‘Exit plan needed for workers’

Alarmed over the closures and downsizing within the garment industry, Washington Rep. Pete A. Tenorio is asking the government to act quickly and sit down with industry players to make sure that no employee will be abandoned.

“It is a huge problem from many, many angles. It’s not just local crowding here or welfare list for Karidat, but the social impact of seeing the potentially 50,000 nonresident workers walking around the beach doing whatever, walking around town and not having anything to do, not knowing where the next meal is going to come from,” said Tenorio.

He expressed dismay that the government seems to be lacking a concrete plan to address the situation.

“I don’t see too many actions being taken. I’m not trying to be critical about it. I’m just trying to be objective about it. It doesn’t matter who’s the governor, the Legislature. I just feel that the time has long been overdue to address this issue,” he said in a press briefing Friday at his office on Capitol Hill.

He said that Gov. Juan N. Babauta should gather all concerned parties, particularly the factory owners and their bonding companies, to get their assurance that they would shoulder all repatriation costs and proper wages in case of closures.

“If I have to recommend anything, I’d ask the governor right now to get moving, get the factory owners, even those not closing down. I think we need to do some advance planning to find out the different status of each garment factory. If we don’t, we’d only see daily closure of factories,” Tenorio said.

Failure to do that, he said, would give the federal government a good reason to come in again and impose control.

“We’d have the federal government on our backs. We don’t want to do that. We want to make sure that we begin to solve the problem, address the problem and show the federal government that we’re on top of it,” he said.

Tenorio said he had predicted that a crisis like factory closures would come sooner. “It’s happening before our eyes right now. Two factories are already in the closure mode,” he said, referring to La Mode and Marianas Fashions.

Meantime, Tenorio expressed fear that existing bonding companies may not be able to pay off all financial obligations in case of mass departure of factory owners.

“My worry is whether or not our government has any kind of plan to deal with this problem in terms of repatriation, for example. That’s very important given the kind of financial weakness that these factories have. I’m afraid, I may exaggerate this thing, but I’m afraid, some owners, some factories may just start disappearing and leaving their workers behind without any means of livelihood nor payment of their wages, and the overall well-being of factory workers. I’m not aware of any real concrete government plan at this point to begin to address this serious matter.

“Given the current knowledge that I have about the status of bonding companies, I have serious doubts that these companies will have the capability to deal with these massive outlays of financial resources to take care of repatriation costs, let alone the guaranteed salaries for these workers,” he said.

Tenorio said he is aware of existing regulations that address such scenario but he said it is different when it comes to actual implementation.

“That’s a different story. When people are going broke, going bankrupt, the first thing they think about is to disappear from the face of the earth, so that they will not face reality,” he said.

A task force consisting of government and industry representatives has been meeting to discuss the situation.

The task force includes Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association executive director Richard Pierce, Labor Secretary Joaquin Tenorio and the department’s legal counsel, attorney general Pamela Brown, U.S. Labor ombudsman Jim Bennedetto, the Garment Oversight Board, and the Chinese Economic Development Association.