A JOB CHRONICLE

To everyone that could matter, this is a story of what I've been experiencing:

I'm a 20 year old woman, worker at a Bangladesh factory in the shoes industry. I have worked here since I was 15 and I have been hidding some things about the treatment we are receiving by this No-Name American Enterprise. I usually have to work from 15 to 18 hours a day and having a salary of just 12 cents an hour, wich can hardly cover my room in a crowded dorm. Besides we have to make our job in a 40 degree environment and it could pass two months before a day off. The space between people' workplace is minimal and abuses are clearly defined. We have not even been provided with the adequate implements to the shoe making, as masks and gloves to protect us from chemicals such as glue and other materials employed, and some workers have been hurt.

I think currently we are not having any job securities at work, bacause when some co-workers of the factory complaint about being mistreated, after a short period of time, they were fired with the excuse that there were quality control reasons and that they have to let them go, even knowing that our company has been used for producing this american products for almost 10 years. Maybe if that would happen before the complaints were made we could think that was reasonable, but after this event, workers at the factory fear for telling something about what is happening internally, because they need their job in order to survive.

By this, I only wanted to create some consciousness about what is happening in many developing countries around the world and make people know that it is required that these transnational companies abandone this negative practices such as ruthlessly exploited workforce, civil liberties denial, poor wages, and start to give the right to work in dignity in healthy safe environments, because big companies know that sooner or later this stories would begin to appear in many cultures, generating an extreme bad image to their brands and eventually reducing their profits.