A day in a metropolitan Jiangsu county

In one of the commercial nodes of downtown Sheyang, a county in the Jiangsu plains west of the Yellow Sea and north of Shanghai, is a room-sized bronze statue of the laughing Buddha. It is meant to signify prosperity, the commercial type pursued when the county was at the height of its ambition and clarity of vision a decade ago.

Near the huge bus terminal being built in the outskirt of town, and the new park that would miniaturize American Memorial Park in Saipan, is a huge solid globe. On one side is a figure that looks like a barefoot Achilles of the Greek pantheon of heroes. It is Houyi the archer shooting nine suns with his arrow without the sandaled flighty winged feet of the popular Greek god-warrior. Atop this planetary symbol are four flying red-crowned cranes, which are famous habitués along the Sheyang estuary.

In the last decade, Sheyang combined the spirits of the Buddha and Houji and joined the rest of China in vigorously pushing for its industrial development. Claiming to be the center of the textile industry in China, its residents were recruited worldwide to staff the transient garment factories that were adjusting across national boundaries while the markets of the industrialized nations sought cheap production means for its sartorial needs.

The Sheyang County Tianhe Foreign Labor Services Co., Ltd. (China) brochure claims success in human resource placements to many places like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia, Madagascar, Jordan, Namibia, Mexico, Canada, and yes, including “Saipan of the USA.” In a mythologizing act to bolster motivation, THGJ had these lines in Chinese characters for itself and its workers:

While my lofty sentiments come from the world

The new sun is rising from the east

Just like the exuberant and charming Tianhe..

Staff is turning their blueprint into practice

Their most beautiful pictures and poems

… a bridge over the world

Lead your dream of working overseas a reality.[/I]

This institution’s deeds on Saipan is what brought this resident walking the cold sidewalks of this sun-forsaken region between the Huang He and the Chiang Jiang rivers on the tail end of winter. Whether authorized or not, it is clear to this writer that one of Tianhe’s staff members ran a recruitment scheme that brought garment factory workers into Saipan without legally bringing them in as such.

With contacts on Saipan, workers were recruited from many attracted to the Saipan garment factories that numbered four times more than was needed. The abundant supply of workers willing to work hard for the privilege of coming to work on Saipan were prepared to dearly pay for it.

A word of context, or, more precisely, how did this cleric turned 6th grade Social Studies lao shi who ran a Resource Center for the Methodist Church on Saipan, get to explore the underbelly of our once favored island industry? The Skinner law firm, and later, Pam Brown, used to refer contract workers to the Center for sanctuary assistance. One of the referred Chinese worker groups came from Sheyang.

The five members in the group were legitimate workers who took their employer to task for not fulfilling contracted obligations. The Center hosted them for a month until they settled their case and transferred to another employer. The intricate recruitment scams perpetuated amongst the unwary became public through workers like them. To begin with, the pitch was invariably to work in America, with some receiving images as inaccurate as “Saipan being a suburb of Los Angeles.”

With the skinheads collecting $30,000 for the privilege of being smuggled into the industrialized West, preferably England, Australia, Canada and the USA, paying close to $10K to move to “Saipan of the USA” was on the cheap. Two attempts of Fujian boat people not too long ago tried to seek asylum in Guam and were diverted to the CNMI where federal immigration laws were presumed not to apply!

To circumvent standard procedures, recruits were brought in as restaurant workers, commercial cleaners and other allowed designations. Once on island, they were hired as garment factory workers without benefit of labor rights and administrative paper trail. Remunerations were made in cash. During boom times, everyone was happy as workers, supervisors, and local connivers all shared in the benefits of the unofficial pies. During lean times, the pinch hurt both the legitimate and illegitimate contract workers. Their handlers sanctimoniously distanced themselves in public. In any case, making turnovers more frequent in garment factories was advantageous to recruiters. Consequently, even when the factories were already closing, the recruitment efforts continued and even accelerated. To some, the money was no longer in the factory, it was in the exploitation of the workers.

Contract offers in Sheyang were for three years. Workers did not know that contracts on Saipan were valid for only a year. The cost was 60K Yuan in China, and another 10K Yuan on Saipan when workers arrived. Workers paid for travel and in-transit costs. This payment scheme applied to the legitimate factory workers, with most of the proceeds benefiting the Chinese recruiter. For the fraudulent employment, the cost is the same, save that the 10K Yuan was paid in China, the 60K Yuan on Saipan. Obviously, there were more palms to be greased on island with the latter.

At $3.05/hour in 1998, a worker took 410 regular days to earn enough income without deductions to equal recruitment costs. A worker thus understood that in three years, only the overtime pay was income; regular pay retired debt. To stay longer than three years was thus the object of aspiring workers. Not to do so meant indebtedness, and since kin back home usually put up the initial recruitment fee, the loss of face was a result as well.

There are other consequences of the above employment scheme that was paramount in this visit to the Jiangsu plains and will be explored in subsequent articles.