Discord Rocks Garment Union Workers: Our leaders are failing us by Stephanie Saul Staff Writer
They are hidden in dilapidated Chinatown buildings or tucked away in Flushing basements and Sunset Park warehouses.
The city's 3,500 registered garment factories are difficult to find, their conditions and immigrant workers concealed from public view.
Yet, as a growing number of the city's garment workers have come forward to complain about wages and safety violations in the factories, some also complain that the union they believed would protect them, UNITE, has failed to enforce its contracts. The union denies the charge.
Most of the garment factories are unionized, organized by the Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees, but advocates for the workers allege that pay and conditions in those shops are no better than in nonunion shops.
"The union has a closer relationship with the boss than the worker," says Wing Lam, director of the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, a Chinatown activist group.
As more and more manufacturing work is taken abroad and New York's garment industry declines, "the union is afraid to enforce its contracts," said Ken Kimerling, a lawyer for the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
"They're afraid the work will go overseas or go to nonunion shops." Kimerling's organization recently filed three lawsuits in federal court against garment factories and manufacturers, including unionized factories for the high-end clothing company Donna Karan International, Inc. The lawsuits allege a wide range of abuses in garment factories.
UNITE officials defended the union's record.
"In our view, we're struggling in a very difficult industry where violations are rampant," said Susan Cowell, a UNITE vice president, who described the global pressures the industry confronts as it competes with foreign manufacturers.
"We think being in a union makes our workers better off," she said, particularly citing the health and pension benefits available to union workers.
Another UNITE official, May Y. Chen, criticized the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association.
"They say the union is no good, that the union is not going to do anything. That is extremely counterproductive," said Chen, who said the Chinese Staff organization has discouraged workers from complaining to the union, handicapping union efforts to protect workers.
The garment industry is one of New York's largest industrial employers, with an estimated 38,000 factory workers alone, according to figures from the New York State Department of Labor.
The bulk of the workers are Chinese and Latin American immigrants who don't speak English. Many of them are working here illegally.
New York's garment industry employment, however, has declined sharply in the past five years as more and more manufacturing jobs go overseas.
Long Island Republican Rep. Peter King, who recently met with Lam at his Chinatown offices to discuss sweatshop conditions, said he plans to look into allegations that the union is not enforcing its wage agreements.
"That's certainly one of the areas we intend to look into," King said last week. He emphasized, however, that he had not yet obtained UNITE's side of the story.
"What we certainly intend to do is bring it up with the secretary of labor, Elaine Chao," King said.
Among common practices in New York's garment factories, including union shops, according to workers and activists:
Not paying wages required by union contracts or paying overtime.
Forcing employees to work excessive hours.
Requiring workers to kick back 1 percent to 5 percent of their paychecks to have them cashed. (Most of the workers prefer having cash.) Shutting down the factories without paying workers.
A recent report by the Center for Economic and Social Rights, a Brooklyn-based human rights group, quoted two workers in a factory that produced Donna Karan garments, who criticized their UNITE lawyer. The workers alleged that the factory where they worked was closed after they complained about working conditions.
"We thought he was a DKNY lawyer, not the union lawyer, because he kept saying that DKNY wasn't responsible for any of the conditions and the union couldn't do anything to help us get our jobs back," said one of the workers, who asked not to be identified.
Oi Kwan Lai, a worker in one of the factories, told the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association that the union failed to protect its members against abusive conditions.
"It felt like being in prison," she told the association in a complaint.
"We had to keep our heads down at all times once we started working. No looking up. No talking to anyone." In a case involving another factory making Donna Karan garments, Richard Rumelt, manager of Local 89-22-1, which represents the Manhattan garment district workers, said those workers never complained to the union prior to filing their lawsuit. That particular lawsuit is a class action which seeks to represent all U.S. workers making Donna Karan garments.
"Despite the business agent for the union being in there on a regular basis, they did not raise concerns," Rumelt said.
After the lawsuit was filed, the union offered to take the alleged contract violations to arbitration, Rumelt said, but no one came forward with information that the union could take to arbitration.
A spokeswoman for Donna Karan International, whose founder, Donna Karan, is active in charitable causes and a favorite designer of high-profile liberals, said the company would not comment on pending litigation.
But the spokeswoman, Patti Cohen, said the company expects its contractors to comply with federal and state labor laws, and has established a compliance program to encourage adherence.
Criticism of UNITE surfaced in 1998 congressional hearings. That same year, federal investigators searched the offices of UNITE Local 23-25, which represents about 15,000 Chinatown garment workers.
The search was related to the indictments of Luchese crime family operatives on charges of extorting money from garment factories to buy labor peace. A union business agent pleaded guilty to receiving a bribe. The investigation was subsequently closed.
Despite wage and hour enforcement programs by both the federal and state Departments of Labor, Lam and other activists say wages and working conditions in the garment factories have deteriorated since the congressional hearings.