Visit to the house of a factory worker
| The garment worker's family. |
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After this we went to one of the children’s houses. This was the house of a better-off factory worker because both the parents of the children worked. The children came and asked to sit down on a mat on the floor. They told us that their mother was just coming home from the factory to talk with us. We had a look around the house. It was made up of three small rooms. One of them was a sitting room/ bedroom. The others were the kitchen and a bathroom. There was a toilet outside which was shared by 5 houses. The rooms were all very small indeed. The mother told us that the government had set a minimum wage for factory workers but she only received about one-third of her minimum wage. Plus she was forced to work overtime and was rarely paid for it. Often she had worked 2–5 hours extra and only been paid for one.
‘She sews pockets onto trousers for ten hours a day’
She doesn’t know what to do because she needs more money and better working conditions but there is no way for her to get it. They have had lawyers come round and talk to the boss but nothing ever changes. She has tried to organise a strike but if she does it is possible that she and lots of others will lose their jobs and/or the factory will have to shut down. The woman’s job is to sew the pockets onto trousers. She does this same thing for over ten hours a day. Her working day is legally ten hours but she often works much more than this. When she arrives home after work she would immediately have to cook the dinner for her whole family.
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