Something to Hide (review)

If your course curriculum has space and time to examine more recent chapters in labor history, Something to Hide could be a starting point for discussion on the effort to eradicate modern-day sweatshops.

This short documentary focuses on a 1998 visit to El Salvador's maquila apparel factories by a group of university students and Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, one of the sponsors of this video.

The students find a host of contradictions awaiting them, among them the so-called "free trade" manufacturing zones festooned with razor wire and ringed by rifle-toting guards, and Taylorite planning to the nth degree. The video shows how it is truly possible to spend just seven cents to make a piece of Nike clothing that retails for $22.99. Nike is not the only culprit mentioned in Something to Hide; Wal-Mart, Kmart, Liz Claiborne, Kathie Lee, Leslie Fay, Adidas, and Van Heusen also get stained by their association with Central American maquilas.

Where the students are less successful is in documenting the conditions inside and confronting the maquila managers. No showing of this film in a classroom setting would be complete without a discussion on the efficacy of tactics employed by the student group.

The film may be at its best in recounting the interpreted remarks of the young women fired from one factory. Deisy was fired after five years at a university apparel manufacturing plant, she said, "for having too many children." She now makes and sells candies outside the factory gates to the workers who remain. Another woman notes that for workers with children, "the money (in wages) is not enough," especially after unpaid overtime and overnight shifts. A third worker laments, "we would like our rights as workers. But if only one or two speak up ... they don't pay attention."

It is obvious that, in the quest for super-sized profits, garment firms are not according their new workforce a chance to make a living comparable to the U.S. workers whose jobs went across the border. Kernaghan observes that not a single free-trade zone garment maquila has a union contract.

What is presented in the documentary will need updating—for instance, the campaign of United Students Against Sweatshops (another sponsor of this video) at high-profile U.S. universities to renounce sweatshop labor in the manufacture of their licensed apparel, not to mention the competing monitoring groups and their differing agendas. But the video does present a decent jumping-off point.

The National Labor Committee will mail Something to Hide on request, counting on the suggested donation to arrive later.

Something to Hide, directed and produced by Katherine Keen, for Crowing Rooster Arts, 1999, is available from the National Labor Committee, 275 7^th Avenue, 15^th Floor, New York, NY 10001. The suggested donation is $20.