Elvys Manuel Abreu
Elvys Manuel Abreu works in TOS to support his wife and seven-month old baby. He has had to work with kidney stones, the flu and with a broken finger because the company does not pay any sick days, and he can’t afford to get any deeper into debt. Even though he broke his finger at work, they refused to give him time off. He wants more just wages and hours so he can spend time with his family and finish his high school degree.
In his own words:
I am an operator in the knitting department. I work on six or seven machines at a time and when a coworker doesn’t come we sometimes work eight. The machines are huge; they are about the size of a normal room. The pressure is intense. They need to take into account that we are not animals. We are not machines just like the ones we are working with.
I live with my mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, wife, and my seven-month old son. There are seven of us in the house. Sometimes we don’t have enough to get by. This happens almost every week because between my wages and my aunt and grandfathers pension we have enough for maybe two weeks, but not enough to pay for the whole month of food. Because the company takes the money for health insurance out of our wages, what we make really isn’t enough to live off of. In a normal week, it costs more than 3,000 pesos ($91.00) to pay for food for the house, and I only make around 2,200 ($67.00) a week. That doesn’t pay for anything! I also have to pay for electricity and water. They cut off our phone line because we could no longer pay for it.
I had kidney stones, but I had to go to work because my son depends on me, my wife depends on me. For sick days they don’t pay and then I wouldn’t have enough to live on. At least in my previous jobs they paid us half of our wages on sick days. It wasn’t easy to work with that intense pain attending to the machines for a week. But I couldn’t spend that week at home. If I stayed home we’d have to buy food on credit from the store to pay it back when I go back to work, but the interest keeps going up until you pay it back. But even now with the job, we have not been able to get out of debt
One time, one of the tubes came loose in the machine and it broke my finger and I had a cast up to my elbow. But I had to keep working with the cast because they wouldn’t pay me if I stayed home even though it was a work injury.
There are a lot of problems with the workload, pressure, the lint in the air and the heat. For example I’m sick with the flu right now and I asked the management for a lighter workload so that I could keep working, but the management said to me that if we feel sick then fine, take a medical leave and go home. But how am I going to provide for my child and my family if I go home to rest?
The hours are bad because after twelve hours everyone is too tired when they come home. You don’t have the energy to cook or have time to study. I was in school trying to finish my high school degree but I had to stop after my second year because I began working. I would like to go back. I would prefer a normal schedule with five days of work so that I could spend Saturday and Sunday with my family and be able to go to school at night, right now getting out of work at 7:00 pm I don’t have time to go to school or do anything else. When I get home my family is already getting ready to go to bed, so I barely get to spend time with them to hear about their days. I can’t call them during the day because it is prohibited to use cell phones at work, so you can’t stay in contact with your family.
I affiliated with the union so that we can progress and move forward. They are fighting for better treatment with fair wages and hours. I want Hanesbrands to know what is happening here and, if they can, they should come here to find out for themselves what is really going on here.