-How did
you feel when the plant closed down?
-What they
did to us was an atrocity. To go to your place of work like any other normal
day and find it crawling with security officers, like a militarized zone… it
was a shock. They wouldn’t even allow us to get our things from the lockers.
How could we if we couldn’t go in? I had never seen a company do what
Nestlé did to us. Never.
-Why did
this happen?
-They
committed this abuse against us because we weren’t able to achieve something
that we’d been working towards for a long time, which was to unite the three
unions representing workers of the same company, from the plant located in
San Cristóbal, the one in San Francisco de Macorís, and ours
in Santo Domingo. If we had achieved that unity, this wouldn’t have
happened, or maybe it would’ve, but not in that way. That is why I now call
on our fellow workers at the other two Nestlé plants still operating
to unite fast, because if they don’t, the same thing that happened to us
will happened to them. It is very clear that Nestlé’s goal is to
destroy the unions.
-Have you
had any news from you former fellow workers?
-Just
yesterday one of my fellow workers came to see me. His wife is about to give
birth, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s going crazy. He can’t
find another job, and the money they gave him as severance pay wasn’t even
enough to cover the debts he had. He even asked me for money to buy milk for
his wife, but I can’t help him because I’ve hit bottom. I’ve been looking
for work for two and a half months and I can’t find anything, nothing at
all…
-How is
your family getting by?
-I have
four boys, my wife, my mother, they all depended on my income. Imagine if
you were an employee in a company and, all of a sudden, they fire you
without warning, without giving you any explanation for firing you. What
will your family eat? I’ve reached an age in which finding a job is very
hard. My family is having a really hard time. And to top it all, my wife had
surgery a month ago, and all the money that Nestlé paid me went into
paying the costs of the operation. I don’t know how we’re surviving, based
on sacrifice, on the help of friends. And when you’re a unionist, it’s even
harder to get work, because they check your record in previous jobs, and in
many places they shut the doors on you.
-What is
your opinion of Nestlé?
-I think it
should be thrown out of the country, because it’s a company that’s very
ungrateful to its workers. People with ten and fifteen years in the company,
and suddenly it’s like a hurricane had come and swept everything away,
leaving nothing, in a matter of seconds. They can’t do that.
-What would
you tell Nestlé workers in other parts of the world?
-I would
tell them not to trust Nestlé, because that company has a pretty name
and a pretty image, but in terms of humanity, it’s monstrous, it’s not worth
it. And what it does here in the Dominican Republic, it can do
anywhere else in the world. I would tell them to be alert and to be
prepared. We were thrown out on the street, treated worse than a dog,
because this is no way to treat even an animal. I’d like to tell all the
workers -who to me are still my fellow workers- to be careful, because the
only thing pretty about Nestlé is its name.
