January 28, 2000

Press Release

 

 

SGMA’s Pierce finds remarks by TV pundit Mark Shields ‘outrageous’

 

When the regulars on the syndicated TV show Capital Gang recently put their heads together to figure out, "the greatest catastrophes, greatest accomplishments, and the heroes and villains of the 20th century," Washington Post columnist Mark Shields came up with a strange choice for the ‘outrage’ of the entire American 20th Century.

"[I]n the Pacific trust territories (sic), in the northern Mariana Islands, which brave Americans died to liberate less than half a century ago, now in 2000 oppressed, brutalized and abused workers make designer clothes with the labels sewed in, made in the U.S.A."

"The real outrage," said Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association Executive Director Richard A. Pierce, "is that such a prominent commentator is not only ignorant of our relationship with the United States but also that he is willing to mouth pure propaganda as truth when he has no personal knowledge of the facts."

Pierce said that it shouldn’t have been hard to pick out a genuine outrage in a century that included two world wars and the slaughter of millions of innocent persons by their own governments over that time period. "I get the sense that Mr. Shields did his research in an old issue of the Reader’s Digest that he found somewhere," Pierce said. "We would very much like to show someone of Mr. Shield’s reputation our factories and arrange for him to meet with the PriceWaterhouseCoopers auditors and others who have been closely examining them. In fact, we plan to invite him to Saipan to see if he can find the conditions he has been talking about."

Pierce said if Shields wants to discover a true outrage on American soil, he should examine U.S. garment factory unions that are collecting dues from workers in factories in New York’s Chinatown, without making any effort to win reforms for their members. The human rights group, The Center for Economic and Social Rights, documented just how bad conditions are in a recent report. The US Department of Labor says 80 to 90% of the Chinatown factories can be defined as sweatshops and fully 90% of these factories have union representation.

Even more outrageous, Pierce said, the dominant union at these factories is UNITE (The Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees), which has been one of the loudest and most persistent critics of the CNMI and the Saipan garment industry.

"If I were to guess the source for Mr. Shields’ remarks, it would likely be UNITE," Pierce said. "They have to be the experts on sweatshops since they extract so much money from them."