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National Labor Committee Report: Harvest of Shame

National Labor Committee
March 12, 2007

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Harvest of Shame

March 12, 2007

Children in Guatemala harvest and process vegetables and fruit exported to school children in the U.S.

The Legumex agro-industrial plant in Chimaltenango, which shipped over four million pounds of frozen produce to the U.S. last year, resembles a high school in the U.S. in that the majority of its 240 workers are children and teenagers 13 to 17 years old. According to Sonia, a 16-year-old who started working at the Legumex factory when she was 11 or 12, there used to be “twelve year olds, even ten-year-olds, but I think they fired them, because they are too little to work. Plus, the boss is always hiring minors to meet production goals.” The younger children were fired in mid-November, 2006. Maria, herself a 13-year-old who was recently fired—(“they said that I keep cutting myself...”)—explained that the factory managers “only take minors because they can take more advantage of the minors...” In fact, when Maria applied for a job at Legumex: “Those of us who were 13 said we were 13. They told us to come right on in. They gave us our knives...there were four girls that were older and they did not receive them like us because they were coming from another factory that did the same, but they weren’t as easy to exploit. Maybe that’s why they didn’t get the job.”

We also asked Gladis, a 16-year-old worker, why she thought management preferred to hire so many minors. She told us, “The boss has said it’s because we have nothing to do at home, we don’t ask to go see our children like the older women, we don’t have those preoccupations.” Ingrid, a 15-year-old who had to quit the factory after suffering pain in her arm and ribs from the constant repetitive motions, explained that when the manager fires a child worker, they use it as a threat to all the other children. “One time they told a girl, they had fired two girls, so they said, ‘Look here, _____, if you leave, you won’t find work elsewhere, because only here will you find work.’ So they say that like a threat.”

Every worker we spoke with, including during a rare chance meeting with 20 or so Legumex workers when a company bus they were riding on had stopped by the side of the road (it was a used school bus from the United States)—told us the same thing, that “the majority...like, the majority...are 13, 14, 15, 16 years old.” Three 13-year-olds came off the bus to stare at us and see what all the excitement was about.

Despite its appearance and so many young people entering the Legumex compound each morning, it is certainly no high school. It is a sweatshop, where the hours can be grueling. At the same chance meeting with Legumex workers on Saturday, February 24, they told us that “last week” they were required to work daily 14-hour shifts from “7:00 [a.m.] until 9:00 at night.” Usually they work six days a week, but the previous Sunday, February 18, they had been forced to work.

Working a 14-hour shift from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and two 9 ½ hour shifts on Saturday and Sunday (from 7:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.) would put the young workers at the factory 89 hours that week, while actually working 83 ¾ hours, after accounting for a 15-minute morning break and 30 minutes for lunch each day. It could even get worse, since sometimes the workers were told to report an hour earlier, at 6:00 a.m.

The norm is to work a 12-hour shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday, with an 11-hour shift, to 6:00 p.m., on Friday and getting out earlier, at 4:30 p.m., on Saturday. Even these lighter hours still put the workers at the factory for 68 ½ hours while actually working 64 hours.

It’s a long day for the children and teenagers. When they get out at 7:00 p.m., most don’t get home until 8:00 or 8:30 p.m., since it’s a 45 minute bus ride to their neighborhoods, and then they still have to walk home. Almost all the workers told us they try to get to sleep by 10:30 p.m., since they have to be up at 4:30 a.m. to wash and prepare their food before walking out the door at 5:30 a.m. Most days, the children get up in the dark and return home in the dark, rarely seeing the light of day. The child workers are getting at most six hours of sleep. In interview after interview, the young workers told us they were routinely at the factory over 67.65 hours a week, 98 hours a week, 72 hours a week, 68 hours, 66 hours, 65 ½ hours...

The Legumex factory is not a nice place. Thirteen-year-old Maria described what it’s like working there:

“They treat you badly: They don’t let you leave early. You don’t get permission to use the bathroom. If you want water, you have to bring it or drink from the tap. Another thing, if you get cut, they just give you some cotton. At times they tell you to keep working, that they can’t do anything for you because they don’t have a first aid kit, so keep working. If you get sick, you have to go to work. For example, if you have a fever, you have to go to work because they don’t let you be absent even one day or they will deduct the bonus from your pay. They don’t give benefits like other factories. You only get a half hour for lunch, 15 minutes for a snack with the threat that if you don’t fill eight boxes you can’t have lunch or a snack.... They don’t pay overtime hours... You cut yourself too much... It feels terrible, you have to be standing all day. You get very tired and when you stop for a bit because you’re tired, that’s when they tell you, ‘You have to work harder, the work is for today and not for tomorrow,’ they say, and ‘That is why you get paid.’ ...If all the trucks have not left from 6:30 [a.m.] to 12:30 p.m. they do not give you permission to go to the bathroom. ‘No, not now. No permission until 12:00 p.m., until 9:00 at night.’ If all four trucks have not left, you don’t get permission.”

During working hours, the child workers are not allowed to talk to each other, “because they say, ‘You are not here to fool around, you are here to work, so you better hurry. Otherwise we will fire you.’ So you hurry with the threat of being fired.”

“Besides being robbed of your fifteen days wage in front of you, they rob you more by not paying sick days. They always do that when someone gets sick. You have to be there, even if you are sick, the supervisor says ‘even if you have your intestines hanging out, you have to keep working because today we need to produce what we produce every day.'”

Sixteen-year-old Sonia concurs: “They pressure a lot. They scream a lot. They ask for a quantity they are not able to meet.” Gladis relates: "Yes, they scream at us. ‘Hurry up! If you want to leave at 5:00 or 5:30 you have to hurry. If not you’ll leave at 7:00 or 8:00.” Ingrid had the same experience: “They yelled at us, they said, ‘Hurry, girls!’ They never stopped screaming.”

Chimaltenango, where the Legumex factory is located, is in the highlands, surrounded by towering volcanoes, and it is much colder than in much of Guatemala. In the mornings and evenings you definitely need a jacket.

“The factory is cold,” explains Maria. “There is not any sunshine. It’s cold! There is one cold room [where they freeze the vegetables and fruit] here. There is another one behind. All that creates a lot of cold and while you do your work, you start feeling feverish.” “Really cold,” says Ingrid. “They don’t care that it’s cold. They take away our sweatshirts at 9:00 a.m. when we go out for a snack. They take it at 9:00 a.m. and they say if we don’t take it off, they will take them off and throw them out wherever. Or they say, ‘We will give them away.’ They say the sweatshirts make us sleepy, because of the sweatshirt. But it’s cold, and they [the supervisors] have sweatshirts, everything, but we have to, you have to go with nothing. ‘You are too heavily clothed, take off your sweatshirt. I don’t care,’ [they say]. But all day long, the supervisors walk around in sweatshirts.”

Other workers also explained that although the factory is cold, “they don’t let us in with any sweaters, because the supervisor says they make lint.” Due to the cold temperatures they have to work in, the workers say, “Just about everyone gets grippe, stomach aches and coughs...headaches.”

The Legumex factory is divided into two departments. In the preparation section, which always operates on a day shift, the vegetables and fruit are cut, sorted and inspected. It is in the processing department that the produce is pre-cooked, frozen and put in sealed boxes for shipment. In processing, the workers alternate their shifts, working a day shift one week, from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and then switching to a 14-hour night shift the following week, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. During the day shift, they are at the factory at least 60 hours a week, while the night shift is at the factory 84 hours. Such a rapidly changing schedule does not allow the workers to adjust their eating or sleeping habits, leaving them tired, disoriented and often ill.

We were told that workers sometimes faint from exhaustion. Fifteen-year-old Ana, who works such a night shift along with two other minors, explained: “Yes. Sometimes like when you have a headache, and you tell the supervisor...and they don’t say anything... A little while ago my throat hurt because of the cold, and every time I coughed bits of blood came up, and I said to her...well, since the supervisor wasn’t there, I walked over to see her, and called her, and she went nuts, and she told me that if I was absent, they would suspend me for another day.” “It’s cold,” Ana says. And you are “standing up all night... Those of us who are fast have to do it really fast. If not, then they chastise us... One feels really tired, wanting to sleep.” All night long, Ana stands next to a conveyer belt, in space enough to use just one arm, constantly spreading out the cut vegetables so they cook evenly.

Mandatory production goals at the Legumex factory can be wildly excessive. For example, Sonia explained that, “There was one day when we had to produce 400 pounds [of broccoli] in one day, and by midday I only had 150 pounds, so they were asking for another 250 pounds from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. and we ended up leaving around 8:30 p.m. That was the 17th of this month [February]." Working a 12 ¾ hour shift, she had to process 35 heads of broccoli every hour, one every 1.7 minutes. The pace is furious, typically requiring about 97 operations—34 cuts with the knife and another 63 operations with the fingers—to break each broccoli into bite-sized florets. In one day, this 16-year-old girl would repeat the same motions 43,630 times! To make matters worse, a month earlier management had lowered the piece rate from 0.15 quetzales (1.9 cents U.S.) per pound of processed broccoli to just 0.12 quetzales (1.6 cents). The workers are going backward at the Legumex plant. When you are processing 450 pounds of broccoli a day, this cut in the piece rate really matters. It dropped Sonia’s piece rate wages from $8.77 for the day to $7.01, which amounts to a loss of $1.76 a day. This is a huge loss for these poor workers.

In a recent 13-day period, Sonia processed 1,228 pounds of broccoli and 7,766 pounds of melon.

At the end of the shift, “You feel a lack of motivation,” she explains, “You get home and want to do nothing. You just want to go to bed because your hands hurt, your back...your feet, of course.”

The girls say that processing melons is the worst. Again, Sonia explains: “When we do melon, nobody goes in with a sweater... The water rises by an inch...and it’s even more damp because once the water gets in [into your sneakers] you have to walk around with wet shoes [for 12 hours]... Sometimes your feet start splitting and bleeding, getting infected from all the stuff you throw around. The ones that are not strong get infections.”

Gladis agrees that melon is harder than anything else “because you have to split it and clean out the inside very well, and then make balls and balls all day long with your hands.” The factory floor is “damp, always soaked. It is never dry... because every so often they put disinfectant down. They pour it on... Your feet can’t bear it, from standing all day. Also your back, sometimes your back hurts.” The small balls of melon that the girls scrape out all day long are frozen and sent to the U.S.

A former supervisor confirmed the harsh treatment the workers face. “I worked there as an assistant supervisor, and the boss there used to chastise me because I didn’t rush the girls... He warned me and said to me... ‘Look, you have to demand it of the girls, and if they don’t listen to you, pull their ears.’ They only make demands there, but they don’t want to comply with the requisites of the minimum wage...”

The Legumex workers cannot speak, use the bathroom, or drink water without permission.

Ingrid explains: “They don’t give permission. You have to beg for permission [to use the bathroom]... Only during breaks and lunch are we free to do so.” Every worker we spoke with confirmed this, including the girls on the company bus who, when asked if they could freely use the bathroom shouted “Nooo! No. Only at lunchtime and snack time.” Also, there is no toilet paper. Gladis told us, “You have to bring your own toilet paper.” Often there is no soap and there are never towels to dry your hands.

Nor does the factory provide clean drinking water. The workers must either bring their own drinking water or drink from the tap in the factory, which is dangerous, as tap water in Guatemala is not potable.

“We can’t talk,” the girls told us. “We are not allowed to talk. If we talk, they scold us.” “They’d scold you,” Ana says, “if they catch you talking.” Gladis agrees. “No you can’t [speak]. They don’t let you.” Asked why, she says, “I don’t know. If we talk, we won’t hurry.”

The more we spoke with the workers, the clearer it became that the Legumex factory is violating every single labor law in Guatemala, not to mention a similar total disregard for the core internationally recognized worker rights standards.

Illegally, Legumex workers are not inscribed in the national Social Security Institute, which means they do not have health insurance. Sick days are not allowed, and wages are docked for any time missed. Workers are denied their legal 15 days of annual paid vacation, and are routinely denied statutory national holidays off with pay.

Not a single worker at the Legumex factory is paid the legal minimum wage or anywhere near the proper overtime pay due them.

As a result, some workers are earning less than half of the wages owed them.

Fifteen year old Ana is among the best workers at the Legumex factory. She is serious, fast and attends to details. She also works long hours in the processing department alternating from a day shift one week to a night shift the following week. On average, she is at the factory six days and 72 hours a week, while working 67 ½ hours, or 11 ¼ hours a day. Ana should have earned $11.38 a day—$7.84 for the regular eight hours paid at the legal minimum wage of 98 cents an hour and $3.54 for the 3 ¼ hours of overtime paid at the mandatory $1.09-per-hour premium. Instead, she was paid at most $8.49 to $8.99 per day meaning she was being shortchanged of 21 to 25 percent of the wages legally due her. For the typical 15 or 16-day period, this adds up to a loss of $31.06 to $37.56, which is an enormous amount of money for a worker being paid below even the very modest 98-cent-an-hour minimum wage.

The workers are paid semi-monthly at the Legumex plant. Ana should have earned $147.94 for the 13 or 14 days of work, but she received only $110.39 to $116.88.

Sonia, who is just 16 years old, works in the preparation department where she too is among the very best workers. She produces a lot and with real quality. It is not uncommon for Sonia and her coworkers to work a 12-hour shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., six days a week. Sometimes they are kept to 8:30 p.m. and also have to work on Sunday. This puts them at the factory 72 to 88 hours a week.

More common, however, is to put in an 11 ½-hour shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., six days a week. This puts the workers at the factory 69 hours a week while working 64 ½ hours, which includes 16 ½ hours of overtime on top of the regular 48 hours of work. Sonia should have been earning $10.84 a day, $65 a week and $140.83 for the semi-monthly pay period. Instead, she earned as little as $77.92 and a high of $116.88 per pay period. Most often, she earned $103.90, or $7.99 a day, which is $2.85 less than what she was legally owed.

Sonia, among the fastest workers, is, like Ana, being shortchanged of 26 percent of the wages legally due her. The $2.85 she is being underpaid is for her, and the other poor workers, an enormous amount of money amounting to the loss of three hours of regular wages each day.

But Ana and Sonia represent the “good news.” It is all downhill from here.

Sixteen year old Gladis often works from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00, or even 10:00 p.m., 15 to 16 hours a day. More common is to work from 6:45 a.m. to 6:30 at night, while being let out “early” some evenings at 5:30 p.m. An easy week for Gladis would be to work four nights to 5:30 p.m. and just two to 6:30 p.m.; this puts her at the factory 68 hours a week while working 63 ½ hours. She should be earning $47.01 for the regular 48 hours and another $16.90 for the 15 ½ hours of overtime, which must be paid at $1.09 per hour. Instead, she was paid just $66.62 to $71.04 for the semi-monthly pay period, which would include 13 to 14 work days. This means Gladis is being underpaid of just about half of the legal wages due her.

We had a long meeting with about a dozen Legumex workers who walked us through the hours they worked and what they were paid.

First, management defined the “regular” workday as being from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., or a 10 ¼-hour shift after subtracting the half hour for lunch and the fifteen-minute morning break. Also, the daily base wage is set at just 34.20 quetzales, or $4.44, which puts their minimum at just 43 cents an hour. Of course, this is all illegal. By law the regular workday is eight hours, and must be paid at the legal minimum wage of 98 cents per hour. All overtime—in this case the 2 ¼ hours improperly classified as regular time—must be paid at $1.09 per hour. Legally, for a 10 ¼-hour shift, the workers are owed $7.84 for the right regular hours and $2.45 for the 2 ¼ hours of overtime for a total of $10.29—and not the $4.44 paid by Legumex.

Factory management also told the workers that for the three hours of overtime between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. they would be paid just six quetzales, or 78 cents, which would come to an overtime rate of 26 cents an hour, which is less than one quarter of the legal overtime premium of $1.09.

If workers want to climb above these illegally low wage rates, they would have to rely upon a piece rate tied to excessively high production goals.

The norm for this group of workers from the preparation department was to work an 11-hour shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and a 10 ½ -hour shift on Saturday, to 5:30 p.m. This would put them at the factory 65 ½ hours a week while actually working 61 hours. The least hours they ever worked were from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. five days and from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday. This schedule would put them at the factory 62 ½ hours a week while working 58 hours. Even with this light schedule, the workers should be earning $57.91 a week—$47.01 for the regular 48 hours and $10.90 for the 10 hours of overtime. This comes to $9.65 a day, or $1.00 an hour for the 9.66 hours of work.

If the workers “killed” themselves to meet their high production goals, they could earn at most 50 to 60 quetzales a day ($6.49 to $7.79, or 67 cents to 81 cents) an hour. So even under the best case scenario, when the workers are racing and able to meeting their high production goals, they are still being underpaid by 19 to 33 percent of the wages legally due them. They should be earning at least $1.00 an hour and not the 67 cents to 81 cents they earn on a good day.

Thirteen year old Maria said she was working from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30, 9:00 and 9:30 p.m., often seven days a week. This was in late September through November 2006, when she could be at the factory 98 to 105 hours a week. At the low end, she worked four 14-hour shifts from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., two 11-hour shifts to 5:30 p.m. and one 10-hour shift ending at 4:30 p.m. Under this “light” schedule, Maria was at the factory 88 hours a week while actually working 82 ¾ hours, including 34 ¾ hours of overtime. For the week, she should have earned $84.89, or $12.13 a day, and $1.03 an hour.

But for little Maria it did not work like this. The most she ever earned was 450 Quetzales for a full month, or $58.44, which is less than 70 percent of what she was legally owed for one week’s work. While Maria was legally owed $12.13 a day, she was actually earning just $2.16, or less than 20 percent of what she was due.

Fifteen year old Ingrid did not fare much better. Typically she worked an 11 ½-hour shift from 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., six days a week. However, if she worked fast and was very lucky, she could get out at 5:30 p.m. on Friday and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. Under this schedule she was at the factory 66 hours a week while actually working 61 ½ hours. Including the 13 ½ hours of mandatory overtime, Ingrid should have earned $61.73 a week—$47.01 for the regular 48 hours and $14.72 for the overtime. For the day she should have earned $10.29 or $1.00 an hour.

Instead, for the semi-monthly pay periods all Ingrid earned was Q507, Q513, or at most 547.70 quetzales, or $65.84, $66.66, and $71.06. She was being paid just 49 cents to 53 cents an hour and not the $1.00-an-hour wage she was legally owed. Ingrid was earning just about half of her proper wages.

In many ways, the young workers at Legumex are going backwards. We already know that the plant manager, Elvis Barrios, recently cut the piece rate for cutting up broccoli. Management is also now deducting for the 15-minute morning break and the half-hour lunch. Fifteen-year-old Ana told us: “Before, they didn’t deduct lunch, but now they deduct it. Before, they paid that half hour, but now no. They told us, now they were going to deduct lunch and the snack for those who agreed, and that those who disagreed could go.”

And how is this for the Christmas spirit: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are paid national holidays in Guatemala. Not so at the Legumex factory, where the workers were forced to toil on Christmas Eve. They did get Christmas Day off—unpaid! Ana also told us this: “And when we had our [Christmas] party for the whole plant, and according to [what we thought] they wouldn’t deduct it, but they deducted that, too.”

It is not that the workers do not know that they are being cheated of their proper wage. Again, Ana: “Yes—because we companeras who are working days and nights, we’re working more hours than those who are working just days. They’d have to pay us 1,200 quetzales ($155.84) or 1,100 quetzales ($142.86), but that’s not how it is.” We asked the young girls we met from the company bus what would happen if they asked the boss for their proper overtime wages? The girls shouted all at once: “They don’t let us. They’d fire us!” In fact, on Friday, February 23, a group of workers were fired for daring to ask that their wages be paid on time. Gladis explained it to us: “Yes, they were fired because a girl was saying they weren’t going to pay the Friday and they got bothered—they were going to strike [demonstrate] and the boss arrived and fired them right away, some he suspended until this Thursday. He supposedly grabbed one girl by the hair because she answered him back.” Sonia also knew what happened: “Someone told them they weren’t going to get paid. They got angry and went out to demand their pay and all that, but when they left and re-entered to speak with the boss, he mistreated them, he treated them like men, the supervisors said some terrible things, that they were almost crying and because of them we also got scolded because they didn’t want us to do the same thing.”

As 13-year-old Maria explained, “the workers have no rights, that we have to lie and cover up all the abuse if we are questioned by anyone. ‘If you don’t want to do overtime,’ they told you, ‘you are going to be fired,’ and that everything they ask us we need to say, ‘Yes!’ That we have to right to go to the bathroom, and that we have the right to get water, everything a person asks, we have to say, ‘Yes!’ and, not to mention, they don’t pays us overtime and don’t do anything for us.” Ana said the same: “But what they do there is hide everything. They chastise us. On the day shift, they don’t let the workers go to the bathroom. Us, they scream at us. If what they [the North American companies] are saying is that there they treat you well—it’s not like that.”

We asked the girls if the Guatemalan Ministry of Labor ever helped them, even one time, and the resounding response was “No!”

Why is it that the North American buyers—who imported more than four million pounds of frozen vegetables and fruit from the Legumex factory last year—could not find such serious violations and work with their contractor to bring the Legumex factory into compliance with Guatemalan law?

When we asked if North Americans ever come into the factory, the girls responded “Yes, Uh huh.” Do they talk to the workers? “No, they just come look. Look at the production.” How often, “like every month.”

These workers are in a trap, stripped of their rights, isolated and with no exit.

We asked 16-year-old Gladis if she had a bike. “I don’t know how to ride a bike,” she said. “I don’t have one.” Basically, the young teenage workers at Legumex get up in the dark each day and then return home after work in the dark. This goes on at least six days a week. When we asked 13-year-old Maria if she ever played, she said: “No. There was no time, just work and work.” When we said to Ana, “So, you are fifteen years old. What do you do for fun?” “Right now,” Ana responded, “I can’t really fool around, or play,” and she burst into tears.

It does not have to be this way. The young workers’ demands are so modest.

The girls from the bus said, “They should pay us our overtime. They should let us out early...enter at 7:00 [a.m.] and leave at 5:00 [p.m.]..that they should pay us a good [the legal] wage…”

Ana said that the U.S. companies… “should talk with the factory because it’s too much what they make us do and they don’t pay us the wage. In Preparation, a lot of boxes come in and they don’t pay us for them. And to fire people who treat us badly. And to allow us to study.”

Ingrid appeals, “They should pay the minimum wage, that girls like me leave earlier, on time, at 4:00 p.m., you’re tired and you can’t go on, so I say, that they leave at 4 or 5 p.m. and that they not allow them to leave at 11:00 p.m. because they are little girls. And I know that if I get tired, and I’m 15, and they are 13 or 14—they must be more tired than me.”

After explaining that President Bush was visiting Chimaltenango to laud CAFTA and praise factory conditions and wages, two girls said they would love the opportunity to meet and speak with him. “I would tell him,” Sonia said, “that it’s all a lie. Well at least I would tell how it’s all a lie, what they have told him is not true, they don’t give us benefits, paid vacations, sick days, that it’s all a lie because we are not paid well. I would love to meet him and speak to him and explain things.”

Thirteen-year-old Maria said, “I would like to tell him that everything people told him are lies, that the girls here in Guatemala are treated badly if we don’t get the job done, we would get hit if is was possible. They take away our wages, it is not truthful for him to come here and say we are treated well at the factories because that is not true. If he took one day to be like a Guatemalan and work in an export factory, he would see all that he has been told is like being in a rose garden and it’s not like that in Guatemala.”

There may be a way out of the trap. Maria may be just 13 years old, but she is definitely very smart. Maria may never have even heard the word ‘union’ before, but she knows what is going on and what will be needed to fix things.

Asked if it would help if young people in the U.S. stood up for the rights of the young workers at the Legumex factory, Maria responded, “I think so. They would be giving their support to the young workers of Tierra Fria/Legumex because we do not have the confidence, the young people can help in some way, maybe we could get treated a little better, maybe five minutes of rest, but here we work all day and only get lunch and a snack. If they let us go to the bathroom, well we don’t get permission because they say we will go talk in the bathroom or we will look in the mirror, though there is no mirror.”

It would help also, “because, like they say, all of us together, it can be done. If ten people get up and the rest don’t, then nobody will listen, but if everyone got up, if the whole factory stood up together, then they would have to listen, ‘you told us we would get out at 5:30 p.m.,’ but since only one complains, ‘look, it’s 8:30 p.m., you said we would leave at 5:30 p.m.,’ then, of course, they don’t listen to one. But if the whole group were to come, then yes.”

Maria and the other child and teenage workers at the Legumex factory are asking for the help of children and teenagers in the U.S. who eat the vegetables and fruits harvested and processed by the children of Guatemala.

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