NEW YORK -- Behind a cramped and noisy garment shop, sandwiched between old three-decker homes in a section of Queens, 9-year-old Guang Jiang is spending his day hunched over a work bench helping his father stitch women's dresses together.
He is being paid 25 cents an hour.
"My son comes to the factory to help me count the garment material," his father, Kong Jiang, told a state garment industry inspector. Said the boy, in newly learned English: "I just come to work when my father tell me to do so, to make easy for my father to work faster."
Nine months after a nationwide federal crackdown on child labor in this country -- a crackdown that has drawn more headlines for the Department of Labor than any of its other operations in decades -- life goes on much as before in thousands of dirty, dangerous sweatshops here.
Throughout the shops, child factory workers remain a common sight. The Labor Department's widely publicized "Operation Child Watch" has failed to do anything to curb abuses. Federal officials claim they cannot find child-labor violations.
Violations are not hard to spot. On the same day young Guang was found in the Queens factory, Zhang Min, 14, was found working at a sewing machine stitching union labels on dresses in a sixth-floor loft factory in Manhattan. Nearby, in a fourth-floor factory on Forsyth Street where the main entrance is blocked with discarded boxes, Shu Homg, 14, was found behind a sewing machine.
"If you were concentrating on just child labor, you could find it every day," said Angelo Valdevitt, a state labor and wage inspector assigned to New York's sprawling garment district. State labor officials say that so far this year they have found 262 children working in the factories -- more than in any previous year.
Yet over the same period, federal labor officials say they were able to find only "in the vicinity of two or three" child workers.
"We were in a lot of places," contended Thomas Kelly, head of the federal wage and hour office in New York. "We just haven't found many child-labor violations."
The Labor Department's sputtering "crackdown" on sweatshops illustrates one major failure in the massive child-labor raids that began in March. There are others.
Far from the cities, on commercial farms, labor officials still struggle to get a handle on the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who work in the fields in some of the worst working conditions in the nation. On family farms, labor officials have yet to launch a proposed education program to try to stem an estimated 300 deaths and 23,000 child workplace injuries a year.
