Marleny Franco
Marleny Franco was fired from TOS Dominicana shortly after she had organized a meeting to address discrimination against women in the workplace. The management at TOS tried to force her to resign, and when she refused, they took more than half of her severance pay. That same day she found out that she was pregnant, with almost no money to support her family.
In her own words
I worked as an operator. I got up at 5:30 am to get on the bus to work and I’d get home at 8:00 pm. When I got home I would feel exhausted and dead, I had just enough energy to shower before I fell asleep to wake up to do it again the next day. I worked all twelve hours on my feet. I had constant back pain from being on my feet for twelve hours. It was exhausting doing so much work, and for so little money. They gave me six machines to operate at a time and it didn’t matter if they were working well or not I had to work them all. When one wasn’t working I told them that they should give us less machines, but they ignored it saying that we had to do it. The wages were miserable, and while they promised us raises, we never got a raise. I was paid 44 pesos an hour which ended up being about 2,200 pesos a month, which amounts to almost nothing. Food is expensive here, just a pound of rice is 16 pesos, and a family buys at least three pounds of rice a day, and you can’t survive off rice alone.
I got very sick at work with kidney problems and back pain, which I never had before I started working there. The company didn’t take responsibility for it, even though I got sick as a result of work. I went to the doctor and had to be hospitalized, but I don’t think they would have cared if I had died because of the work. Not only did they not pay when I was out sick, but they didn’t do what they were supposed to for the medical insurance, and so because of their negligence I had to pay 6,000 pesos ($185) out of my pocket at the clinic. (Workers earn about $67.00 a week).
I had to borrow money just to pay for it, and if I had stayed the night it would have cost me 10,000 pesos ($305.00). To pay back the loan, I had to pay another 1,500 pesos ($46.00) in interest, which is almost an entire weeks pay since they deduct money for insurance every month even though the company did not follow through on fixing my insurance. Five months later when I was fired I was still paying back the loan. It was such a struggle to work so hard and have nothing to show for it. Because of TOS’s negligence on insurance I have been unable to save any money up. I am not the only one who has been taken advantage of with the work insurance but the company just doesn’t care.
I organized a meeting with the management and all the women workers to talk about the fact that there was so much work and very little support for women. They didn’t want women working there because they said that we always were sick or in pain. They ignore us and we don’t have the opportunity to speak. Because I would not be silent, I was an inconvenience to them.
I was fired shortly after the meeting. The human resources director, Ely Urena, demanded that I quit my job. I refused, but she gave me no reason for being fired, she just repeated three more times that I should resign. I said I would not quit because I had worked hard. They are firing women one by one because they don’t want to deal with women getting sick at work from forced exertion, but we as women have the right to work. We work because we have to, not because we like it. I felt worse about being fired because they took more than half of the severance pay that they owed me, leaving me with almost nothing. She said if I didn’t agree to accept only half of my severance, that they wouldn’t pay me any severance pay. That same day I found out I was pregnant. I felt terrible because I had just lost my job for no reason and I had almost no money.
I worked there so I know about the abuses that happen and I want better for my coworkers and friends.