A tangled web of lies and myths

Ms. Magazine printed a slanderous and hysterical article with a front page headline depicting Saipan as run rampant with sex and prostitution, forced abortions, labor abuse, corrupt government and ineffective and misguided local and federal enforcement. Ms. depicted this island paradise as badly as are the freakish femme team that printed the garbage they expect women to swallow who’ve grown more accustomed to grocery store checkout counters than college campuses in a cause long gone.

I was raised from the age of two in a city near a nuclear reservation and have experienced, and still experience to this day, almost hysterical beliefs about the perils of what many feel is one of the world’s legitimate answers to the fuel crisis we face today. Like many have now come to realize, energy supplied from safe, efficient, environmentally sound nuclear power plants may soon become a greater source of power as the only large-scale, cost-effective alternative energy source.

This realization comes just as much as the result of the ever increasing costs related to powering our world with fossil fuels as it does from the examination of evidence the majority had accepted from those individuals and organized groups that wanted to never see it happen. After Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island incident, and a nationally released film depicting a fictional nuclear disaster, nuclear energy had been cast as bad as the war incidents its dark side imaged.

In the late ‘80s and ‘90s I thought the Saipan garment factories brought considerably more problems than benefits to the Commonwealth, and the garment industry was synonymous with the ruination of the Commonwealth, as did most federal critics that found the guest worker program the industry’s lighting rod. Twenty years later, and after real changes heralded more for effect than substance, my views have changed, and the rest of the industry’s critics, including those that acquiesce to its economics when arguing for the changes they see as more important than the industry itself, find themselves between a rock and a hard place when money comes to the front.

What no one has noticed while the whirlwind of politics became more important than the issues Ms. would have us believe exist in a 25-year-old industry, and what an island that negotiated for it is supposedly allowing as a result of it, the industry is not what it used to be. It is certainly not what Ms. would have people believe.

It is suspect that Ms. would find a situation so horrible in the Commonwealth, and go to great lengths at the time it did to display its boilerplate material borrowed from a decade ago. It is not a coincidence that the same Washington, D.C. CNMI critics would wave the same material on a front-page cover of Ms. in the halls of Congress as you read this.

It is revealingly hypocritical that Ms. would not cover a story of a woman whose eyes were gouged out in American Samoa by a factory sewing supervisor who was arrested and convicted by the FBI just a couple of years ago, while on Saipan, where there’s absolutely nothing like that occurring, a situation that’s considered by many as no news at all makes Ms. front-page headline news.

Ms. prostitutes itself by serving up the same old, embellished, unbalanced and political nonsense of the past, which, in turn, continues the same old hysterical propaganda originally driven by economics, then capitalized upon by those in other circles with different needs. All, despite the fact that the industry, and the islands themselves, have evolved considerably in the past two decades since it all began.

What no one seems to want to notice are the successes that have occurred along the way. In fact, the garment industry is a story, although in its closing chapters, which tells of an industry that has been converted into an “East meets West” with federal oversight. There’s no Fair Labor Standards Act, EEOC, OSHA, Family Medical Leave Act, EPA, or a sophisticated joining of minimum wage and piece rate systems approved by U.S. Labor in China. Monitoring systems in place have recommended sensitivity training for supervisors over the years, and it shows. The Tan operations’ “Chernobyl” of 1990 is history.

That’s not to say that there aren’t real problems, as Saipan’s federal ombudsman pointed out to Ms., as well as various myths, associated with the island’s industry:

– Saipan factories are unsafe and unhealthy. Some of the most successful partnerships between federal health and safety administrators and the factories have turned most factories that remain on Saipin into brightly lit, air conditioned, constantly monitored and maintained modern workplaces. Under the U.S. District Court administered settlement agreement, all certified factories and subcontractors are monitored and put on probation if any do not meet the standards agreed upon by the factories, the attorneys and the buyers and retailers as minimum health and safety guidelines. No factory is now on probation. There’s never been a death in any Saipan factories, although a severe food poisoning incident occurred several years ago. Employers in the CNMI that bring employees from other countries to work are responsible for the cost of all medical welfare for their employees.

– Saipan factories do not properly pay their employees. The Commonwealth’s Department of Labor and the U.S. Labor-Wage and Hour Compliance Division constantly monitor wage practices in the CNMI. As does the Interior Department’s federal ombudsman’s office. In large U.S. Labor settlement agreements of up to 15 years ago, unpaid wages came from improperly calculated overtime wage practices. U.S. labor informs us now that this is a thing of the past. Unpaid wages to workers of factories that have filed for bankruptcy are about the only remaining consideration on compensation to the factory workers. All but one incident has been eliminated of these. Every worker at the CNMI minimum wage rate of $3.05/hour, and overtime over 40 hours per week, makes between six to 10 times what they earn in the Asian countries they used to earn their wages in.

– Saipan factories use child labor and force employees to work. There is no one working in any factory in Saipan under the age of 21, unless it is summer employment of students on break from their studies. Even then, they must be 18 years of age. Factory workers complain of not enough work, not being forced to work.

– Saipan factories put mainland Americans out of work. Saipan factories compete with Asian countries for orders to the United States. Almost all American brand names source all their apparel from off-shore. Since the lifting of quota restrictions on WTO Members on Jan. 1, 2005, Saipan has lost almost 40 percent of their sales to China and Asia, not Americans losing theirs.

– Saipan factory workers pay $5,000 to $7,000 to get their jobs on Saipan. Although there are some documented cases of illegal recruitment practices and fees being charged 10 years ago, under the U.S. District Court settlement agreement, and agreed upon by the U.S. Labor Department, employees can only be charged a maximum of $1,150 in fees for their positions. Under a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the CNMI and the Chinese government no one but licensed recruitment agencies can participate in supplying employees for offshore employment to Saipan.

– Saipan is an island of sex slaves and prostitution. The Washington Post reported that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a priority of arresting the “worst of the worst” sex crime offenders across America, and this week 1,100 of 9,037 fugitives were arrested in the Western U.S. Next week the East will be targeted. Marshal Services Director John F. Clark says there are “a few million fugitives” out there. Some 2,100 officers from 786 federal, state and local enforcement agencies took part in the dragnet. Last year’s dragnet rounded up over 10,000 serious sex offenders. The young women that work in the roughly two dozen nightclubs on Saipan serve drinks and entertain tourists. Some sell sexual favors to tourists and visiting military personnel on leave to a limited extent, as do those in New York, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Salt Lake City. I would estimate there are approximately 100 active prostitutes working on Saipan at any one time.

– There are forced abortions and forced prostitution on Saipan. Someone please give us the names of the officials that have documented any of this. Please let Ms. Magazine not just swear to it, but get some of these victims to authorities so they can stop what we can’t find. Ms. takes a situation like failing factory operations and jumps to ex-workers becoming prostitutes. Sheer misrepresentation and offensive to the very women they say they protect.

– Saipan is occupied by greedy, corrupt, immoral and dishonest residents that prey upon those that find a way to work on Saipan to better their lives. Not enough can be said of the relationships formed and a community and culture enriched by the diversity of ethnicity and ideology that blend to form a truly “American” schematic of freedom and opportunity. This island has the best restaurants per square mile than anywhere in the world from all over the world. If it’s true in America that the value of anything is directly related to the work that goes into it, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is of great value to its residents and visitors and to the U.S.A. that flies its flag here.

Ms. Magazine did a disservice to itself and to those that know this island community well, and, in turn, a disservice to the very people they say they wish to liberate.

In the late 1960s, a slavery scholar named Philip Curbin undertook to scrutinize the available, established, mainstream scholarship purporting to determine the number of Africans enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the New World. He finally concluded that the vast consensus turned out to be nothing but vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.

Ms. Magazine has contributed and bought into, and prospered from, the “Big Lie” theory and conspiracy about Saipan. And, fortunately, it will be the almighty dollar again that unravels, or disregards as unnecessary, the truth that makes no difference in the grand schemes of morality, truth and right.

Allan DeGon
Capitol Hill