'We Were... Like Slaves'.(inhumane treatment of Chinese garment workers, Mauritius)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

The rain is coming down harder now, but Qiu Jonghua doesn't seem to notice. The wiry old man is clenching a photograph of his only daughter, wondering aloud why she never came home. Two years ago Qiu Nengjuan left Zhejiang province to work in a garment factory--not the one just down the road, but one halfway around the world in Mauritius. Like hundreds of other women from her village, the 32-year-old Qiu thought she was heading to a worker's paradise: in Mauritius, the recruiter told her, Qiu could earn 50 percent more making jeans than she could at home--and she would be living on one of the world's most beautiful islands. "You can save a lot of money there," says Qiu's brother, who went on a three-year contract with his wife and sister. "We all talked about what we'd do with our nest eggs when we got back."

Qiu never made it back, and her village has never been the same. More than 100 years ago, Chinese "coolies" were recruited to harvest sugar cane in Mauritius. History is repeating itself, only now China sends tens of thousands of workers to Mauritius and other remote islands because they--unlike China--have a shortage of cheap labor but an abundance of "quota" (permission to export textiles to the United States and Europe). The workers, many of them from this verdant valley near the coastal city of Ningbo, are not so different from their forebears: at the Novel Garments factory in Mauritius, Qiu's colleagues say they stitched pockets into Tommy Hilfiger jeans for 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 362.5 days a year. "We were treated like slaves," says one of Qiu's colleagues. "We had no choice but to obey."

Except now they're fighting back. During a monthlong illness that left her too bloated even to wear underwear, Qiu repeatedly begged her bosses to let ...