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'Before dawn six days a week, Norma Ulloa left the two-bedroom apartment she shared with four family members and boarded a bus that took her to a stifling factory on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. She spent 11 hours a day there, pinning Forever 21 tags on trendy little shirts and snipping away their loose threads in the one-room workshop. On a good day, the 44-year-old could get through 700 shirts. That work earned Ulloa about $6 an hour, well below minimum wage in Los Angeles, according to a wage claim she filed with the state. Ulloas claim is one of nearly 300 filed since 2007 by workers demanding back pay for producing Forever 21 clothing, according to a Los Angeles Times review of nearly 2,000 pages of state labor records. Sewing factories and wholesale manufacturers have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle those workers claims. Forever 21 has not had to pay a cent. Like other major clothing retailers, Forever 21 avoids paying factory workers wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen that stands between the racks in its stores and the people who sew the clothes. The company benefits from an 18-year-old state law that was originally intended to stamp out sweatshops but has come up short. The law allowed workers to recoup back wages from their factory boss, and any garment manufacturing company that does business with that person. Forever 21 says it is a retailer, not a manufacturer, and thus is always at least one step removed from Los Angeles factories. One paradox of that arms-length relationship: Forever 21 says it often inspects factories abroad that produce its clothes as part of its social responsibility to better protect workers, but it doesnt do that in Los Angeles. The company said it takes that approach because in California the Department of Labor enforces strict worker protections, whereas theres no government body that does that for overseas factories. Now, as retailers across the country face increasingly tough competition from e-commerce, budget brands like Forever 21 are putting more and more pressure on suppliers to keep prices low. The U.S. Department of Labor investigated 77 Los Angeles garment factories from April through July of 2016 and found that workers were paid as little as $4 and an average of $7 an hour for 10-hour days spent sewing clothes for Forever 21, Ross Dress for Less and TJ Maxx. One worker in West Covina made as little as $3.42 per hour during three weeks of sewing TJ Maxx clothing, according to the Department of Labor. Those sweatshop wages are the hidden cost of the bargains that make stores like Forever 21 impossible to resist for so many Americans. A knee-length Forever 21 dress made in one of the Los Angeles factories investigated by the government came with a price tag of $24.90. But it would have cost $30.43 to make that dress with workers earning the $7.25 federal minimum wage and even more to pay the $12 Los Angeles minimum, according to previously unpublished investigative results from the Labor Department. Forever 21 would have had to pay 50% more in order for sewing contractors to pay workers the federal minimum, the investigation found"

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