November 8, 1999
	Don Smith Business Editor Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Dear Mr. Smith:

When the World Trade Organization meets shortly in Seattle, the session will call for considerable overtime work by the local news media to accurately convey what is going on, including the significance of the demonstrations that will accompany this international event. As you will have noticed by now, the industry represented by the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association has been targeted for attention by the Clinton administration and the activists planning protests in Seattle.

Unfortunately, these same parties have largely been able to frame this issue to their own advantage in the U.S. media. I am sending along a recent letter to the Associated Press, which summarizes some of our objections to the general run of news coverage.

The enclosed August AP story from the P-I makes our point, suggesting as it does that conditions alleged in a civil lawsuit against retailers doing business with our Saipan garment factories are proved because some of the retailers chose to settle, including your own beleaguered Nordstrom. Those who settled made it clear they did so to save themselves a lot of money rather than continue to defend their interests against rapacious law firms such as Milberg, Weiss, the masterminds behind this effort.

Certainly readers of your business page are familiar with this firm's successful litigation against Silicon Valley corporations on the premise that management was not delivering enough money to stockholders. To be charitable, quite a few, but not all managers were blackmailed into settling for huge amounts. In this case, Milberg, Weiss has used the interests of labor unions to kill us as a competitor and the human rights groups, not always the same by the way, as the means to create yet another stream of revenue.

Those who settled will probably save millions in legal fees, not to mention heading off millions more in damaged public relations efforts. Those remaining in the cases are willing to pay the price to put these wild allegations in front of a judge, rather than in the realm of propaganda.

When the AP, the Seattle P-I and other U.S. media describe our Saipan factories as "sweatshops"â this is contrary to the official definition of the U.S. Department of Labor, which monitors our operations and can close them if these conditions are found. OSHA is here and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Interior have taken various roles in monitoring our industry. Local labor laws, as well as the U.S. Bill of Rights, also protect every employee here, regardless of nationality. Our organization, the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association, has developed a Code of Conduct and we have just hired the internationally recognized firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers to provide another layer of monitoring in addition to that provided by various retailers who also periodically inspect our facilities. Incidentally, child labor has never even been suggested as an issue here, even by our wildest accusers.

How would it help the situation if the WTO could be persuaded to pass rules that will effectively redirect manufacture of our production to, say Honduras or Bangladesh, the kind of places where it is being driven in any event? It certainly won't help the worker's interests that so concern the human rights folks.

The Clinton administration has campaigned to impose federal control of labor and immigration on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, contrary to the Covenant agreement, negotiated at the highest levels of Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and signed off on by President Ford. The purpose has been to satisfy the labor allies who have provided much of the rhetoric for the class action lawsuits in question. Officials at the U.S. Department of Interior, as indicated by an ongoing investigation by the House Resources Committee, were willing to interfere with the election campaigns of ranking Republican members of Congress. Is this really meant to help present workers here, who will be sent home to exactly the conditions cited by the human rights groups? Let the unions explain that little anomaly to their co-campaigners.

There is a lot of talk about Saipan, but probably the World Trade Organization meeting or even the streets outside is not the right place for that discussion.

Richard A. Pierce