Broadcast January 18, 2001
A lot of Americans are concerned these days about sweatshops in Asia and Latin America where poor people cut and sew garments at cut-rate wages, often in unsanitary conditions. But you don't need to go to a third-world nation to find a sweatshop. You can find all the sweatshops you want right here in the United States, producing a big portion of the shirts, dresses, blouses, and skirts on the shelves of big American retailers.
The U.S. Department of Labor, where I used to work, recently completed its latest survey of cutting and sewing shops in New York and Los Angeles. The places surveyed were randomly selected from lists of registered garment contractors. And here's what the Labor Department found. In Los Angeles, 61 percent of the cutting and sewing shops don't give their workers even minimum wages or overtime. In New York, 65 percent don't provide minimum wages or overtime. In other words, the vast majority of cutting and sewing shops in America s largest cities are ... sweatshops.
The Labor Department only surveyed shops that had gone to the trouble of registering themselves with the state. It didn't survey any of the thousands of fly-by-night operations that don't bother to register. Had the survey included them as well, the percent of sweatshops would have been much higher.
When I was secretary of labor I visited garment contractors in several American cities. I saw people crowded together in small spaces with one bathroom and no fire exits, people who hadn't been paid in weeks, sometimes months, and when they were paid it was a mere dollar or two an hour. People who couldn't complain because their English was so bad, or didn't dare complain because they feared being deported.
The sad fact is that there aren't enough government inspectors to police this industry, and American sweatshops are as bad and as abundant as ever. But there is something you can do. Join consumers in demanding the big retailers you shop in create a system of independent inspectors to will reassure you and everyone else that the clothing we you buy wasn't made in an American sweatshop.
It's easy for us to blame foreign countries for exploiting their workers. It's time we cleaned up our own act here at home.
