Hayden Taking a Bead on Sweatshops : Labor: He plans legislation to make garment makers more responsible for the treatment of workers. Regulators have found some being paid as little as $1 an hour.

Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) plans to introduce legislation this week aimed at cleaning up sweatshops by making garment manufacturers more responsible for the treatment of workers who sew their clothing.

“It’s like a Dickens novel,” Hayden said Tuesday of wage, hour, and child labor abuses that regulators have found in the garment industry in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “You have primitive, 19th-Century sweatshops underpinning an economy that is super-opulent, with the rich being in most cases completely unaware of the source of their clothes.”

Hayden, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment, said he would introduce his bill by Friday, the deadline for new legislation. But even as he began drumming up support for the bill, he warned that new laws would fail unless consumers and retailers begin applying conscience to their fashion sense.

“If the people who care about animal rights would only add workers’ rights to their immediate agenda, you’d have quite a movement going on the Westside (of Los Angeles),” Hayden said.

Officials with two garment trade groups said that the state should spend more money to enforce existing laws before passing new ones.

The last round of garment industry reforms, passed in 1980, required sewing shop owners to register with the state and pass an exam covering state labor laws, said Joe Rodriguez, executive director of the Garment Contractors Assn. of Southern California. The licensing fees were to have been earmarked for enforcement, but have instead been siphoned off for general use by the state, Rodriguez said.

Bernie Brown, president of the Coalition of Apparel Industries of California, said his group has supported a wide array of reform bills, but warned that over-regulation would doom the $6-billion-a-year Los Angeles apparel industry.

“We are trying, very desperately trying to clean up the act in our industry,” Brown said. “(But) if indeed there’s a liability act we can’t live with, we’ll just move out of California.”

In the past year, federal and state regulators have uncovered a nest of sweatshops paying workers as little as $1 an hour to sew clothing bound for Southern California’s priciest department stores.

Some officials and labor leaders say the problem with existing labor laws is that they make it relatively simple to fine sweatshop bosses, but nearly impossible to punish manufacturers who profit from the sweatshop system by having their clothing sewn at rock-bottom prices.

The U.S. Department of Labor in Santa Ana, which began a crackdown on Orange County sweatshops last summer, has tried to attack the problem with a dual approach: requiring sweatshop owners who underpaid workers to pay back wages, and using the 1938 “hot goods” law to prevent manufacturers from shipping across state lines clothing that was made in violation of federal labor law.

Hayden’s bill would take a similar approach on the state level by strengthening the “joint liability” provisions of state law. Currently, California law makes manufacturers liable for labor violations by their contractors only if the manufacturer knew of the abuses.