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Diving Not Included
The great garment wheeze blows over Micronesia
By TERRY McCARTHY
November 26, 1999
Web posted at 1 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12 a.m. EDT
So I am standing there, in the immigration line at Palau's tiny international airport, way out in the middle of the Pacific, with a posse of Japanese scuba divers in T-shirts, shorts and regulation bleached hair, everyone geared up for what is famously some of the best diving in the world, when I hear a young woman blurting out indignantly in Chinese: "Bu zhidao"--"I don't have a clue."
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And there they were, right behind me, about a dozen young women wearing polo-neck sweaters and heavy jackets from the colder climate they left behind in China, looking lost and somewhat helpless, first time away from home. Dumped out of a Continental Micronesia plane, the women have seen two years in Palau, no diving included.
It is about 30 C outside, but these women are here to spend their time stitching clothes for export, another colorful paragraph in the long saga of Chinese migrant labor. More precisely, they are part of the great North Pacific garment wheeze, in which contract workers from China are brought to islands that were formally U.S. protectorates and still enjoy special trading privileges with the world's greatest consumer. This means the garments can be produced at rock-bottom Chinese labor costs while avoiding the tariffs and quotas that limit garment exports to the U.S. from the Chinese mainland.
It was Saipan that invented the loophole--now there are more foreign laborers on Saipan than there are native Saipanese. Every now and again a congressman gets indignant about it and threatens to cut off the trading privileges, but then the Saipanese invite a bunch of other congressmen--often with their families--out to their little Pacific paradise on a "fact-finding mission." Strangely, Congress has so far failed to reach a consensus on the issue.
Palau, which gets all of 60,000 tourists a year, was a surprising location for a garment factory, I thought--but what about Yap, farther out in Micronesia and known primarily for its manta rays? It gets just two flights a week and has about 5,000 foreign visitors a year. Sure enough, there on the tarmac was another group of young Chinese women, ready to put in their time to earn money for a house or a small shop back home.
Don't get me wrong: I am all for private enterprise and for people's right to travel where they want to get jobs and advance themselves. I am Irish, after all--enough said. But is there not something vaguely artificial about Bill Clinton buying a T-shirt in Martha's Vineyard that has been stitched together by a woman from Henan in a factory in Micronesia with a Korean floor manager in a factory nominally owned by a Yapese? The geographical contortions here resemble one of those inflight magazine maps with red and blue lines linking all the cities the airline services.
Anyway, the great garment wheeze may soon be over. Assuming China does indeed accede to WTO, the garment quotas are supposed to be phased out. Which means the woman from Henan will likely stay in China to work, the Korean will be fired, Clinton will order his T-shirt directly from eRag.com and the Micronesians will have to go back to scuba diving. The world moves on.
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