Sweatshops flourish across the U.S.

The federal government must refrain from any further use of its bully pulpit tactics in leveling baseless accusations against territories and countries abroad about slavery and sweatshop conditions.

It must first ensure that its own backyard isn’t in fact a scrapyard of the very conditions it accuses of others. In fact, sweatshops have started returning and sprouting across US mainland, the larger plot of American soil.

A recent article by Kirstin Downey Grimsley about sweatshops says that in the past few years, federal investigators and workplace activists have uncovered dozens of sweatshops in the United States, “particularly in New York and Los Angeles, where immigrant employees, many of whom are poor and speak little English, work long hours for low pay. It is estimated that more than half of the nation’s 22,000 sewing businesses are now sweatshops.

“Charles Kernagham, director of the National Labor Committee, a group that seeks to expose sweatshops, said the abusive working conditions common overseas appear to be taking hold in the United States.” He said “what the letter writer describes sounds worse than some situations he has observed on Saipan, China and Latin America”.

Said he: “Really, it’s shocking how much of these sweatshops are returning to the United States and how little the American people know about them”.

However the NMI has been portrayed in the most negative way, all the work of a fully orchestrated agenda of the US Department of Interior, Miss Andrea Sheldon, executive director of Traditional Values Coalition, came to the islands in recent years and paid a visit to what the national media has dubbed “sweatshops”, worker dormitories and back alleys where abortions and prostitution rings had been reported.

“She told WORLD International (On the Web) she’s surprised to find clean and pleasant working conditions and immigrant employees seemed more than content with their lot”. Her assessment is amplified by Kok Hiong Pang, pastor of the Chinese Christian Church, the largest Chinese church on Saipan. He told WORLD that in six years of ministry to Chinese workers on the island, he had never experienced or heard of instances where freedom to worship or practice had been hampered.” He said that “there may have been a few cases where these things happen, but it’s not ‘rampant’, as the investigators say. This is a lie”.

The same article in WORLD International says a close scrutiny of these perceived indictments suggested a different conclusion: the charges were trumped-up for political advantage-greater federal control over a locally governed islands and decreased economic competition for textile unions in California, the garment capital of West Coast.

The NMI had to endure all the negative portrayal of its image in the international community fed to the global media by architects of Marianas Bashing in the US Department of Interior. In the words of a former Covenant negotiator, “Interior is hell bent to ruin self-government to protect the interest of the labor unions rather than working in partnership with the NMI to assist its people ‘attain a progressively higher standard of living’.”