Word: saipan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Welcome to Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain east of the Philippines. And, yes, it has been a U.S. territory since the end of World War II. Li Li is one of 40,000 foreign contract workers, mostly from China, Bangladesh and the Philippines, shipped in to service a garment industry that exploits Saipan's exemption from a number of American labor and immigration controls. This allows the garment factories, most run by Chinese or South Korean firms, to pay foreign laborers substantially less than the minimum wage but still export nearly $1 billion worth...
...attempting to sue her former employer, SR (Saipan) Corp., for the assault on her and for unpaid overtime. "The managers did not treat us like human beings," she says, adding that she would not have gone to Saipan if she had known what the working conditions were like. But having borrowed the equivalent of $2,800 to pay the "recruitment fee" in China, she cannot return until she has earned at least enough to pay off the loan. "That comes close to the definition of indentured labor," says Allen Stayman, insular-affairs director at the U.S. Department of the Interior...
President Clinton sent a letter last May to the islands' Governor, complaining that the labor practices "are inconsistent with our country's values." Last week a bipartisan congressional commission on immigration released a scathing report that said, "Only a few countries, and no democratic society, have immigration policies" like Saipan's. Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California who has sponsored legislation that would end Saipan's exemptions, visited the island two weeks ago and said he was "deeply troubled" by conditions...
...carnage was horrific. In the China theater alone, perhaps as many as 10 million people perished. In the fighting in the central Pacific, some 20,000 U.S. soldiers died. On Saipan, Japanese women and children hurled themselves from cliffs rather than submit to the American invaders. Most Japanese soldiers there either died fighting or took their own lives: 27,040 corpses were found. The toll from Tarawa--984 U.S. Marines and 29 Navy men killed in just 76 hours of fighting--caused normally self-censoring correspondents to send home horror stories that nearly triggered a congressional investigation. All of February...
...command of a ship off Saipan preparing for the invasion of Japan when a message came over the radio that a `powerful bomb' was dropped on Japan," says one of the essays in the booklet. "Even if they had said atomic bomb, none of us would have known what...