All the sweatshops are not in Asia or in Central America. Los Angeles, California, is apparently full of them and they keep on stripping the workers of their wages, their energy, and even their health.

In the time of covid, they are forced to work in cluttered, hot, essentially airless conditions and they are doing their work without much regard for the danger of contracting a case of Covid-19. What happens to them is called wage theft, but it happens routinely and the powers that be do not want any changes.

One of the potential changes was a bill, SB 1399, which moved through the California State Senate Committee on Labor, Public Employment and Retirement in 2020. In the same year, the bill died in the Assembly, when it was not brought up for a vote. That’s not unusual for a bill that takes away the opportunity that employers have (almost a right) to deny workers a decent wage, overtime pay, paid vacation time, toilet breaks during the day, and other benefits that many workers enjoy.

Mostly, it happens because many garment workers are undocumented and most of them are afraid that, if they complain about the abuse, they will lose their jobs. Even though those jobs are mind-numbing and leave the workers open to exploitation, they need them for support of their families. It is the goal of the Garment Workers Center (GWC) to move pay for the garment workers from piece work to an hourly wage, which would give the pay of garment workers more stability and make it more difficult for the employers to steal wages.

According to the GWC and other advocates for garment workers, the piece-rate work often does not even come up to the low minimum wage called for in the labor law. On Jan. 1, 2021, California’s minimum wage went to $13 an hour for employers with 25 or fewer workers, and $14 an hour for employers with more than 25 workers. Anyone who has tried to live in a metropolitan area in the U.S. on a minimum wage knows that $13 an hour will not be a living wage. Garment workers in Los Angeles work up to 12 hours a day, up to six days a week at 3 cents per piece, and still, they do not make a living wage.

Employers in California, and in many other states for that matter, have access to the politicians who make the rules and they have made the rules in favor of the employers. One of the biggest problems for wage workers or piece-rate workers is the labor contractor. The use of labor contractors attempts to give the major-brand companies plausible deniability. “We have no control over what our contractors pay the workers, and no control over how they are paid,” say the brand-name clothiers, whose garments are sold in many of the biggest shops in the country at high prices. It’s not that they can’t pay a decent wage. They just don’t want to pay a penny more than they have to for the work that is sweated from the people who sew up the clothing. And it doesn’t matter whether they sew for the top of the line or for knock-offs. It’s all the same exploitation.

One part of the solution, through SB1399, is that garment workers would be paid by the hour. As well, the state’s Bureau of Field Enforcement investigators would be empowered to issue citations across the entire supply chain, not just the contractors. That would be a start on the endless task of bringing some justice to those workers who must come to believe that justice is nothing but a dream.

Garment worker advocates say there are some 60,000 garment workers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the task ahead of them is one that needs to be brought out of the shadows, where it has been for them and untold millions of other low-wage workers throughout American history.

Why do so many workers toil under such unjust and exploitative conditions? Because they are the unseen, but vital, workers whose conditions are not a concern to those whose only connection to the working class is that expensive dress or top or pants (yes, even the expensive jeans that are ripped up and down, even before they are worn once).

They are termed aliens by their tormentors, who are not just found in the air-conditions offices of the name brands, but also in the halls of our state legislatures and the Congress of the United States. These folks have the ear of those who make the laws and they tell the lawmakers, “Ignore their calls for equity and justice in their sweatshops and workplaces.” The lawmakers listen because that’s where their money comes from for their next (imminent) campaign. Low-wage workers don’t have those connections. Besides, they don’t speak the language that lawmakers would understand. They speak in their own languages, yet they are unheard.

In 1902, involving the giant coal strike of the time, George F. Baer (he was a lawyer and railroad executive), speaking of the conditions which the workers endured in a letter on behalf of the coal managers, to the government’s Anthracite Coal Commission, he stated, “These men don’t suffer. Why, hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”

It has been 100 years. How much has changed? And who will speak for the garment workers and others who make up America’s sweated labor?

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Contact Mr. Funiciello and BC.