January 28, 2000
	Mr. Edward B. Cohen Special Representative to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the 902 Consultations

Dear Mr. Cohen:

The contents of your report to President Clinton as well as its recommendations generally came as no surprise to members of the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association, who have quite reasonably concluded that there was never a serious federal interest in labor reform for its own sake, other than as a justification for imposing U.S. immigration and the U.S. minimum wage unilaterally. This is not at all to suggest that reform efforts within the CNMI garment industry, initiated and paid for by our membership will cease. It is simply to observe that the federal effort seems to be driven by domestic politics and certain labor union constituents of the administration, rather than concern for the welfare of our workers.

As Executive Director of SGMA, the misstatements and tortured logic in portions of this document will not be allowed to stand without rebuttal, though any sort of negotiation or dialogue on these issues clearly will not be forthcoming from your quarter.

The garment sector in the CNMI has been demonized in a campaign organized within the U.S. Interior Department and eagerly trumpeted by sensation-hungry but frankly lazy U.S. media outlets who showed up here with their story line already sketched out at the Office of Insular

Affairs. One of the by-products of this effort was the characterization of the CNMI in the formerly staid Reader’s Digest of the CNMI as "the islands of slaves." Unfortunately for the Digest, it had to privately settle a lawsuit due to one of the many inaccuracies in the article, but DOI has never attempted to set the record straight about its insular client, any more than it has safeguarded the financial interests of Native Americans.

The Commonwealth over and over again has been presented as exceptionally out of touch with American life and values and as taking advantage of Covenant provisions negotiated with Washington. As your report states: "[The CNMI’s] industries also are not subject to U.S. duties and quotas on products they send to the customs territory of the U.S. These CNMI policies have resulted in large numbers of foreign workers being brought to garment and other factories in the CNMI for temporary work under conditions which both federal law enforcement officials and human rights groups believe are highly abusive."

Strangely enough, that’s exactly how the human rights group, The Center for Economic and Social Rights views the effect of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act on New York’s garment factories. Since its passage, CESR says in a new report, working conditions, "have steadily declined and the employment of immigrant[s], especially undocumented immigrant workers, has gone up. This is in a city where US Department of Labor figures cited by CES state that, "60% of NYC’s 7,000 to 7,500 garment factories are sweatshops…" DOL also says that as many as 80% to 90% of the factories in Chinatown can be considered sweatshops, but there’s an even more interesting figure. Some 90% of these sweatshops are unionized!

That’s right, unionized, and the dominant union is none other than UNITE, the Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees, which has provided much of the muscle between the federalization effort aimed at the CNMI. According to CESR: "In reality, most garment workers in NYC never see their union contracts and three quarters of unionized shops in NYC are sweatshops by UNITE’s own admission…In fact, labor violations occur as frequently, if not more often, in unionized shops as in ununionized (sic) shops."

The CESR report focused on the Choe factories, which produced Donna Karan products as a sub-contractor for many years. Some highlights of its findings: Many of the workers earned $4 per hour, with overtime never being paid, despite 60 hour workweeks; Average workdays were 11 hours per day, six days per week, with no heat or air conditioning on the weekends; Various forms of abuse, intimidation and harassment; illegal deductions from pay checks, no paid vacation, no maternity leave and much more.

After the retailer and the factory operator, CESR put the blame for a situation that went on for more than 12 years on UNITE and the U.S. DOL. No less a figure than the DOL’s Wage and Hour Administrator John R. Fraser observed to me in a recent letter, "I am proud to say that these problems do not pervade our society as is the case in the Commonwealth." I am not sure Mr. Fraser has this right.

Your report to the President continues the effort to paint the CNMI as unique and diverging from the "American way," but you strain logic when you say migrant farm labor on the U.S. mainland is a completely different matter from bringing in foreign workers to do contract work on Saipan. "[Migrant farm labor] jobs are temporary and existing immigration law accommodates such labor needs." Sure they’re temporary jobs, except that most of the same people come back to harvest the crops every season. Plenty of the great grandchildren of the workers that Edward R. Murrow chronicled so long ago on CBS Television are working those same fields and under about the same conditions, as Murrow’s less talented successors occasionally point out. It seems as if our American food chain is built on their backs. A far more powerful constituency than the CNMI garment industry assures that those laws continue to "accommodate" them and I am sure this is true. I suggest that you poll some of the strawberry pickers sleeping under cardboard boxes in Congressman Miller’s district as to how they are enjoying, "the opportunity for economic and political integration," as you have it, that is being extended to them at the end of every growing season.

As usual, you presented the President with the horror stories about extortionate recruiting fees holding workers in "virtual slavery" in the CNMI. The term favored by Interior and various legislators has been "indentured servitude." Well thank God that the enlightened oversight by the US Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service has eliminated this problem in New York and Los Angeles garment factories, among others. According to CESR: "Workers [in New York] have been harassed, beaten and even killed by snakeheads for protesting poor working conditions and/or not working hard enough to repay their ‘debt.’ Immigrants from China’s Fujian province sometimes owe as much as $35,000 to the snakeheads for being smuggled to the U.S. They are forced therefore, to work at whatever jobs are given to them within their community." Outside of the utterly unproven and discredited effort to prove forced abortions and violations of religious freedom by OIA’s (we hope) disbanded propaganda branch, show us something comparable to the situation in New York here in the CNMI.

The CNMI garment industry did not invent recruitment fees and neither it nor the CNMI government, for that matter, administers them, as your report repeatedly implies. These are not enforceable contracts in our courts any more than they are on the U.S. mainland. More to the point, this same problem comes up repeatedly in reports by the Department of Labor and various private agencies about sweatshop conditions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, among others. We’re far from the U.S. mainland, but hardly unaware of a history and a present that includes all the negatives that you attribute solely to us.

The story that you relay about the Saipan garment factory in which by "happenstance" you found out that workers had not been paid for 12 weeks would be more impressive, had one not read the accounts of what appear to be routine conditions in the New York City garment producing areas. The Choe violations went on for many years. It makes us wonder how Mr. Fraser’s troops occupy themselves on our small island. $80 a month for sleeping quarters on Saipan? Sorry Mr. Cohen, but you should explore available housing here with a budget of $20 a week. I sincerely you suggest you read The Center for Economic and Social Rights study closely. We come across as incredibly benevolent employers in every sense, compared to what is recounted there.

You restate yet again the old canard about the CNMI minimum wage relative to the U.S. minimum wage, without crediting the significant worker benefits mandated by local law, which are recognized by objective observers as roughly equalizing the compensation. Mr. Fraser and his politicized counterparts will not acknowledge this, but our membership would like to see DOL document CNMI conditions comparable to New York or other major American cities.

Your report takes the CNMI to task for not controlling entries and exits of alien contract workers, while acknowledging a few mainland discrepancies: "We are aware that exact figures on the numbers of aliens lawfully and unlawfully present in the remainder of the United States are also unavailable. However, given the CNMI’s small size and that it is an island with limited ports of entry, and there is minimal, if any, undetected entry, this information should be significantly easier for the CNMI government to obtain."

All right. The foregoing statement seems fair enough and it certainly seems reasonable that the CNMI should find it easier to control entry to Saipan than the U.S. with its extensive borders. However, it also stands to reason that all the resources brought to bear on this small island, including staff of the U.S. Department of Labor and an unprecedented number of OSHA inspectors, among others on site, would have similarly been able to anticipate and halt the egregious violations described. Let’s not forget, the Choe factories in New York were conducting their business for more than a dozen years without as much as a single inspection by DOL according to the CESR study. And where was OSHA when the heat in the factories was turned off during winter weekends, among other outrageous actions by the factory operator?

I might point out that federal neglect was also pretty much the situation in the CNMI for many years. Before this issue excited the political interest of the present administration, DOL and OSHA, for just two examples, were rare species in the CNMI until the 1990s. As you are well aware the relevant federal laws undeniably pertained back into the 1970s.

The CNMI garment industry, which you acknowledge has propped up an ailing CNMI economy during a very tough economic time, is once again blamed for its success and for trying to expand its workforce. "We learned that the majority of job vacancies are for relatively skilled workers, particularly in the garment industry. However, most persons illegally present in the CNMI such as laid off security guards, general construction workers, and victims of various recruiting scams, are unskilled." As you say, we didn’t strand those workers, but once again, we’re getting the blame.

What I have found more troubling over a long period of time and is once again reflected in your letter and report is more than a mild hint of racism. "Most [Saipan] garment factories are owned by non-American, Asian interests." As I have repeatedly asked others on a less exalted level than yourself, would it be different if the owners were from Holland, from Britain, or from Germany? It is unfortunately a fact of American labor history that the unions as well as everyone else always discriminated against the latest arrivals, exploiting them and playing them off against the rest of the workforce. How ironic that at the dawn of the 21^st century, a garment industry union is helping sweatshop operators do their business in New York while creaming off dues from their unknowing Chinese and Latino membership. How appropriate that UNITE publishes a newsletter titled "Stop Sweatshops News."

This letter repeatedly points out hypocrisy in the federal effort relative to our CNMI industry, administration’s policy on the African trade initiative, which it enthusiastically supports, takes this to a new level. Our free-trading President supports the House version of this bill, which would lift all tariffs and quotas on imports of African-made textiles. Yet at the same time, your recommendations to him would condition the duty free access of our industry to the U.S. mainland on our slavish obedience to micro-management of our industry. Among other things, we would be required to hire an increasing number of foreign citizens, also known as "Freely Associated States citizens." It seems us you are using our industry to solve the problem that Washington created when, without consultation with the insular areas, it was agreed that these people could freely enter the U.S. despite their decision to retain foreign citizenship. As you may recall, the CNMI has been denied the impact aid assistance for admitting these people that the more favored Guam is now starting to receive.

So what will be the condition for the lifting all tariffs and quotas on textiles for the entire African continent, besides the rather vague requirement that its sovereign nations embrace democracy and free markets? Will this be enforced by the U.S. Department of Interior? Perhaps UNITE can be put in charge of all African unionization. It would be not only the world’s largest closed shop but a fitting award for UNITE’s loyal political assistance to the administration.

Richard A. Pierce