Word: saipan
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Welcome to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain east of the Philippines. And, yes, it has been a U.S. territory since the end of World War II. Li Li is one of 40,000 foreign contract workers, mostly from China, Bangladesh and the Philippines, shipped in to service a garment industry that exploits Saipan's exemption from a number of American labor and immigration controls. This allows the garment factories, most run by Chinese or South Korean firms, to pay foreign laborers substantially less than the minimum wage but still export nearly $1 billion worth...
...attempting to sue her former employer, SR (Saipan) Corp., for the assault on her and for unpaid overtime. "The managers did not treat us like human beings," she says, adding that she would not have gone to Saipan if she had known what the working conditions were like. But having borrowed the equivalent of $2,800 to pay the "recruitment fee" in China, she cannot return until she has earned at least enough to pay off the loan. "That comes close to the definition of indentured labor," says Allen Stayman, insular-affairs director at the U.S. Department of the Interior...
President Clinton sent a letter last May to the islands' Governor, complaining that the labor practices "are inconsistent with our country's values." Last week a bipartisan congressional commission on immigration released a scathing report that said, "Only a few countries, and no democratic society, have immigration policies" like Saipan's. Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California who has sponsored legislation that would end Saipan's exemptions, visited the island two weeks ago and said he was "deeply troubled" by conditions...
...lucrative garment industry, the local government has been lobbying hard in Republican circles to invoke the spirit of free trade to help fight off a federal takeover. In the past year more than 90 members of the House of Representatives, their family members and aides have been flown to Saipan free of charge on inspection visits that include time on the golf courses and coral reefs for which the island is famous. A new Governor, Pedro Tenorio, was inaugurated last week, pledging to reduce the tensions with Washington. "It is in our best interest to see the system work...
...help the locals boost their own economy and keep out competitive immigrant labor. The opposite has happened: 90% of private-sector workers are aliens, while unemployment among locals has reached 14.2%. The labor market is so skewed that in 1995 the government had to issue a directive forbidding Saipan's welfare recipients to hire foreign workers as maids. And in establishing the commonwealth, the U.S. Congress certainly did not foresee communist China's establishing an economic beachhead on American territory...