Truth - Al Franken [66]
So far, not so bad. Just run-of-the-mill exploitation of powerless workers. Did Brian Ross have anything more specific?
ROSS: Workers are kept in crowded, often rat-infested labor barracks. Of course, some are better than others. But at this one, the toilets didn’t work, the showers barely worked, and the water was contaminated.
Picky, picky, picky. Time was when people would be grateful to have a job where they had to drink contaminated water. It’s called an entry-level job. Used to have one myself. I was a caddy. I had to buy my own soda.
Then Brian Ross spoke with Eric Gregoire, a Catholic Church human rights worker.
ROSS: Authorities say [garment workers] essentially have become indentured servants, a practice outlawed in America at the same time as slavery.
GREGOIRE: I’ve seen people locked in barracks, locked behind barbed wire.
Okay. It’s a bad job. I get it. But these women have bootstraps, don’t they? They’re in America! They may be locked inside a fetid, even toxic hellhole, but if they’re lucky enough to have a window, they can look out through the barbed wire and see the Stars and Stripes swaying in the balmy tropical breeze. This is the land of opportunity. After all, that’s why they came. They could get a management position, or maybe even someday start a sweatshop of their own. I mean, they’re working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. How long could it take?
ROSS: The women have to pay government officials in China fees of as much as $6,000 or $7,000 to even get jobs on Saipan, putting them deep in debt and beholden to both factory bosses and the officials back in China.
Oh. So, they’re basically screwed, then.
And not just figuratively. As Ross reported, many young women who paid their family’s life savings for “good jobs in America” ended up instead as involuntary sex slaves servicing government officials, sailors on shore leave, and Japanese businessmen.
KATRINA (through translator): Once there was a customer that bit my breast. But the boss told us the customer is always right.
ROSS (voice-over): Many of the women who work here are only teenagers. Many underage, like Katrina, not her real name, who was fourteen when she was recruited from the Philippines.
KATRINA (through translator): It was my first time to dance naked, and I was ashamed.
ROSS (voice-over): Katrina told federal investigators that she signed this official Saipan government affidavit, thinking she was going to be a waitress, and ended up forced into live sex acts onstage.
Pretty disgusting. Hideously disgusting. If you ask me, this is a clear case where the customer is definitely not always right.
Why wasn’t anyone in Washington doing anything about it? Because a certain congressman wouldn’t let them.
Saipan’s labor practices had been raising concerns in D.C. since the eighties. California Congressman George Miller first convened a hearing on Saipan’s garment industry in 1992. By 1997, the Clinton administration was calling for American worker protections to extend to the CNMI. By March of 1998, when the 20/20 piece ran, the issue was coming to a head. Miller released a report describing in detail how the involuntary prostitutes faced “threats that they or other members of their families would be killed if they prematurely returned to China.” But even when a Senate committee conducted its own hearing, nothing seemed to happen in the House.
That’s because Congressman Tom DeLay and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were winning the battle.
As in World War II, the key to winning the second Battle of Saipan was an invasion. This time, it was an invasion of members of Congress, congressional staffers, and right-wing opinion leaders. The eighty-plus conservative junketeers didn’t stay in barbed wire–fenced labor barracks, but rather in the luxurious beachfront Hyatt Regency Saipan, where they enjoyed fourteen manicured acres of tropical gardens, afternoon cocktails at the