sweatshops
The US General Accounting Office defines a sweatshop as a business that regularly violates wage, child labor, health and/or safety laws. While sweatshop abuses in the garment industry have been an issue of public concern for decades, few people know about the sweatshops of the booming electronics industry. Behind the gleaming facade of the high tech industry are thousands of low-paid, mostly immigrant women, who assemble the nuts and bolts of our computers using hundreds of toxic William Carlsen, Staff Writer Thousands of Asian women are forced to work under slavery-like conditions on the U.S. commonwealth island of Saipan making clothing that top garment retailers are selling for huge profits, according to a sweeping lawsuit filed yesterday in San Francisco. In a series of suits filed in state and federal court, human rights groups claim that foreign clothing firms are passing off the apparel as ''Made in the USA.'' Because of Saipan's commonwealth status, retailers have avoided more than $200 million in tariffs.
Still, they have refused to exercise their power to mitigate the intolerable working and living conditions. retailers and manufacturers accountable for mistreatment of workers in foreign-owned factories operating on U. The class-action suits, which seek $1 billion in lost wages and damages, were brought on behalf of 25,000 so-called ''guest workers,'' mostly Asian women, and they allege violations of labor, racketeering, human rights and business laws. The plaintiffs are represented by a coalition of law firms, including Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP -- class action specialists with principal offices in New York and San Diego. Many fear deportation and cannot return home because they must first repay ''recruitment fees'' of up to $7,000, the suits allege. They said they have conducted inspections and would stop doing business with vendors they believed were in violation of the law. Nordstrom, for example, said it inspected two facilities in Saipan in October and did not find violations. ''To allow such squalid conditions to persist on American soil is both patently unlawful and morally reprehensible,'' said Al Meyerhoff, one of the lead attorneys. They are currently seeking compensation for Holocaust victims forced to work as slave laborers in factories.
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