QUITO (AFP) – Ex-employees of a Japanese textile company in Ecuador told of their dire living and working conditions, after the country’s constitutional court ruled the firm kept its staff in a slave-like setting.
Some gave birth to children in unsanitary and overcrowded camps, while others were denied proper medical attention after work-related injuries, according to testimonies given at a news conference in Quito.
Justices last week ordered the company, Furukawa, to pay USD120,000 to each of the 342 victims – a total of around USD41 million. It will also have to make a public apology to them.
As of 2021, Furukawa’s plantations for abaca – a fine plant fibre – covered almost 23,000 hectares spread over three provinces on the Pacific coast, where the majority of the population is black.
“We have been confronting the monster that is Furukawa,” Segundo Ordonez, a 59-year-old farmer, told the meeting at the headquarters of Ecuador’s Ecumenical Human Rights Commission.
