"It's catch me if you can," Metchek says. "It's very easy to move a shop. If the labor department walks in and closes you up? You rent the machines and move next door. The workers will work whether they get cash or a check."
Illegal factories spring up like mushrooms after a rain in order to cash in on a hot item: "If a scarf is hot, you'll have 10 more factories opening up just to make scarves. When scarves are not hot, they're gone." Consumer demand for fast fashion makes it possible. A new color. A new print. It's over in 10 weeks.
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"Anyone who wants to deal with a legitimate retailer has to watch themselves on all levels," Metchek says, then stops to pull in a representative from Stony Apparel. "Hi. How are you? Good to see you. We're talking about sweatshops."
The Stony rep grimaces. "Sweatshops?" he says. "There aren't any sweatshops."
"Thank you," says Metchek, pointedly. "They have to watch it like a hawk. They have compliance monitors who check the status of factories."
The rep nods. "You've got to be squeaky clean."
"There's a bad apple in every bunch," says another manufacturer who has wandered over. He is the owner of the Barbara Lesser clothing brand, which sells to Nordstrom. "But why focus on that? People like to look far into the past. Some fire in 1918 or something. The big shirt fire," he says. "We're not here to change Third World countries. My opinion is, I'm going to worry about my own backyard. That's where I do business."
"The interesting thing about all of this," Metchek says, "is, after all of these years, they haven't found another El Monte."
The Underground
"Well, I have to say, I'm so troubled by that kind of standard," California Labor Commissioner Julie Su says a few days later. Years ago, she was the lead attorney for those 72 Thai workers. "El Monte was a situation in which workers were held against their will," she continues. "They were working 18 hours a day. They sewed on the first floor of an apartment building and then dragged their tired bodies upstairs to sleep, eight or 10 to a bedroom. Windows were boarded. Razor wire surrounded the apartment complex. So that cannot possibly be the standard against which we measure progress in the industry."
The standard, she adds, ought to be a legal one. By that measure, the garment industry is far from squeaky clean. Problems persist.
Su's office administers AB 633, and some 1,000 claims are still filed each year. Some years, it's closer to 2,000. "That's just ones that are filed," Su says. "We know that the majority of workers do not file claims." They either don't know their rights, or are frightened, or expect retaliation, or have little faith that anything will happen, she notes.
That lack of faith is not unfounded; before Su came in, cases took 700 days (as opposed to the legal maximum of 120 days) to adjudicate.
Barely a year in office, Su has improved that time dramatically. In the first half of 2012, her office issued decisions totaling more than $1.7 million, already more than the total issued in 2010.
A large number of the office's investigations uncover violations. "And we're not talking minor violations. We're not talking about technical errors," Su says. Her investigations routinely turn up myriad abuses: Failure to pay minimum wage and overtime. Failure to provide wage statements, so workers know how much they worked and what pay they are entitled to. Failure to carry workers' compensation insurance. Falsification of records. Cash-pay violations tied to tax evasion. Abuse of "piece rate."
In itself, paying workers for every piece they complete isn't illegal, but companies often use it as an excuse to avoid paying the minimum wage. You see people work faster and faster. If they work too fast, management lowers the pay rate.
"The faster you work, the more you were supposed to be able to make. But it gets twisted into a ceiling on wages," Su says. "They tell workers: If you don't get minimum wage, it's your own fault. You were just too slow."
(A 2008 UCLA study found that lots of money is being stolen from L.A. garment workers — on average, $26.2 million a week.)
The El Monte bosses, Su recalls, kept a front shop in downtown. Conditions in that front shop, she says, are what exist in today's sweatshops. "They were doing the finishing work — the trimming, ironing, packaging. Workers arrived earlier than they actually clocked in, and stayed later than they clocked out."
There was no minimum wage, no overtime and no breaks.
In the 12 years AB 633 has been on the books, enforcement has been a challenge. Shady contractors shut down their business once a complaint is made, then open up under a new name. (Legally, these "successor" businesses are still responsible for the prior operation.)
"The problem of sweatshops in Los Angeles remains a reality," Su says. "I don't want to suggest that everybody is a bad actor. But from where I sit, not enough has been done all around."
The complexity of the garment industry makes it especially hard to police. It's a three-tier system. The contractor does the sewing. They're hired by manufacturers, who get contracts from retailers. "Everyone wants to make a little bit of money," says Ruben Rosalez, the western states regional administrator for the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor. "Our theory is that the retailer is really the one who controls everything all the way down."
