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‘Made in USA’
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Posted on Sep 03 1999
The “Made in the USA” label is regularly placed in garments manufactured in true sweatshops a hundred miles south of your editorial office in Los Angeles. Your editorial writer casually labels every garment factory on Saipan, 5,800 miles away, a place where he/she has likely never been as a sweatshop, but frankly, most of what passes for journalism in this area is propaganda and yours is merely average.
With the exception of the U.S. minimum wage, the same American labor laws apply here as in California; the same people are responsible for either good or bad enforcement. Unlike sweatshops in Los Angeles, our garment factories pay the legal local wages and overtime, not to mention local taxes. On our 13-mile long island, garment factories are scrutinized by staff from the U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA, a U.S. District Court and the FBI. The Department of Interior has a labor ombudsman, which we fund. There is an entire set of local labor laws and the bureaucracy to enforce it and private inspectors for outside retailers with more, under the settlement that you are so pleased with, I would venture to say we should be able to do a better job than Los Angeles.
For the benefit of your readers, I suggest you read up on the U.S. Department of Labor definitions of what constitutes a sweatshop, and make some effort to find out about conditions in distant places before you make statements in the editorial columns.
The U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands negotiated control of its own immigration and minimum wage at the highest levels of the U.S. government and to describe it as a loophole or suggest that it violates U.S. law shows your ignorance.
Your editorial is what normally results when special interests, in this case, the AFoFL-CIO, Congressman George Miller and the very political partisans at President Clinton’s Interior Department provide the legwork, thought and information instead of your own journalistic efforts.
Richard A. Pierce
SGMA executive director
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This letter was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in reaction to an article which appeared in that paper last Aug. 17, 1999.
