Sweatshop Exhibit Revives Painful Memories

It was a scandal as close as a bedroom closet--an outrage hovering there among familiar sportswear, dresses, jeans, hats and shirts.

Few consumers, if any, could have been aware that some of their most prized clothing had been manufactured in an El Monte sweatshop where Thai workers toiled in virtual slavery behind locked doors and razor wire.

Dozens of those workers, freed in an August 1995 raid, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance on Sunday, where their illegal, inhumane working quarters are the centerpiece of an exhibit called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops 1820-Present.”

“I never thought I could get out of there,” Maliwan Radonphon, 30, said Sunday of her year and a half in the El Monte sweatshop, working from 7 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, for sub-minimum wages.

When she saw the razor wire used to prevent workers from escaping, “it gave me chills,” she said. “They just showed a little bit of the wire in the exhibit,” she said, “but it was enough to remind me.”

A woman who would identify herself only as Bunta, 37, said, “I never thought I would see this day when I’m free and out of that place.”

That place was a contemporary hell in a small El Monte apartment complex where workers, mainly women from rural Thailand, were forced to work for up to 16 hours a day, many as long as seven years.

“You are our heroes,” Julie Su, an attorney with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center who represented the workers, told them at a reception before they toured the exhibit. “You have stirred so many people from apathy and ignorance.”

The Thai workers had been brought to this country on fake passports only to find themselves sleeping on dirty floors where mice and cockroaches scurried.

Authorities raided the sweatshop on Aug. 2, 1995, freeing 72 Thai workers. Eight others had escaped earlier.

Seven sweatshop operators who had recruited the seamstresses pleaded guilty to violating federal civil rights laws in 1996. The workers have since won settlements of more than $4 million, with each worker getting from $10,000 to $80,000.

Several Latino workers shared in the settlement.

The Museum of Tolerance exhibit, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, became the center of controversy when clothing manufacturers mounted stiff opposition to the show before it opened in Washington in April 1998.

On Sunday, the Thai workers listened intently at each of the show’s exhibits.

One group of Thai women gasped audibly when they were told that 146 young women died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire because the doors to their sweatshop had been locked from the outside.

Since their ordeal in El Monte, the Thai workers have moved on. They now are legal residents, most have studied English, many still work in the garment industry, at least 15 have married, 13 have had children and more are on the way.

“They had no idea that they had been victimized,” a social service worker said. “They had no idea what their rights were.”