Savoring Freedom : Thai Sweatshop Workers Recall Their Pasts and Contemplate Their Futures as They Celebrate With Supporters and Tour the Site of Possible New Jobs

Forty years ago, Wittipong Withiboompronsak was an orphan living in a Buddhist temple. Ten years ago, he was sewing clothes in Thailand for about $3 a day. Four years ago, he came to the United States and, authorities say, he became a virtual slave. Seven days ago, he was being ordered “back to the tank” by an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent while under federal detention, a towel around his shoulders and a tense, bewildered expression on his face.

On Friday, his 49th birthday, he celebrated his hours-old freedom with a beer, a gap-toothed grin and a blue velvet hat.

“I made it myself,” he said proudly of his snazzy cap. Withiboompronsak, a soft, gentle man from Thailand’s remote Tak Province, could have said the same thing about the hole in his smile. Unable to visit a dentist while allegedly held prisoner in a sweatshop apartment complex in El Monte, Withiboompronsak had removed several rotting teeth himself--with no anesthetic.

But Friday night was no place for such grim memories. Withiboompronsak was enjoying himself at Wat Thai Buddist Temple, a fluted structure that looks like a chunk of Southeast Asia transplanted to a barren stretch of North Hollywood. He ate rice soup, listened to speeches lionizing him and his 71 fellow sweatshop workers, and even gave a stand-up interview for the evening news.

He was a minor celebrity now, and while the hot white camera lights were annoying, beyond their glare he could glimpse normalcy, a simple thing denied him for so long. He waved happily at a group of children playing nearby, entreating them to give him a candy, and he chatted with a group of saffron-robed monks. No children or monks were ever seen inside the seven-unit, razor-wired compound on Santa Anita Avenue in El Monte, and Withiboompronsak was never allowed to leave.

As the journalists sloughed away, he chatted with an old friend, one of an estimated dozen who scaled the wall of the guarded sweatshop in the seven or so years of its existence. Now this friend, who declined to reveal her name, was healthy, married, several months pregnant and working for a decent wage, and Withiboompronsak saw that life in America could be better than the hell he had experienced thus far. He flashed his shiny new work permit--a six-month license to live and work legally in the United States while waiting to serve as a material witness in the prosecution of his alleged jailers, some of whom were arrested in an Aug. 2 raid by state and local authorities.

“I am going to work here and wait for the money that is owed me, and only then will I return to Thailand,” Withiboompronsak said firmly. A new life had begun, he said, and it would certainly be better than the one he had just escaped.

For many of Withiboompronsak’s fellow prisoners, that new life will begin at licensed garment factories like Susie’s Knitting Mill in the City of Commerce, where 15 of the rescued workers were taken on a tour Saturday and offered jobs at just above the $4.25-minimum wage--or roughly 10 times what they’d been earning in El Monte. The women dawdled by the machines and talked shop, all of them having been professional seamstresses in their native Thailand before being lured into peonage in California. They noted the difference between the high-ceilinged, clean facility and the cramped living rooms and garages they had labored in for 17 hours a day, every day of the week, allegedly under the supervision of an imposing woman known only as “Auntie.” Many said they would take jobs at Susie’s Knitting Mill.

“Tuk,” who declined to give her real name for fear of retribution, was not so sure. After three years at the El Monte site with only a handful of days off--most of which she spent doing laundry--Tuk said she would like to get out of the garment industry and move into housekeeping or care-taking. “I’d like to take care of children,” she said, “or old people.”

That Tuk, a shy yet composed woman of 37, prefers to remain anonymous is perhaps fitting, since her story is so depressingly similar to most of the 66 other women and five men who toiled with her in three-bedroom apartments crammed wall-to-wall with brown carpeting, sewing machines and bolts of fabric.

Tuk, like nearly all the others, was the child of poor rice farmers. She was raised in Suphanburi in Central Thailand, about 100 kilometers from Bangkok. (Many of the others are from the Northeast bulge of the country--known in Thai as Isaan--a drought-stricken plateau that sends streams of laborers to the cities during every dry season.) When not helping with the rice harvest, Tuk worked in a garment factory in Bangkok, Thailand’s booming, overpopulated capital and the center of the country’s incredibly rapid industrialization. There she earned only about 75 baht--$3--a day, but she worked a reasonable eight-hour shift and was able to send a little money home to help support her mother, father, nine siblings and her own daughter, who is now 14 and lives with Tuk’s parents.

Still, when approached by a recruiter allegedly offering big salaries in the United States, Tuk was easily tempted. America, as always, was the promised land.

Told she would have to work three years and pay back a transport fee of nearly $5,000, she plunged into the unknown, signing on for an adventure and a better life in America.

The trip started promisingly enough. Getting a passport and a visa was astonishingly easy. After boarding a flight as part of a legitimate tour group, Tuk allegedly was swept away at Los Angeles International Airport by her new keepers and whisked straight to El Monte in a van.

Upon arrival at the peach-colored apartment complex, Tuk still didn’t know anything was amiss, she said. She was given a room to share with four other women, part of a three-bedroom unit holding 15 in which the living room and garage below were dedicated completely to garment making. Bespectacled, heavy-set “Auntie,” then allegedly spelled out the rules: Don’t leave the compound. Doors and windows must be closed at all times. No fraternization between units. No talking to people outside the compound. No one outside after dark. No phone calls without permission. Work, and work hard.

From that moment, Tuk worked every day until she dropped, frequently as long as 19 or 20 hours. These hours created a predictably high number of stress-related illnesses, such as peptic ulcers, said Jantra Chennavasin, president-elect of the Thai Physician Assn. of America, who has begun doing free medical interviews with the workers.

Although she quickly realized the trap she had fallen into, Tuk was prevented from fleeing by a variety of forces, including high cement walls, round-the-clock guards and the threat of violence. According to several of the seamstresses, one would-be escapee was badly beaten and then photographed; Auntie allegedly liked to toss this grim document into the lap of workers when they complained or slowed their sewing pace.

But more than intimidation and their own ignorance of the world outside the compound, it was the worker’s loyalty to their parents that apparently kept many of them from scaling the wall or demanding to be sent home. Sacrificing for the good of one’s parents is a central tenet in Thai culture, especially for young women like those who made up the bulk of the El Monte work force.

Tuk managed to send $2,000 home to her mother and father in the course of three years. This was scraped out of monthly payments that ranged from around $200 in 1992, up to $600 to $700 this year. Deducted from those gross piecework wages were exorbitant expenses designed to return most of each paycheck to the owners of the sweatshop.

Having traded in the orange jumpsuits of the INS Terminal Island detention facility--and the potato and bread diet they say was driving them crazy--the workers now hope to recoup damages from their alleged captors via a batch of civil claims now being assembled, legal suits that will also seek reparations from any retailers discovered to have bought the shop’s clothing.

In the meantime, however, they are savoring freedom and the kindness Tuk says is now being heaped upon them from all sides. They have also taken something else with them from the barbed-wire compound to the various safe houses they are sleeping in: A camaraderie born of shared hard times.

“You don’t have to worry,” assured one young woman, speaking by phone to a Thai radio reporter as her friends crowded the room and teased her about her newfound fame. “Now we are very comfortable, like sisters.”