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Garment worker challenges DeLay
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jun 06, 2005 09:14pm |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Tuesday, June 7, 2005 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | House Majority Leader Tom DeLay says he found no victims of sweatshops, sex slavery or forced abortions on the Pacific island of Saipan in the mid-1990s. But Carmencita Abad says that’s because DeLay did not want to see them.
“My answer is, Mr. DeLay, I am that person,” Abad said in a telephone interview. “I am an example of an individual who can prove that the accounts of sweatshop labor and forced prostitution are not just allegations but true accounts of working conditions in the Marianas Islands when Mr. DeLay traveled there and turned a blind eye to our misery.”
It was called, in part, to counter claims DeLay made last month when he told The Daily News that there were no human rights violations taking place on Saipan in the 1990s.
“The workers there were very well treated,” he said.
Congressional investigators, national news organizations and the U.S. Labor Department have all supported claims that, in the 1990s, workers on Saipan were forced to work 14-hour days, often without being paid for their overtime. In some cases, the workers were locked in their factories while working and in their barracks when they were not.
The U.S. Justice Department has prosecuted cases in which Asian women paid thousands of dollars to recruiters who promised them jobs as restaurant workers on Saipan. The women emigrated there only to be forced into prostitution.
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