Women Workers.

It’s generally agreed within the global labour market and especially within EPZs that as employees, women are the worst off. Women represent the majority of employees in EPZs. In countries such as Jamaica and Honduras 90% of the EPZ workforce is female. Research has consistently found that women are paid less than men and are commonly subject to sexual harassment, violence and discrimination. Employers are hiring women from their home towns or villages in their mid – twenties. Then, supervisors, insisting that they are “too old” and that their fingers are no longer sufficiently nimble, have a good excuse to pay them the minimum wage. This practice is a highly effective way of minimising the number of mothers on the enterprise payroll.

For instance, in the Mexican maquiladoras all women applying for work must undergo pregnancy tests. “Cases of women workers in EPZs being forced to take pregnancy tests are well-documented” claims the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Some reports implicate such investors in the EPZs owed by Zenith, Panasonic, General Motors, General Electric and Fruit of the Loom, found that “pregnant women are denied hiring”. It seems to be normal for maquiladoras employers to mistreat and discharge pregnant employees. The inspectors of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions discovered mistreatment designed to encourage employees to resign. Pregnant women were required to do overnights and to work on long hours of unpaid overtime and physically strenuous tasks. These women were also denied time off from work to go to see the doctor. This practice has led to on-the -job miscarriages. “In this way”, the study reports, “a pregnant workers are forced to choose between having a healthy, full-term pregnancy and keeping her job”.

In Cavite are well known stories about pregnant women who have been forced to work even after pleading with the supervisor until 2a.m. It’s not surprising anymore when women working in the ironing section give birth to children with burns on their skin. Some of the stories are certainly apocryphal. They became fear-fueld zones legends. But the abuse of pregnant women in Export Processing Zones is also well documented. The problem is far beyond Cavite. Other methods of sidestepping the costs and responsibilities of employing workers with children are reported throughout the zones. In El Salvador and Honduras the detritus in the zones are littered with empty packets of contraceptives pills that are reportedly passed out on the factory floor. There were reports in the Honduran zones of management forcing employees to have abortion. At some Mexican maquiladoras, women are required to prove they are menstruating through such humiliating practices as monthly sanitary - pad checks. Employees are kept on twenty -eight -day contracts - the length of the average menstrual cycle - making it easy, as soon as a pregnancy comes to light, for the workers to be dismissed.

In some FTZ pregnant workers might be sacked without warning because maternity leave is often non-existent. There is an example in a Sri Lankan zone when a woman was reported to be so terrified of loosing her work after giving birth to a baby that she drowned her newborn child in a toilet. Motherhood has become the scrooge of those zones where employees prefer to avoid paying benefits by assigning employees to a predictable schedule or offering any job security.

Excessive working hours make it difficult for women to both work and care for family members. As an example I would like to talk about Carmelita Alonzo, an employee in Cavite who died, according to her co-workers, “of overwork”. Alonzo, as it it was told to Naomi Klein again and again by groups of workers gathered at the Workers’Assistance Center and by individual workers on one-on - one interview and then described in her book “No Logo” - was a semistress at the V.T. Fashion Factory, sticking clothes for the Gap and Liz Claiborne, among many other labels. All of the workers want Naomi Klein to know this tragedy happened so that she could explain it to “the people in Canada who buy these products.” Carmelita Alozo’s death occurred following a long stretch of overnight shifts during a particularly navy pick season. “There were a lot of products for ship-out and no one was allowed to go home”, recalls Josie, whose denim factory is owned by the same firm as Carmelita’s, and who also faced large orders at the time. “In February, the line leader had overnights almost every night for one week’. Not only had Alonzo been working those shifts. She had a two-hour commute to setback to her family. Suffering from pneumonia - a common illness in factories that are suffocating hot during the day but fill with consideration at night - she asked her manager for time off to recover. She was denied. Alonzo was eventually admitted to hospital, where she died on March 8, International Women’s Day. When Naomi Klein asked a group of workers gathered late one evening around the long, table at the center how they felt about what happened to Carmelita. The answers were confused at first. “Feel? But Carmelita is us.” But then Salvador, a sweet-faced twenty -year-old from a toy factory, said some thing that made all of his co-workers nod in vigorous agreement. “Carmelita died because of working overtime. It is possible to happen to any one of us”. And then Naomi Klein added that “overtime horror stories pour out of the export processing zones, regardless of location: in China, there are documented cases of three-day shifts, when workers are forced to sleep under their machines. Contractors often face heavy financial penalties if they fail to deliver on time, no matter how unreasonable the deadline. In Honduras, when filling out a particularly large order on a tight deadline, factory managers have been reported injecting workers with amphetamines to keep them going on forty -eight - hour marathons.”

The reproductive health of both men and women workers, and their children, may be harmed by exposure to toxic chemicals, heat, noise, overwork and exhaustion. In factories where pregnant workers are allowed to keep their jobs, they may still be required to work in an unsafe environment, although they are often pressured to quit so the employer does not have to pay for maternity leave and benefits required by law. For instance, Runa, who makes clothes for Asda and Tesco, is quoted saying: "My pay is so meager that I cannot afford to keep my child with me. I have sent my five-month-old baby to the village to be cared for by my mother"; Ifat, who works in another factory, said: "I can't feed my children three meals a day"; Rahima Khatun, 21, who works as a sewing machine operator at one Adidas factory, said: “I had my first child last year, but I can’t spend enough time with her as I have to be at work at the factory 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I have no choice. Working overtime is compulsory. My managers are constantly swearing at us and pushing us if we don’t work fast enough. Sometimes the factory does not even pay us for three months at a time.”