Officials of the U.S. Department of Labor\u2019s Wage and Hour Compliance Division recently met with Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association representatives to discuss upcoming fiscal year 2004 enforcement findings and reports on work within the Saipan apparel factories.<\/p>\n
DOL\u2019s Terrence Trotter (Hawaii), Richard Hamilton (Saipan) and Luis Cabuhat (Saipan) met with SGMA\u2019s executive director Richard A. Pierce in a courtesy visit at the Saipan International Airport upon Trotter\u2019s arrival and Pierce\u2019s departure to discuss the past year\u2019s enforcement reports.<\/p>\n
An increase in educational outreach to the SGMA membership occurred during the past year. As a result of these face-to-face educational sessions, according to US DOL, instances of wage and hour compliance violations are at a low within the member factories.<\/p>\n
Advance notification of wage and salary recovery for employees has still been detected but these violations now occur as a result of factories having to delay scheduled payroll due to uncollected sales contracts, not from old violations such as unrecorded hours, or other compliance violations.<\/p>\n
\u201cUS DOL now has seen almost all violations of the past put behind us,\u201d Pierce said. \u201cWhat they see now is simply a sign of the competitive nature of our business in the factories.\u201d<\/p>\n
US DOL announced during the recent meeting that their enforcement offices will notify all contracting parties when there\u2019s an instance of delayed wages, or other wage violations. This will \u201cput on notice\u201d all parties that particular attention needs to be paid to timely production, billing, payment on contracts and wage payments, and that the situations are being closely monitored.<\/p>\n
Although a rare occurrence, SGMA told US DOL that they are aware of three factories that have been late in wage payments for a week or two weeks. Most of the time, employees are aware of the nature of the delay, and employees, at the end of their contracts, do not return to their home countries without full compensation. <\/p>\n
SGMA is comprised of 24 of Saipan\u2019s 25 licensed apparel factories. The industry accounts for nearly 16,000 jobs in the factories and yields a third of the CNMI government\u2019s budget income.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Officials of the U.S. Department of Labor\u2019s Wage and Hour Compliance Division recently met with Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association representatives to discuss upcoming fiscal year 2004 enforcement findings and reports on work within the Saipan apparel factories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}