Testimonio

Hi, my name is Sophie and I'm 8 years old.

I'm the 3rd daughter of my family and I work in a cotton fabric since I was 5 years old. All my family works there. My mother press, my father transports the materials and my sister and I help with machines and special tasks.

We work in the fabric in normal days about 12 or 14 hours a day. With extra time required during busy periods. Somedays in my mealtime I have to clean machines. I arrive home hungry and tired every day.

The fabric where I work is depressing, dusty, humid and with a reheated atmosphere.

In the fabric, most of the children are barefoot, the workers are sickly, quite skinny and in very bad hygienic conditions. Some people says that there isn't enough oxygen. Most of workers are women and children. Everyday about 50 workers of 300 can't come because they fell really bad.

I earn less money than the rest of my family, three shillings. My mother doesn't earn much more.

I don't like go to the fabric when something wrong has happened. Because the boss treat children very bad, he has hit me sometimes, I think they can't do that but I can't complain because I don't want to lose this work.

Also, some of my mother's partners has had health problems because of the spun in damp of the cotton thread. They suffered pneumonia. Additionally, the air is full of dust, which lead to chest and lung diseases. In my case, the loud noise by machines has damaged my hearing. But, the worst thing is that in manufactured fabrics people are in contact with high levels of phosphorus, and that makes their teeth going bad. Some children died because of excessive inhalation of phosphorus!

As I said, I'm the 3rd daughter, but I only have a sister. That's caused because my brother dead in an accident, he was forced to crawl into dangerous, unguarded machinery which led to his dead. And this tasks continue being children's task.

But, at home the things don't improve.

Most of the money we earn go to food. Sometimes bread, soups and in special events, meat. We share our house with another family. There is one bed for each family. The other family works in an iron fabric and they also have very bad conditions. One thing that I don't like about my house is the niff of the neighborhood, we don't have sewage system.

The reason of this letter is the need of the workers to have a decent life, with a decent salary, decent conditions and security for their children.