Good afternoon.
First of all, you have to understand that Canada is negotiating a free trade agreement with the Porfirio Lobo Sosa regime. That treaty, that regime, is violating people's human rights and their labour rights.
I'd like to talk about the Gildan Activewear's practices as well. The company is violating labour standards, recognized standards. The shifts are far too long and include night shifts. Gildan Activewear has 11½-hour shifts on average, both day shifts and night shifts. These are flagrant violations of national labour standards. Gildan Activewear is a Canadian company. It was criticized by employees for violating labour rights.
There are huge health and safety problems in the workplace. Workers are working in non-ergonomic work stations. The company requires its workers to make excessive physical efforts and imposes production targets of over 500 pieces of clothing per day. This piecework is excessive. The workers, the women who work for Gildan, with our support filed a grievance or complaint about Gildan Activewear and brought this problem to the attention of the international community. The workers' health problems are the direct effect of the work situation. Workstations, as I said, are not ergonomic, and complaints were made in 2008. Since that time, the length of shifts has only gone up. In fact, the women who work for Gildan now have to work six days a week, 70 hours a week. It's a difficult situation for these women who work for Gildan Activewear.
It goes beyond the standards. We made a complaint against Gildan Activewear. Gildan Activewear imposes work conditions without any study or concern about the potential effect of those conditions. They are thereby jeopardizing the health and safety of the women who work for them. The company has increased the length of the workday and has increased production targets. Basically, two people are doing the work of three. In short, we've been able to see for ourselves that 92% of the women who work for Gildan are suffering from musculoskeletal problems--in other words, problems with muscles, tendons, and joints. They have problems with all this. Many of them have two or three illnesses, occupational illnesses, at the same time. Despite complaints to the labour department, this situation continues.
We don't understand how the company is able to get away with this. Workers don't even have time to brush their hair, or they can't brush their own hair because their shoulders are so sore. We've made complaints nationally without any success, and that's why we've brought our complaints to the international stage.
We are calling for the international community to insist on Honduras enforcing its own human rights standards in legislation and its labour standards, and that Honduras require Gildan Activewear to comply with our legislation. We complained to the FLA Friday of last week. They have 40 days to respond to our complaint. They're going to have to tell us within 40 days if they can solve the problem with Gildan Activewear.
The company will have to either solve the problem or compensate workers who were injured in the workplace.