‘Exploitation’ of guests workers

Between the recent stories in the Marianas Variety and the latest Saipan “expose” in Ms. Magazine, I’ve really got to wonder if sensationalism has finally trumped any kind of pretense to due diligence in journalism.

Recently, your front page (Editor’s Note: Not the Tribune) has had a revival of pieces about exploitatively high recruitment fees and cases of workers coming to Saipan to work only to find jobs nonexistent, or companies closing that were supposed to employ them for one year, with a chance of a renewed contract.

This is sad, and it is indeed the case that such unscrupulous acts have happened. It may even continue to happen as long as there remains any possibility of corruption, misdeeds, and misunderstanding in the long chain of parties between the worker, the recruiting company, the CNMI and foreign governments and the employer here in the CNMI.

However, the “astonishing revelations” in both the Variety and Ms. Magazine have a long history that is worth examining.

In the late 1980s it was common knowledge that guest workers from the Philippines, Korea and even Japan paid sums of money for jobs arranged and brokered by recruitment services companies. These employees came from countries with consulate offices on Saipan, and all had bilateral agreements with the United States for their employees working abroad.

Not so with the last wave of employees from China who work in the same factories, hotels, construction and service companies. The guest worker from China had no one from their country to listen, represent and oversee them as they worked far from home. It’s not surprising that problems associated with a guest worker program administered under Saipan authority began to appear as these workers entered and worked.

As concerns about exploited workers in the garment industry began to surface in the mid-90s, many of us saw needs unmet both for them and for the CNMI. I offered a group of leaders from China with, as a part of their group, state licensed employment recruiters, to then Gov. Froilan C. Tenorio. They were from the Harbin Institute of Technological and Economic Cooperation. This was in 1997.

After final consent by the U.S. Administration, the CNMI entered into a formal agreement, through a Memorandum of Understanding, with the Government of China, establishing in Saipan the Chinese Economic Development Association. CEDA was to administer to its overseas workers in Saipan and oversee labor concerns of those workers recruited in China coming to Saipan to work.

It was not until after much international media attention, a class action lawsuit settlement and an institutionalized will not summoned until 2003 that the CNMI finally decided to use the MOU and CEDA for what I had worked with then-AG Bob Dunlap to create.

I recall, in 2004, sitting in the Secretary of Labor’s offices with legal counsel, the new AG, various Labor officials, the federal labor ombudsman, some factory representatives and the CEDA Secretary that I’d invited along.

We were all there at the invitation of the AG to address what to do with employees of factories beginning to close, and formulate a way to cover the costs of repatriation for workers unable to be sent home by their former employers.

The issue of recruitment fees owed by workers to recruiting companies arose as a major reason many came forward claiming they couldn’t go home. One thing we realized was that this was one of the motivations behind a large number of frivolous complaints filed by the workers: The complaints allowed them to stay on Saipan until their case was heard, and allowed them to find another job. No one blamed the workers for saying or doing whatever they had to do to stay where they wanted to stay.

What happened next was a scene out of a bad movie.

We’d been talking for about an hour and as the meeting was about to close, I asked Mr. Shen, the CEDA Secretary, if he’d like to offer anything.

Shen told everyone that under the MOU establishing CEDA, if contracted employees were prematurely displaced, laid off, or terminated before their expected two years of service, CEDA had the ability to contact the licensed recruiters in China and arrange for them to forgive the placement and recruiting fees.

About 11 jaws dropped and hung open for maybe five seconds.

The Secretary of Labor then asked the obvious: Why hadn’t anyone at Labor been made aware of this? Shen said he’d visited more than once and had been told no one was really interested, and was told to send his concerns in writing to the Labor Department. He said he did.

It wasn’t much longer that the new AG authored a superceding MOU for CEDA, and the CNMI and China signed it. Not much later, the Labor Department then began referring all applications for employment through CEDA for authorization of legitimate recruitment companies of 26 individual firms to make sure those agreements were valid, enforceable and at a fee no more than the U.S. District Court class action settlement sum of about $1,200.

I don’t know how many workers are still entering the CNMI to work from China without going through the CNMI/CEDA screening (maybe some phony tourist visas), but if there are I’m sure we’ll read about it in the Variety, or Ms. Magazine. And, I’m sure they’ll be happy to catalogue yet again how little we care and how eagerly we exploit foreign workers here on Saipan.

But what I’d like to read is a story about how the system works sometimes, instead of the isolated incidents of when it doesn’t. But who’d want to read anything that boring ?

Richard A. Pierce
Governor’s SA for Trade Relations