California’s Fight Against Garment Worker Wage Theft is Headed Nationwide
California’s wage theft reckoning for fashion businesses could soon spread nationwide, but the Golden State isn’t holding back in the meantime.
On Wednesday, George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney, announced that two people who owned garment companies in South Los Angeles between 2017 and 2022 have been charged after being accused in a seven-count felony complaint of underpaying their workers and subsequently lying about it.
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Soon Ae Park was charged with two felony counts of grand theft of wages from two different employees exceeding $950, one count of perjury by declaration and one count of procuring and offering false or forged instrument, while Lawrence Gi Lee was charged with three counts of perjury by declaration.
Park owned HTA Fashion, a contractor that performed most of the sewing for Lee’s Parbe Inc. Prosecutors said that the workers repeatedly experienced wage theft during the five years, including earning less than the legal minimum and receiving no overtime despite clocking more than 55 hours a week.
While Park and Lee agreed to pay settlements to their former employees in 2018, they later perjured themselves in their Garment Manufacturers and Contractors Registration applications by stating that they had not been cited for or settled a labor code violation for unpaid wages by the Department of Industrial Relations. Lee also failed to declare Park’s sewing business as a sub-contractor in the same applications, Gascón’s office said.
In 2022, Park provided a forged Certificate of Registration document to a Department of Industrial Relations inspector during an investigation into her compliance with California labor laws, prosecutors added.
“Employers in this case knowingly and intentionally denied workers their hard-earned wages, paying workers as low as $6.00 an hour,” State Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in a statement. “These bad actor employers abused workers, defrauded the system and should not be in business. California needs more criminal prosecutions of wage theft to protect workers and honest employers from unfair competition.”
The minimum wage in California during that period was between $10 and $14 for companies with 25 employees or fewer and $10.50 and $15 for those with 26 or more.
The case is the first filed by the district attorney’s new Labor Justice Unit, which Gascón officially debuted on Wednesday, as well as the office’s first filing of California Penal Code 487, a new law that recognizes and charges wage theft as a felony-level crime.
“The unit will bolster our existing fight to end wage theft and labor exploitation by providing a dedicated team of seasoned prosecutors and investigators whose focus will be the enforcement of these laws,” he said in a statement.
“Los Angeles remains the wage theft capital of the country. This historic unit will enable the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to take greater action against financial crimes affecting hardworking Angelenos and their families.”
George Gascón, Los Angeles County district attorney
Wage theft costs U.S. workers as much as $50 billion per year, said Marissa Nuncio, director of the Garment Worker Center, a California labor-rights group based in downtown Los Angeles.
“We applaud the formation of this new L.A. County task force and hope to see more widespread enforcement of wage theft violations,” she told Sourcing Journal, noting that wage theft is especially prevalent in the garment industry.
The Garment Worker Center was one of the driving forces behind the signing into law of SB 62, a.k.a. the Garment Worker Protection Act, which requires that all of the Golden State’s garment workers be paid the minimum wage instead of the typical piece-rate system. It also expanded liability for brands and retailers that have largely shirked responsibility for wage theft and other forms of labor violations in their upstream supply chains.
Now Nuncio wants to take that fight to the rest of the United States by helping build up momentum for the reintroduction of the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change, or FABRIC, Act. Next week, an 80-person-strong delegation that includes Nuncio, members of the fashion advocacy group Remake, garment workers and their children will be heading to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers to back the bill, which was introduced in the Senate in May 2022 by New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and then in the House of Representatives by congresswomen Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Deborah Ross of North Carolina that July.
The only problem with SB 62, she said at an event at Mara Hoffman in New York City this week, is that it only applies to California.
“All workers across the country deserve the same protections,” she said. “And we can transform the industry by using the momentum of that win and using that to continue forward. It’s time to extend those protections.”
Delia Qui?onez Lima, a member of the Garment Worker Center who toiled as a garment worker for three decades, has felt the injustice of being paid pennies for every piece of fabric she cut or every price ticket she attached. In her very first week of work, she received just $80, which she had to use to pay for rent, transportation and food.
“At the end of the day, it was companies that were earning off of my labor and off of my exploitation,” she said in Spanish, which Nuncio translated into English. “I worked for more than 10 hours a day and I earned so little.”
Since the passing of SB 62, Lima said she’s seen a change. For the first time, her colleagues are earning a just salary, she said.
“We just want well-being for everybody,” Lim said. “If everyone supported policies like SB 62, like the FABRIC Act, we really can all of us achieve a better life. We want dignified work that pays us a minimum salary, where we’re not being paid by the piece and where everyone is taking responsibility, including brands, for our wages. That’s how we can have a better quality of life so that we can buy the necessities of life. Right now we can’t.”
“Can we do it?” she added with a wide smile. “Yes, we can.”
The FABRIC Act currently has 275 endorsers. Mara Hoffman aside, brands that are rallying behind it include Everlane, Outerknown and Reformation. But there are also manufacturers like Saitex, Portland Garment Factory and Wing & Weft Gloves that are behind it, together with civil society groups such as AFL-CIO, Fashion Revolution and the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum
“This is not a red or blue issue,” said Ayesha Barenblat, founder and CEO of Remake. “This is a bipartisan issue. We can and will create dignified work right here.”
Gillibrand told Sourcing Journal that U.S. workers “in every industry” are making their voices heard as a “renewed labor movement is gripping our nation.”
“For far too long, garment workers and the once bustling American manufacturing industry have been overlooked,” she said. “Garment workers in the United States are often underpaid, overworked and put in unsafe conditions. From designers to managers to workers, women overwhelmingly play a leading role in this important industry.”
She’s reintroducing the FABRIC Act to “thread the needle” ensuring equitable compensation for garment workers while also making “historic investments” in domestic garment manufacturing through reshoring incentives and the creation of a grant program.
“Protecting the garment workforce is a sustainability issue and has direct impacts on economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, and gender equality,” Gillibrand added. “It’s time to take bold action at the federal level to change the fabric of the American garment manufacturing industry so we can protect these vital workers and not only make American, but buy American.”
Other moves are afoot to shape regulation, which many see as a vital pressure point for making meaningful systemic change that doesn’t just nibble at the edges of the industry’s biggest problems. New York State’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, also simply known as the Fashion Act, continues to trump up support for its call for greater brand and retailer accountability ahead of the Empire State’s next legislative season. And on Thursday, the American Circular Textiles Group, PoliticallyinFashion, Rebecca Ballard Advisory, Transparentem and TS Designs hosted a first-of-its-kind congressional briefing to educate Washington, D.C. staffers about fashion’s most pressing issues, including forced labor and textile waste, that could do with public policy action.
”Textile waste is the nation’s fastest-growing waste stream and it’s coming at the cost of both the environment and the U.S. taxpayers who have to pay for clothes to be burned and hauled to our overflowing landfills,” Rachel Kibbe, founder and executive director of the American Circular Textiles Group, said in a statement. “This doesn’t need to be the case. There is a world in which both textile reuse and recycling can be as, or more, accessible than other household waste streams. But this can only happen if the fashion industry and policymakers collaborate on supportive policy that supports the infrastructure, logistics, market dynamics and innovation required to transition from linear to circular systems.”
Same with forced labor, said Rebecca Ballard, pointing to India’s Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment, which was created in the aftermath of the rape and murder of a young garment worker, as a potential solution. It started as a pact between Natchi Apparels and H&M Group, then expanded to include Gap Inc. and Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. Last September, the mechanism resulted in what Ballard called the “fastest release of a Withhold Release Order ever.”
“You can’t compete with products made with forced labor in the marketplace,” Ballard said. “The United States has the strictest laws of any country banning imports made with forced labor, and it is the only country with both civil and criminal penalties. However, forced labor is on the rise globally…There are so many solutions to combating forced labor in fashion [that] can be scaled.”
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