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It's a page straight from Charles Dickens, the only
difference being that there are no ragged children in it. But there are
ragged men and women.
To keep its workers awake while they sew babies' clothes for export to
America, a factory in Taytay, Anvil Ensembles, has hit on a novel idea.
The original one did not prove good enough: that was to have someone go
around rapping with a stick the tables of workers who were dozing off. It
startled them to wakefulness but not for long. They dozed off again soon
afterward.
The new method was more effective. That was to offer the workers clinging
to the last straw of wakefulness a drug called Duromine. The drug is
normally used to fight off fat but the owners of Anvil Ensembles
discovered (how they did so, only they can say) that it is more effective
fighting off sleep. On the face of it, the workers are not forced to take
the drug. But on the pit of it, they have precious little choice. They do
not keep awake, they do not keep their jobs.
But why are the workers sleepy all the time? Are they lazy? Do they not
get enough sleep at home from watching too much TV or staying out late at
night in karaoke bars?
None of the above. They are sleepy because they work sometimes for three
days at a stretch. The garments factory exports clothes on a seasonal
basis. Working on a tight schedule during peak season, it hires people --
though that is not how it treats them -- to sew at record speeds without
sleeping for days. It currently has more than 400 of them, mostly women,
which it is paying at less than half the minimum wage. Supervisors
constantly remind the conscripts that to slip out of consciousness is to
slip out of work. The more imaginative supervisors remind them as well
that their looks and inability to speak English have not prepared them for
an alternative life as prostitutes or overseas Filipino workers.
Thankfully, the workers have found the courage to complain, and their case
is now pending with the Department of Labor. We do not know how many labor
laws Anvil Ensembles has broken, but it cannot be a few. That is quite
apart from other laws, chief of them drug laws, which President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo has been pleased to announce she is enforcing.
It is no small poetic justice that with the publication of this story, the
owners and officials of Anvil Ensembles, who are nowhere to be found, are
probably now having quite a few sleepless nights. But this is not a case
that can be left only to the justice of poets. It calls for the justice of
the courts, too. We can only hope the Department of Labor will see eye to
eye with the Department of Justice on this and make sure the wrongdoers
are haled to court. Indeed, make sure that where they are going, they will
have precious little to do but sleep.
Asleep
We remember that some years ago, there was a story
about a firecrackers factory in Bulacan that was using child labor on
pretty much the same basis as Anvil Ensembles. The kids, some of them
below 10 years old, also worked almost round the clock and got paltry sums
for their pains.
They did get to get some sleep, but on the floor in fetid quarters with
the door padlocked to prevent them from leaving. As one young teen who
escaped (that is the correct word) from this labor camp (that is the
correct word, too) narrated later, they could not sleep anyway from fear
that in the event of a fire-firecrackers are incendiary-they would all
burn to death.
Incredible as it may seem, we still have sweatshops like this. And
probably they are more common than we think, times having gotten harder,
people being more desperate for work and the authorities more willing to
look the other way. The differences may only be in degree. Other factories
may not try to keep their workers awake round the clock for days or keep
children imprisoned inside the work area at night, but they do exploit
them ruthlessly as well. The minimum wage and overtime laws are more
honored in the breach than in the observance.
While other countries are coming out to greet the 21st century, we are
digging in to greet the 19th. All this must suggest that the No. 1 problem
of this country, which seems to have gotten lost in the haze of battle,
real or invented, is neither drugs nor terrorism. It remains old-fashioned
(as in Industrial-Revolution old) grinding poverty. What this country
needs are not more jet fighters and armored vehicles, it is more food and
freedom. What this country needs is not more anti-drug units and czars, it
is more jobs and justice.
You wonder sometimes if government is not walking in its sleep. |
