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Sleepless in Sweatshop
Garment workers drugged to stay awake for 3 days
by Luige del Puerto and Rommel Lalata
from Philippine Daily Inquirer
July 3, 2003
72-hour shifts
In the uncertain world of subcontracted companies, work is normally seasonal and even then comes in fits and starts, wages below par, and working conditions hardly improved from those of a century ago.
For Anvil Ensembles, a garments factory in the town of Taytay, near Manila, which makes baby clothes for North American companies, business usually blows in by September. A few weeks before then, the company sends notice to workers who have been idled for a month or two to report to work because job orders are coming in and there are quotas to be met.
For these high-speed sewers and machine operators, mostly women, that means occasionally putting in 48- or 72-hour work shifts whenever management orders the factory gates shut and locked until Saturday or Sunday morning. Everyone understands that there will be no going home.
From then on, there is no stopping the whirr of high-speed sewing machines that drowns out the chatter and the banter managed during slower days. But when workers are on their second, or third, consecutive all-nighter, being unable to talk to one another is the least of their worries. Keeping awake is.
Rouel Quitoriano was one of those whose job it was to prevent missing production schedules and shipment deadlines, lest the company end up paying fines to principal contractors.
As supervisor of the workers at the annex, Quitoriano had to make sure that no one fell asleep on the job.
These were the owner's specific instructions on how the diminutive supervisor (he stands barely five feet tall) could keep workers from dr ...