Source: NYT

It was one of the worst sweatshops that state inspectors have visited in years, they said, sometimes requiring its 100 employees to work seven days a week, sometimes for months in a row.

Location of Jin Shun factory? (guessed from Google Map, Street View)

The factory, Jin Shun, located in Queens, handed out instructions to its workers telling them to give false answers about working conditions when government inspectors visited. Jin Shun makes women’s apparel for Banana Republic, the Gap, Macy’s, Urban Apparel and Victoria’s Secret.

Location of Jin Shun factory? (guessed from Google Map, Street View)

Wage violations were so widespread that Jin Shun’s workers were cheated of $5.3 million. The case made by the State Labor Department against Jin Shun is one of the biggest involving back pay that it has ever brought.

According to state officials, most employees, virtually all of them Chinese immigrants, were paid just $250 when they worked their typical 66-hour, six-day weeks, amounting to $3.79 an hour, far below the state’s $7.15-an-hour minimum wage.

Location of Jin Shun factory? (guessed from Google Map, Street View)

No one answered the phone at the factory on Wednesday afternoon.

Two Chinese immigrants who worked at the factory said that during one busy stretch they worked 120 days straight.

The factory is located at 47-51 33rd Street, in Long Island City, New York.

The Labor Department announced that on Wednesday morning it placed special tags on more than 10,000 items of Jin Shun’s apparel, stating that the garments were produced under unlawful conditions. Within hours of that tagging, the clothing company Urban Apparel paid state officials $60,000 to have the tags removed. The money covered the amount of wage violations that the department found had occurred when employees were making the tagged garments.

One former worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared retribution by management, said that after working several seven-day weeks, she took off one Sunday to see a doctor. “When I showed up at work the next day, the boss asked me, ‘How come you didn’t show up yesterday?’ ” she said. “I tell him, ‘I was sick. I needed to see a doctor,’ and the boss said, ‘If you don’t follow my orders, if you don’t come to work, then we don’t need you to come back any more,” and fired her.

State officials said that about $2.4 million of the $5.3 million in wage violations occurred while the factory was operating under a previous name, Venture 47. They said the factory’s owners recently changed its name to Garlee NY.

As said by the Queens Crap Blog:

Wow - In the past week Queens has seen stories about slavery, forced prostitution, sweatshops…what year are we in?