Business (Not) As Usual

What would you do if your employer refused to pay you wages for one month, two months, then three months? For doña Alba Torres and 5 other of her co-workers this wasn’t merely a hypothetical question but a very present and unfair reality. Like many senior citizens in society, doña Alba‘s job security was precarious at best. For 16 years she worked at the janitorial company SIMAT laboring away without ever receiving various legally mandated employment benefits such as over time and an education bonus for individuals with children in school.

For every sick day she took they would deduce almost triple the amount she would earn in one day. Her employers would look for any reason, such as charging her for her uniform, to reduce her already meager $130 monthly salary. “I understand a social security tax, but I wasn’t receiving any of the benefits!” she protested.  Another affected worker shared, “We are poor people and we are not going to use this money to buy luxurious things. We need this money to survive.”  
 
In an ironic twist to the story, SIMAT was contracting their services to the Ministry of Labor, an institution responsible for defending and guaranteeing the protection of labor rights for all Hondurans 

Not a stranger to working with companies with a poor record of respecting their employees labor rights and known for having an ear to the ground to the plight of janitorial workers in the city, the Labor Project decided it was time to act when Project  training lawyer  talked with doña Alba through one of the mobile trainings.

For six months, journalists and lawyers from the AJS-supported Labor Project had been putting pressure on the company’s to change its illegal practices by advocating for the payment of worker benefits for people like doña Alba. “We had notified the Secretary of Labor of several infractions SIMAT had been committing, but this was the last straw for them,” explained AJS-supported Labor Project lawyer, Felix.  The company’s failure to pay three month’s worth of salaries to these six workers assigned to their very own building was enough to have the Secretary of Labor cancel their contract with SIMAT, sending a message loud and clear to the public: violating workers’ rights is not tolerated as business as usual.  
 
“We are happy because finally, justice is being done,” stated one of the affected janitorial employees.  
 
Thanks to the persistent efforts of the Labor Rights team and the cooperation of the Secretary of Labor, the work of respecting labor rights in Honduras is being advanced and justice is being done for thousands of people like doña Alba. .  

Postscript
While labor-rights violating SIMAT lost out when the Ministry of Labor cancelled their contract, the poor women who had worked for them did not. Most of these women were re-hired directly by the Ministry of Labor. Claudia Fortín, one of the cleaning women who worked for SIMAT and now works directly for the Ministry of Labor, says they now receive the full wages and benefits the law requires. "They even celebrated my birthday, and gave us gift baskets at Christmas," she says.

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