30/08/2020 SB 1399 makes retailers accountable for garment worker pay - Los Angeles Times David Weil, who oversaw a federal crackdown on the industry while serving as the administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division during the Obama administration, said his agency attempted to do just that toward the end of his term. “We worked the problem from the ground up. We found out how many minutes it would take to make different items, therefore the wages that would need to be paid for that given some reasonable rate of return and the cost of materials,” he said. “It was a heavy lift.” ADVERTISEMENT The division found contractors received just 73% of the price needed in order to ensure that workers could receive a bare minimum legal wage. Randy Youngblood, a prominent industry figure who operates Apparel Resources, a Yorba Linda company that monitors contractor compliance for apparel manufacturers, said he supports abolishing the piece rate. “I am not a proponent of piece rate work in 98% of the garment factories in California. As a time-study engineer, it’s a real science. You need to be on the shop floor checking rates with a stopwatch,” said Youngblood, whose high-end clients include jeans maker Paige and women’s apparel designer Karen Kane. “If an operator has trouble making the rate, you need to be able to show her where she or he are losing time and how they can pick that time up. The bulk of the sewing contractors we deal with don’t have that level of sophistication,” he said. ADVERTISEMENT Richard Cho, president of the Korean Apparel Manufacturers Assn., which represents hundreds of companies that make clothes for brands and retailers, said an hourly minimum would wipe out the remaining manufacturers that make inexpensive clothes for big discount chains. “We are not even running small businesses. We are running micro businesses,” he said. Those that could survive it are moving into the “better boutique market,” where higher-quality clothes are sold at a premium. Still, he doesn’t outright oppose the bill, noting that making retailers responsible for labor violations of subcontractors could help his membership. “Why is it that the [liability] doesn’t go all the way up to the one that has written the bad purchase order? Why does it always have to end with the contractor or the manufacturers?” he said. “That is not fair.” Nana Atelier, a small manufacturer in Boyle Heights that opened two and a half years ago, was one of the few apparel companies that has sent a letter in support of the bill to legislators. ADVERTISEMENT Co-owners Alnea Farahbella and her husband have their own upscale women’s fashion brand and make clothes for other high-end brands, including New York designer Rachel Comey, in a brightly lit factory with a cheery, yellow floor. She candidly admits the couple’s own brand, Toit Volant, is subsidizing the company, which pays its workers an hourly wage. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-08-17/fashion-brands-garment-workers-sb1399-joint-liability-piece-rate 9/13