Labor Submits Claims for 213 Ex-Garment Workers

Local
Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The Department of Labor submitted yesterday to former judge Timothy Bellas, the trustee of the Garment Workers Trust Fund, individual claims on behalf of 213 former garment workers totaling about $700,000.

Deputy Secretary Cinta M. Kaipat said the list of claims was assembled from the information provided by those who registered with the Labor Department at Garapan Park last summer and includes those who registered with the federal ombudsman in the summer of 2007. Kaipat's list includes workers who were employed by garment industry subcontractors.

These subcontractors were “virtually indistinguishable from the main garment factories that they served,” Kaipat said.

Last Friday, Bellas announced that the Garment Workers Trust Fund still has $600,000 available to assist former garment workers who are still on Saipan and are facing hardships. He said the $600,000 is leftover money from the checks distributed to the workers as settlement in the class action against garment factories. “Under the terms of the settlement agreement, it is supposed to go to help workers if we can. If we can't, then it goes to charity,” he said.

In the past two years, Kaipat said, the Labor Department has adjudicated wage claims made by former garment workers whose cases were filed long before the current administration. The adjudication of these claims has made it possible for garment workers to be compensated from the trust fund. Nearly all of the cases on the list submitted by Kaipat were filed in the years 1997 through 2004.

“We expect that our list is reasonably complete,” Kaipat said. The former ombudsman, Jim Benedetto, compiled a list after extensive advertising for unpaid wage claims in local papers in 2007. He turned that list over to the department. Also, the department advertised and held a mass registration in 2008 to assemble claims from the 2007 and prior-year cases that had been completed in Labor's cleanup of old cases.

The trust fund is accepting applications until Aug. 15, 2009 from former garment workers who want to avail of the funding.

Applicants need to send their applications either in Chinese or English to GWTF, P.O. Box 505943, Saipan, MP, 96950. (PR)