No defense for this
NEW BEDFORD - Remember that huge raid in New Bedford last year?
Federal officials arrested more than 300 illegal immigrant workers at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory, a waterfront plant that produced backpacks for the military. Inside, they found awful working conditions.
US Attorney Michael Sullivan said it was like a 19th century sweatshop: Workers fined for being minutes late, or for talking during work hours. Double shifts with no overtime. More fines for spending too long in the bathrooms, where there was a chronic shortage of toilet paper.
Nobody should endure such conditions. And particularly not while working on a US military contract -- vital, taxpayer-funded work.
The Defense Department had a monitor at Bianco. Day after day, quality assurance officer Carmelo Kercado was surrounded by the immigrant workers, and the supervisors who exploited them. And yet, amazingly, he was ignorant of all of it, according to a spokesman at the Defense Contract Management Agency.
All he knew was, the backpacks were getting done.
Desperate to keep the company's jobs in New Bedford after Bianco's tens of millions of dollars in military contracts were canceled, local officials brought in a Missouri-based Eagle Industries, a large national manufacturer of police and military equipment, to take over the operation.
Now there's trouble at Eagle. Some of the 350 workers there say conditions at the plant are so bad that they're trying to unionize.
They say the factory is so hot in the summer that workers have fainted. They say the big fans Eagle brought in recently can be turned on only with a supervisor's permission, and that they can bring in their own fans only if they get letters from their doctors. They say supervisors call them names, fire workers without cause, and shoo them out of the bathrooms if they stay too long. They say they have to go off the clock to take even brief phone calls.
And some of the managers the workers say they fear are the very same ones who enforced the Dickensian rules at Bianco.
"Do you know what it's like to go to work each day with the fear you might get fired?" asked Elisa Rios, a 42 year old Eagle stitcher who is helping to organize the union.
Eagle says none of the workers' claims is true.
"From the day we took ownership eight months ago, we have strived to improve every single aspect of working in this plant," said spokeswoman Alissa Southworth. "From increasing wages to adding a 401K plan, right down to replacing the lights to improve visibility and adding ergonomically correct chairs."
Workers at Eagle average about $8.50 an hour, three dollars less than the average wage earned by other New Bedford stitchers. They have no sick pay. And most of them can't afford the health insurance Eagle offers. But all of these things are standard for the very competitive defense contract industry, Southworth says.
Don't look to the Defense Department, which still has a monitor in the factory, to help sort through any of this.
For starters, that monitor is still Carmelo Kercado -- the same guy who watched Michael Bianco Inc. for years, and said nothing.
The treatment of stitchers is not Kercado's department, says Defense Contract Management Agency spokesman Dick Cole. His concern is the quality of the backpacks coming off the sewing machines, not the welfare of the people who sit at them.
"His duties do not extend to reporting on working conditions," Cole said. "The law does not require that."
You would think that, after all that has happened in this plant, the Department of Defense would be paying extra close attention to conditions at Eagle. That they'd want to make sure the packs our military wear on their backs are not being produced on the backs of mistreated workers.
You would be wrong.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her email address is abraham@globe.com. A version of this column was published in the Aug. 10 Boston Globe.
