In the mid-1990s, a landmark case involving El Monte garment workers brought modern-day slavery in the U.S. into glaring focus. Federal agents raided a locked sweatshop compound a half hour’s drive outside Los Angeles to free 72 Thai immigrants who’d been working more than 16 hours a day.
Nearly 30 years later, the mass exploitation of Thai immigrants continues.
This week, the Thai Community Development Center opened a first-of-its-kind facility in the U.S. just blocks from the Thai Town business district in Hollywood, where workers will learn about labor rights and how to organize from Thai-speaking staff and volunteers.
The majority of Thai immigrants continues to work in the service sector. These immigrants are treated as unskilled labor, making them more vulnerable to exploitation, said Chancee Martorell, executive director of the Thai CDC. Her organization has worked on cases involving more than 1,000 trafficked Thai workers.
“Despite being a small immigrant community in this country, Thais are disproportionately affected by the scourge of human trafficking,” Martorell said at the center’s grand opening on Wednesday.
Martorell noted Thais have been part of the country’s largest labor and sex trafficking cases. Meanwhile, industries with high concentrations of Thai workers, such as restaurants, spas and agriculture, are rife with wage theft. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered $1.65 million in back wages and liquidated damages from the owner of the Thai restaurant chain Ocha Classic.
The center’s grand opening coincided with the 28th anniversary of the El Monte case, drawing county and state officials who were in office when the case broke, as well as more than a dozen of the El Monte garment workers, including 65-year-old Nantha Jaknang.
Jaknang and the other workers, mostly women, had been paid by the cents for each piece they sewed while trapped in a sweatshop working up to 22 hours a day.
“A Thai worker center like this is the change we've longed for for a long time," Jaknang said in Thai as Martorell interpreted. “We will rise above adversity weaving a future where workers’ dignity is honored.”
With the help of advocates such as Martorell and a young lawyer named Julie Su, who is now the country’s acting labor secretary, the El Monte workers won more than $4 million in settlements against B.U.M. International, Mervyn's, Montgomery Ward and others.
The Thai Workers' Center expects to assist about 500 people a year, operating out of rented rooms at the co-working complex Second Home that will serve as a satellite office of the Thai CDC.
Directing attorney Panida Rzonca said Thai CDC has been primarily working with restaurant workers, but will increase outreach to massage industry workers through LINE, the messaging app of choice among Thais.
“A lot of it does rely on social media,” said Rzonca, whose business card includes her LINE ID. “After we make direct outreach in person, we're also going to help them come in so they can benefit from our services.”
On Tuesday, the former El Monte garment workers were given a tour of Second Home’s open-concept work spaces and courtyard, where professionals hunched over their laptops.
Most clients are expected to be Thai, but the center is open to all low-wage workers and will collaborate with the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance and the Pilipino Workers Center.
“The center will transcend ethnic lines and organize workers across ethnic lines and service industries,” Martorell said.
L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis was a state senator representing El Monte at the time the slavery case broke and worked to pass legislation requiring a code of conduct and third-party monitoring in the garment industry to eliminate sweatshop practices. Nevertheless, unscrupulous employers continue to abuse workers, said Solis, also a former U.S. labor secretary.
“They may drive nicer cars or have a different sign on the shop or their factory,” Solis said. “But nonetheless, we still see wage theft occurring. We still see people being paid under the table, still being paid piecemeal.”
Funding support for the center is coming from the California Community Foundation and the Liberty Hill Foundation.
