Testimony of Lydda Eli Gonzalez
My name is Lydda Eli Gonzalez and I am from Honduras. I
am 19 years old. I started working when I was 11, and when I was 17, I
entered the maquila factories. For 13 months, until August 15, I have
sewn the Sean John label at the SETISA factory in San Miguel Free Trade
Zone.
The free trade zone where I work is surrounded by very
high walls, with a locked metal gate, and armed guards. I enter at 6:45
a.m. Our regular shift is supposedly from 7:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., but
since the production goal they give us is so high, we are almost always
kept working for 1 ½ or 2 hours of overtime until 6:30 p.m. We are not
paid for these extra hours. It is especially toward the end of the
week, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, that they make
everyone in the factory stay working, because they say the exports have
to go out. The overtime is mandatory. They threaten or punish us if we
cannot stay. The supervisors say we will be fired, or that they will
change us to a line where we will earn even less.
My job is attaching the sleeves to the shirt. There are
different styles of Sean John shirts, but for long-sleeved shirt, a
production line of about 20 workers has to sew 190 dozen shirts a
day-that's 2,288 shirts. Management demands we reach this goal, but it
is impossible. With luck we can do 90 or 100 dozen in a regular shift.
So the company demands overtime and we must stay. The supervisors stand
over us shouting and cursing at us to go faster. We are under constant
pressure. They call us filthy names, like maldito, donkey, bitch, and
worse things. You can't answer the supervisors or they will fire you.
It is very hot in the factory and you are sweating all
day. There is also a lot of dust in the air. You breath it in, and you
go into the factory with black hair, and come out with hair that is
white or red or whatever the color of the shirts we are working on.
It is forbidden to talk, and you have to ask permission
to use the bathroom. We have to get a pass from the supervisor and give
it to the guard in front of the bathroom, who also searches us before
we go in. You can go once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
Also they watch the time, and if you are gone more than three or four
minutes, they call you on the loudspeaker. Another thing, the bathrooms
are very dirty and there is almost never any toilet paper or soap. They
also don't permit us to get up to get water-if the worker next to you
goes, you take advantage and ask her to bring you water too. You can't
move or stretch, or even look to the side. You just have to focus and
work as fast as you can to complete the production goal, always under
pressure. Because of this, and because the benches are just wood with no
backs, by the end of the day your whole body aches, your back, arms,
shoulders, everything, and one feels exhausted.
All the new employees are required to take a pregnancy
test, and if it comes out positive, they are fired. Older workers also
suffer a lot of harrassment and discrimination, because the management
prefers workers between 17 and 25 years old. When a woman gets to be 30,
she can't get work in the maquila factories, and if she is working,
often she is harrassed and sent to worse positions to make her quit.
They search us physically when we enter the factory and
if one has candy or gum or lipstick, they take it away because they
think it could stain the clothing. Like I said, they search us at the
bathrooms too, and also leaving the factory.
We have no healthcare. For the last two years our
factory has not paid the Social Security fees, and because of this, we
have no access to healthcare. This is illegal.
The Chief of Personnel and the other managers constantly
threaten us, telling us that if we organize a union, they will shut
the factory down and throw us out on the street. They fired me on
August 15, just because they suspected I was part of a group that
wanted the rights of the workers to be respected. That was true, since
we wanted to form a union to end the abuses and bad treatment in the
factory. The supervisors tell us we don't have rights, that we have to
shut up and work, or leave.
When Barbara and Charlie showed me the price of a Sean
John shirt, I could not believe it. That is, we know they are very
expensive, and very pretty. But what a surprise to find out that they
cost $40. In Honduras, we workers never imagined that they could cost so
much. We produce more than a thousand of these shirts a day, and just
one shirt would pay more than my wage for a week!
It is difficult to make the Sean John shirts. Seeing
this label we get nervous, because there are the same very high
production goals-no matter what label-but they demand really high
quality. The quality inspectors check every little stitch. For us, t
he pressure increases with the Sean John label and we earn less,
because we can produce less. With Sean John, we can only earn the
minimum wage of 576 lempiras a week-which is $33. This would be around
13 lempiras an hour. [$0.74] But really we are earning less, because
they make us work a lot of overtime hours, which are not paid.
If it is a short sleeved shirt, which is easier, and we
know the style-something like Nautica, we can earn between 800 and 830
lempiras a week. [$45.45 to $47.16]
You cannot live on these wages. Really you work just to
eat. It's impossible to save. You can't buy anything, it's just to
survive. I am lucky because I live with my mother and an uncle. So we
share expenses. But I'm no better off than I was two or thee years ago.
We workers are always stuck in the same place, without being able to go
forward.
I get up at 5:00 a.m. to get to work at 6:45. I take two
buses, which costs 8.50 lempiras-a total of 17 lempiras a day, round
trip. [$0.97] When I get to the factory, I have a tortilla with beans,
the cheapest breakfast, which costs 9 lempiras [$0.51]. I also buy the
cheapest lunch, which includes a small piece of chicken, rice, beans and
water. This costs 21 lempiras [$1.19]. Just these small daily expenses
for transport and food come to almost four hours of wages a day.
Fifteen of us are fired now, because we wanted to
organize a union to end all the maltreament and abuses. We wanted to
have a voice to end the mandatory pregnancy tests and overtime, to have
the right to use the bathroom when we need to, and so the supervisors
would not scream at us any more, and we want access to healthcare like
the law says.
Right now we are in a trap. There are no rights in the factory, and we who were fired are probably on the companies' blacklist.
We don't know much about the labels, that is about who
owns the labels. So the label "Sean John" didn't mean anything special
to us. When we came to the United States, they told us that it was Sean
Combs. But that still didn't mean anything to me, until it was
mentioned that he was the boyfriend of Jennifer López. Then, yes!-I've
seen him on television in Honduras. Knowing this, I felt happy, because
since he is a very famous and very powerful person, he can help us end
all the humiliating treatment that they give us in the factory.
I want to ask Mr. Sean Combs for his help so we can win
our rights and be treated with dignity and not in a humiliating manner,
because we are human beings. We do not want him to take his work from
the factory. On the contrary, we need these jobs, and we are willing to
work very hard. But the maltreatment and the abuses are too much.
There is too much injustice in the factory, and that is why I came
here, to ask Mr. Combs and the American people for help, in the name of
all the workers. We sew your clothing. Please demand that the
companies treat us with respect.
Thank you.
