipan garment factories labor six days a week, sometimes up to 20 hours a day.
I can already hear the sweat-shop apologists: But they’re choosing to work those hours! And it’s a rational choice, because it puts food on their table!
Indeed, it may be a rational choice, and it does put food on the table. But choosing between starving and indentured servitude is a choice that no one should have to make.
And businesses manage to get around U.S. labor laws by having their products produced on these islands. The U.S. minimum wage requirement doesn’t exist, and they can still put “Made in the USA” on their labels, leading customers to believe that the clothing items were produced in the continental U.S. under humane conditions. Further, the companies that operate on these islands often employ guest workers, who have no virtually no rights and are often abused:
The guest worker designation means that these foreign laborers can remain on the islands for an indefinite period but are not eligible for U.S. citizenship. If workers complain about conditions, not only can they be terminated at the whim of their employer, but because they’re exempt from U.S. immigration law, they can be summarily deported.
The local Department of Labor and Immigration, chronically underfunded, is of little help to them, taking six months to a year to complete reviews of complaints. There are no labor unions. While there is a Federal Labor Ombudsman’s office in Saipan, under the Department of the Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs, it can do little more than offer translation services and refer aggrieved workers to other agencies; it has no authority to investigate or prosecute.
“There are serious problems here and everybody knows it,” says the ombudsman, Jim Benedetto, as he stares out his Saipan office window at a sheet of rain. “There isn’t anyone who would say there aren’t worker abuses.”
When Congress tried to step in, big business interets won out — and those interests were led by none other than Jack Abramoff and his pal Tom Delay.
And then there’s the pregnancy issue.
Despite the squalid living conditions, the young guest workers want to stay at their jobs long enough to make their sacrifices worthwhile. But if they happen to get pregnant while working in Saipan, they’re faced with a new nightmare. According to a 1998 investigation by the Department of Interior Office of Insular Affairs, a number of Chinese garment workers reported that if they became pregnant, they were “forced to return to China to have an abortion or forced to have an illegal abortion” in the Marianas.
So much for pro-life politics.
And it doesn’t end there. Companies are now moving their operations to places where they can pay workers even less than they pay then in the Marianas. But the women who traveled to the Marianas to work are still there, with no employment. Often, they turn to the sex tourism industry:
A naked Mongolian woman in a blond wig grinds her body around a silver pole. As music pounds through the small room, disco lights reveal an overweight, graying man in a Hawaiian shirt sitting in the corner, rubbing the thighs of another of the club’s dancers. A Japanese man with a sunburned nose stuffs dollar bills between a third woman’s legs while kissing and rubbing her breasts.
Outside the club, scantily clad Chinese girls, their hair dyed red or blond, sit on cheap white plastic chairs. “You want massage?” they call out.
“I can get you lots of Chinese girls,” says a man with one long fingernail, who calls himself Free. “You can take a girl back to her room and do whatever you want to her. All night.”
And that might be the creepiest quote I’ve ever read. “…and do whatever you want to her.” Sick.
Teeming with strip clubs and massage parlors, the red-light district of Saipan has a magnetic draw for Asian businessmen, and for U.S. Navy sailors on three-day furloughs from duty stations in the Pacific and beyond. “Every time a ship arrives, they want women,” says a local taxi driver. “They say, ‘I want a nice fuck tonight. Give me a nice lady.’”
There are no reliable statistics, but an estimated 90 percent of the island’s prostitutes are former Chinese garment workers, who sell sexual favors for about $50 a night. Women recruited to work in Saipan as waitresses, or in other legitimate jobs, often end up being forced to become strippers or prostitutes, according to Timothy Riera, director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Honolulu office.
But that’s capitalism, right?
The saddest tale we’re told in the Marianas comes from a 24-year-old Filipina who is afraid to give her name. She and the 22-year-old woman sitting on a couch beside her came to Saipan last fall after recruiters offered them $400 a month to work as waitresses. Her 14-month-old son had died of dehydration the year before when she didn’t have enough money for his medication. So, she couldn’t turn down the recruiters, she whispers, because she believed it would enable her to provide a better life for her surviving 3-year-old son.
But, “they forced me to work like a prostitute,” she says. They were expected to have sex with as many as four men per day and given but one daily meal of noodles. “The boss lady told me if I don’t work, I won’t return back to the Philippines or see my son, and they will file a complaint and I’ll go to jail.”
As she talks in the shelter where they’ve now hidden for five months, the other girl folds her body into a ball, tears streaking her face.
And what does Tom Delay have to say about this?
“Sure, when you get this number of people, there are stories of sexual exploitation,” he told the Galveston County Daily News in May 2005. “But in interviewing these employees one-on-one, there was no evidence of any of that going on. Most Saipan prostitutes are former garment workers. No evidence of sweatshops as portrayed by the national media. It’s a beautiful island with beautiful people who are happy about what’s happening.”
Those are some family values for ya.
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