Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor...
By Terry McCarthy/Saipan
The young Chinese woman believed she had come to America. But how could this be the American Dream? Li Li, 26, found herself working 18-hour days in a factory cutting textiles. At night she and 700 other workers were locked up in company barracks infested with rats and equipped with just one outside toilet for every 50 people. The residents were allowed out only on Sundays for a maximum of one hour. When she complained about conditions, according to her account, she and another female worker were beaten by factory foremen wielding heavy dressmaking scissors.
Welcome to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain east of the Philippines. And, yes, it has been a U.S. territory since the end of World War II. Li Li is one of 40,000 foreign contract workers, mostly from China, Bangladesh and the Philippines, shipped in to service a garment industry that exploits Saipan's exemption from a number of American labor and immigration controls. This allows the garment factories, most run by Chinese or South Korean firms, to pay foreign laborers substantially less than the minimum wage but still export nearly $1 billion worth of clothes annually to American markets--patriotically stamped MADE IN THE USA and free of duties and quotas that apply to products made in China and Korea.
Li Li is attempting to sue her former employer, SR (Saipan) Corp., for the assault on her and for unpaid overtime. "The managers did not treat us like human beings," she says, adding that she would not have gone to Saipan if she had known what the working conditions were like. But having borrowed the equivalent of $2,800 to pay the "recruitment fee" in China, she cannot return until she has earned at least enough to pay off the loan. "That comes close to the definition of indentured labor," says Allen Stayman, insular-affairs director at the U.S. Department of the Interior, who is pressuring the Northern Marianas to clean up sweatshop practices or face a federal takeover of immigration and labor controls. "The local immigration and labor departments are essentially organized crime," says Stayman. "It is one big scam." So big that foreign laborers outnumber natives 40,000 to 28,000.
President Clinton sent a letter last May to the islands' Governor, complaining that the labor practices "are inconsistent with our country's values." Last week a bipartisan congressional commission on immigration released a scathing report that said, "Only a few countries, and no democratic society, have immigration policies" like Saipan's. Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California who has sponsored legislation that would end Saipan's exemptions, visited the island two weeks ago and said he was "deeply troubled" by conditions.
Terrified of losing its lucrative garment industry, the local government has been lobbying hard in Republican circles to invoke the spirit of free trade to help fight off a federal takeover. In the past year more than 90 members of the House of Representatives, their family members and aides have been flown to Saipan free of charge on inspection visits that include time on the golf courses and coral reefs for which the island is famous. A new Governor, Pedro Tenorio, was inaugurated last week, pledging to reduce the tensions with Washington. "It is in our best interest to see the system work," he says. But Tenorio does not plan to close down the garment industry to stave off a federal takeover. "I think it's premature for me to say 'Close down' after these people invested so much money." Since the Chinese and Korean firms moved in, Saipan's revenues have jumped from $224 million in 1985 to $2 billion last year.
The Northern Marianas have a commonwealth agreement with the U.S., negotiated in 1975 to give the local population U.S. citizenship while retaining control over labor and immigration. This was intended to help the locals boost their own economy and keep out competitive immigrant labor. The opposite has happened: 90% of private-sector workers are aliens, while unemployment among locals has reached 14.2%. The labor market is so skewed that in 1995 the government had to issue a directive forbidding Saipan's welfare recipients to hire foreign workers as maids. And in establishing the commonwealth, the U.S. Congress certainly did not foresee communist China's establishing an economic beachhead on American territory.
Abuses of contract workers are widespread. A recent scam involved offering Bangladeshis jobs supposedly paying $1,000 a month as security guards on Saipan (shamelessly described as "a train ride away from Los Angeles"). A $6,000 recruitment fee was demanded. "When we arrived here, suddenly there was no job," says Mohamed Feroj Ahmed, one of more than 100 Bangladeshis who wander the island, indebted but unable to find more than day labor. When told of the Bangladeshis' plight, Congressman Miller said, "How low do you have to get to rip off a Bangladeshi?"