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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 26, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Home work scandal in Cleveland

Auto-parts workers get $2 an hour

By Martha Grevatt in Cleveland

During contract negotiations with the Big Three auto makers, the big issue this time around was outsourcing. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler all get most of their component parts produced by outside contractors, eliminating union jobs.

It is well known that most of these outside companies are non-union, forcing workers to work for low wages, with no benefits, and often under sweatshop conditions.

However, that's not the worst of it. It recently made front-page news here when RP Coatings, a local automotive supplier, was found to be paying workers less than $2 an hour to work in their homes.

According to a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the company shipped millions of screws each week into inner-city neighborhoods. There, low-income people-mostly seniors, disabled, single mothers and welfare recipients-snapped plastic washers onto the screws.

Whole families, including children as young as 7, would sit at the table and produce these assemblies, working late into the night. They were paid at piece rate, starting at $3.30 for 2,000 screws and going up to $7.50 for 5,000.

That didn't even add up to minimum wage.

Why did people to submit to such brutal exploitation? "With so many kids at home, you need some way to make a little bit of extra money," said Phyllis Shelton, who lives with her husband and five children. "It might pay for a loaf of bread or milk."

Carol Burton said, "You get caught up in a system and you don't realize that they're exploiting you." Her sons started helping her three years ago when the youngest was only 8 years old.

The Plain Dealer stories led to a Labor Department investigation. After timing the workers, it was determined that it would take an adult over three hours to finish a box of 4000, for which RP paid $6.

The Labor Department charged the company with violating minimum-wage laws-but refused to press additional charges for exploiting child labor. The excuse was that the parents condoned their children working, as though the parents were at fault for being desperately poor instead of the bosses being at fault for despicably exploiting the children and adults.

After the investigation, RP agreed to pay back wages to 134 workers. The firm has supposedly ceased its illegal practices, but only after losing 90 percent of its business to competitors due to all the bad publicity.

While saying it was "the best decision business-wise" to pay back wages as ordered, RP President Robert Phillips insisted, "I don't feel we did anything wrong."

The scourge of home work

Industrial home work was banned in the United States in 1941, after a long struggle led by unions in the needle trades and garment industry.

The bosses had always liked farming out piece work to employees' homes-where there are no health-and-safety inspections, no enforcement of wage-and-hour or child labor laws, no way to protect workers, mostly women, from extremes of exploitation.

As the RP case shows, the bosses still love home work. That's why the Reagan administration rode over the labor movement's opposition and abolished the ban on it in November 1988.

There is no way of knowing how widespread home work has become since then. This case may be the tip of the iceberg.

It shows how the practice has spread beyond the garment industry, where super-exploited immigrant women sew at their kitchen tables all night long, and how it is connected to ongoing industrial restructuring and the drive to find ever-cheaper ways to make profit off human labor.

The scandalous revival of home work, one of the horrors that was supposed to have been wiped out with the New Deal, presents another challenge for the labor movement, now on record as committed to organizing the unorganized.

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