14 Hours Is Not Enough, 9 More Hours!

Hi, my brothers and sisters. I work in a private hospital as a cleaning worker. I’m on the night shift permanently. I work around 14 hours a day and wonder sometimes how I could keep standing after so much working. It must be the affect of the unemployment whip, while we are forced to work restless and exhausted from the best hours of the evening to morning. You can’t even see anything when you doze off at some specific hours in the night. We are often told to be careful by our managers. ‘’Guys, it’s your health that comes first, there are medical wastes around, you might get your hand pricked by an injection and end up with inflammation. So you might pick up HIV or any other dangerous virus.’’ These words come out from his mouth as though this concerns him more than us.

And if a misfortune such as these occurs, it’s time to hear: ‘I had warned you, it’s your carelessness!’ This is what drives me mad. How come can we keep careful when we are barely walking after so many sleepless hours? Our shifts are very long for us, yet our boss thinks it’s not even long enough. So, when it is time to go home and sleep after the night shift, he would dare to say ‘you will get training’ and keep us in the hospital. These so-called ‘trainings’ are just practices that are organized by the boss in order to make us work more. That’s how bosses found the way for more work: call it training. After these ‘trainings’ we barely keep standing with dizziness.

Sisters and brothers, it’s the art of our calloused fingers what beautifies around. It’s our hardworking hands that are sometimes coward sometimes fisted and that produce all goods in the world. Brothers and sisters why are we working under these fatal conditions? Why do we comply with these conditions while we are so close to the risk of dying or becoming disabled because of a work-related accident?

We are working under these conditions, because we are unorganized. Why don’t we come together in order to change our terrible working conditions, whereas we hammer away at boss’s work? Because we are unorganized. Yes, our salvation lies in coming together, organizing and saying “we don’t want to work under these conditions.”