RESURGENCE OF SWEATSHOPS REPORTED IN NEW YORK
Published: New York Times, February 26, 1981

By SANDRA SALMANS

Concealed behind painted-over storefronts and crowded into shuttered lofts and cellars, sweatshops are reappearing in garment manufacturing in the New York area, Government investigators and union officials say.

According to these investigators, the sweatshops are spreading from Chinatown, where they took root long ago, to Washington Heights, Inwood and the South Bronx, and extending into Queens, Brooklyn and even Staten Island. Sweatshops have also been found in northern New Jersey and parts of Westchester.

''It's exploding,'' said Herbert Rickman, special assistant to Mayor Koch. While sweatshop conditions vary, there is a grim sameness to the basic appearance: rows of women bent over sewing machines, separated by narrow aisles often made impassable by dress racks and piles of piece goods. Fire exits and windows, too, are often blocked or even padlocked, reducing emergency escapes to a rickety freight elevator and unlit stairs. For 30 employees, there may be only a handful of time cards - with stamped times that bear little resemblance to the actual hours worked.

Even the most reputable garment factories tend to be crowded and cluttered by modern standards. Sweatshops, however, may fail to comply with minimum wage and hour laws, child labor regulations and fire and safety codes laws. 50,000 Workers Estimated

Precisely how many sweatshops and sweatshop workers there are in New York is impossible to determine. In a report to be released today, State Senator Franz Leichter, who represents an upper Manhattan district where many sweatshops have recently sprung up, estimates that some 50,000 people are employed in as many as 3,000 sweatshops in the apparel trade. Ten years ago, according to Senator Leichter, there were only 200 sweatshops in the city, half of them in Chinatown. The industry's official estimate of total employment in New York is less than 200,000, but no one dismisses the sweatshop figure as improbably high.

The resurgence comes nearly 70 years after the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, where 146 garment workers died. The notorious episode is invariably invoked by government officials in discussing the situation today.

Increasingly, the workers are illegal aliens - from Hong Kong, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Haiti or Latin America. Lacking work permits and sufficient knowledge of English, they are easy targets for exploitation. The flow of immigrants from these areas is generally cited as a main factor in the revival of sweatshops, which were believed to have declined sharply in the city following reformist legislation and union activity in the 1930's and 40's.

As Herman Starobin, research director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, noted, ''There's a growing garment-producing operation in the midst of a completely different culture.''

Government, union and industry officials cite several reasons for the growth of the sweatshops:

- Budgetary cutbacks have compelled government departments to reduce the number of inspectors and deploy them in top-priority sectors, which do not include garment manufacturing.

- The large inflow of immigrants, both legal and illegal, has created a sizable and trained pool of workers who are easily exploited.

- Indifferent or ineffectual officials in government and the I.L.G.W.U., the main union responsible for organizing garment factories in the New York area, are cited by some garment manufacturers as contributing to the problem. Many Chinatown factories are unionized but are often found in violation of city building and fire codes.

- The contracting system, in which apparel companies parcel out the production of garments to small, highly competitive contractors and subcontractors, is said to encourage the companies to put a squeeze on wages while obviating any sense of responsibility.

In theory, a number of government departments are responsible for policing the apparel trade and imposing criminal and civil penalties. But, apart from some much-publicized periodic raids - the most recent of which occurred some 18 months ago in Chinatown - inspection and policing have been sharply curtailed as a result of budgetary cutbacks, officials say. When inspections are carried out, they are often handicapped by a lack of interpreters, especially in questioning new immigrants from South Korea or South Vietnam. Number of Inspectors Cut

For the five boroughs, the buildings department has only 69 inspectors to examine construction, issue violations and pursue recalcitrant owners. The fire department has only 150 inspectors, down by 100 from several years ago. Instead of annual inspections, ''we might hit between 10 and 15 percent of the buildings each year,'' said Paul Kotch, the department's inspector-general. Payoffs of inspectors by contractors, Mr. Kotch acknowledged, were an additional problem.

While the city's authority covers only building and fire codes, the United States Labor Department is supposed to inspect for machine safety, minimum-wage and overtime payments, and the employment of minors. But since the Chinatown raids in 1979, the department has turned its attention to higher-priority industries.

''We don't normally make inspections unless we get complaints,'' said Nicholas DiArchangel, deputy regional administrator in New York for the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He added: ''Very few complaints come from sweatshops. They don't speak English, and they're afraid.''

While garment manufacturing is admittedly not a high-risk trade, OSHA inspectors are supposed to insure that sewing machines have needle guards to protect seamstresses' hands. But in sweatshops, where workers tend to be paid by piecework and productivity is the foremost concern, the workers themselves resist using guards, saying the guards slow them down, Mr. DiArchangel said.

''If I tried to enforce it, I'd be doing someone out of a livelihood,'' he added. ''Do you get punctures - which can become infected - or do you feed your children? It's that basic.''

Paying for piecework, the norm in garment sweatshops, is not illegal as long as workers receive at least the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. ''But in most cases, people can't possibly make the number of pieces to come anywhere near the minimum wage,'' said Frank Mercurio, regional director of the Labor Department's Employment Standards Administration.

Mr. Mercurio's department has found sweatshops where workers were averaging $1.50 an hour for a 50-hour week. To show a 40-hour week on their records, inspectors say, employers often punch time cards in and out dutifully as workers remain at their machines, not collecting overtime for extra hours.

To raise their income, inspectors say, garment workers increasingly take work home. The practice, largely banned by state and Federal law, removes workers from public scrutiny and makes law enforcement difficult.

It is widely agreed that sweatshop workers are easy to exploit because many are recent immigrants, lacking adequate English, fearful of government and accustomed to substandard wages and working conditions. If they are here illegally, they are even more vulnerable to abuse by employers.

''Undocumented workers are afraid,'' Mr. Starobin said. ''That fear allows employers not to pay Social Security or withholding tax, and to fight efforts to unionize. If the workers protest, he threatens to tell the Department of Immigration about them. Legally, they're unpersons. The less documentation they have, the more serious the violations are apt to be.'' Union Cited as Part of Problem

Some manufacturers suggest that the I.L.G.W.U., as a result of ineffectual leadership, is partly to blame for the resurgence of sweatshops.

''Why blame someone who gives work to people?'' said Myron Norris, owner of Givenchy for Little Tantrums, which makes children's apparel under license from the designer. The company uses a contractor in Chinatown. ''Why not blame the Mayor, or the union for not enforcing the contract?''

Union officials insist that they are working harder than ever to organize garment workers, including illegal aliens. Of the 110,000 I.L.G.W.U. members in the New York area, as many as 30 percent are estimated to be illegal immigrants.

The Seventh Avenue manufacturers are the guilty ones, says Frederick Siems, I.L.G.W.U. executive vice president. ''The name of the game is price,'' he said. ''Sweatshop operators bid on garments, and the one who is most desperate gets the work. These manufacturers know what's happening.''

In the view of Mr. Siems and others, contracting, the traditional method of garment manufacturing, is fundamental to the perpetuation of the sweatshop. Typically, apparel manufacturers send their cut or piece goods to contractors to be sewn; the contractors, in turn, may subcontract the work.

The system encourages fly-by-night operators who, in a seasonal industry, manufacture for a few months, pocket their profits and close. ''It isn't difficult to find a loft where you can put 30 or 60 machines, and you're in business,'' Mr. Mercurio said. ''It's a fastbuck operation. It's just like a pusher - the police kick him off one corner, but in a week he resurfaces on another.'' 'We Can't Police Him'

Contracting also removes the manufacturer from direct responsibility for the treatment of workers. ''When we give a contractor an order, we can't police him,'' said Mr. Norris of Little Tantrums. Mr. Norris has a representative visit his Chinatown contractor daily to inspect the garments' quality but not wages or working conditions. ''If they're breaking the law,'' he said of his contractors, ''the city should close them down.''

Government representatives also charge that the truckers, who convey piece goods from the manufacturer to the contractors, help support sweatshops by charging excessively high rates for shipping the goods. And it is virtually impossible for contractors to switch to another trucking concern because of the influence of organized crime, according to Senator Leichter.

To clamp down on sweatshops, Senator Leichter this week is offering legislation that would compel contractors to register with the state. Under the measure, the state would be able to confiscate goods found in sweatshops - a practice that would adversely affect manufacturers who own the goods.

''The manufacturers may become our policemen,'' said James Quillin, Labor Commissioner of California, where a similar law is scheduled to go into effect this July.

Most New York manufacturers oppose the measure. ''All the laws that we need are already on the books,'' said Kurt Barnard, executive director of the Federation of Apparel Manufacturers. ''They should be enforced.''

Other measures cited as means of stopping sweatshops include making it a crime knowingly to employ illegal aliens, and granting amnesty - and legalization of their status - to illegal immigrants already working here.

The outlook for any legislation is uncertain, however. A similar bill proposed by Senator Leichter failed to pass last year, and laws concerning immigrants require Federal action.

Some manufacturers and government representatives tend to be blase about the need for such laws. As one manufacturer noted, ''Why should we object to employing people in sweatshops here when we're willing to import garments from sweatshops in Hong Kong and other countries?''

But Mr. DiArchangel rejects that. ''Legal or not,'' he said of the workers, ''they're here and they're working and we should be protecting them.''