UCLA students’ book spotlights garment sweatshops
By Valeria Godines
Charlotte Observer, NC
The Orange County Register
(MCT)
SANTA ANA, Calif. – When Sarin Prakobwanakit and Justin Miyamoto took a UCLA class on labor and social justice, they knew very little about the garment industry. And they knew even less about the workers.
When they thought of downtrodden employees, they thought of Latinas, not Asians.
“I lived under the model-minority myth,” Miyamoto, 22, said. He thought Asians lived successful professional lives and never were low-income workers struggling for better working conditions.
And then they learned about the El Monte raids. On Aug. 2, 1995, state and federal agents raided a garment factory in El Monte, Calif., where 72 Thai nationals worked and lived in near slavery conditions. The workers toiled for $2 an hour in an apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire.
The case sparked national discussion about the garment industry.
And, in the case of nine students at UCLA, it spawned an idea for a book.
The result is “Sweatshop Slaves: Asian-Americans in the Garment Industry,” a 104-page book that was published earlier this summer. The students conducted in-depth interviews with a number of workers in the sweatshops.
“I didn’t learn about the El Monte raids until college. I’m very surprised I didn’t know about it before,” said Miyamoto, a biochemistry major who wrote a chapter on legislation targeting abuses in the industry. “To learn injustice is so close and so rampant is appalling.”
“Many of them had grown up their whole lives in the Southland and many had no idea these conditions existed and it really brought it to home,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. “It is quite an accomplishment to have a publication under their belt before they leave school. Many talked about how they would go shopping at the Gap and Banana Republic and never thought about who made the clothes or where they came from. Now, every time they go shopping, they think about the hands that went into this garment.”
The greater Los Angeles area is the center of the North American garment industry. More than 1,000 manufacturers employ an estimated 90,000 workers, most of them immigrant.
A U.S. Department of Labor survey of the Los Angeles garment industry has revealed that 67 percent of garment shops violated minimum-wage and overtime laws. The survey was released in 2000. It also found that 98 percent violated health and safety laws and an estimated $80 million was owed in back wages each year, according to the book.
Prakobwanakit, who graduated with a degree in molecular biology, wrote a chapter on Rojana Cheunchujit Sussman, one of the workers in the El Monte raid.
“The apartments were dirty and dark, the windows were all boarded up, and the complex was two stories and surrounded by barbed wire that faced inwards,” Sussman says in the book. “There were two armed guards with guns, knives and baseball bats that patrolled the complex around the clock.
Downstairs in our complex was the workroom where we were to spend 16 to 20 hours of our days working for the owners.”
“I felt sure that if I tried to leave, I would be killed.”
