“You need the work,” one woman said, “so you shut your mouth.” #MeToo may have helped change the landscape for women in Hollywood and in the boardroom, but cleaners, secretaries and supermarket workers who have suffered sexual violence at work say it has yet to do much for them.
Yasmina Tellal, 42, spent six years picking and packing fruit and vegetables in the south of France.
“From the start” her bosses “established a system of fear”, she told AFP. “They would come to kiss us during breaks, touch us and try to make us take 300 euros ($350) to sleep with them.
“One day while I was in the car with my supervisor, he stopped at a rest area, grabbed my hand and placed it on his thing,” she said, struggling to get the words out, even a decade on.
Tellal arrived in France from Spain in 2011 with a promise of work through a Spanish temp agency. She thought she was getting a one-year contract at the French minimum wage — around 1,800 euros per month — with accommodation and meals provided.
But that is not how it turned out. “I was paid around 400 euros, sometimes less. I had to figure out the rent on my own, and working conditions were inhumane,” she said.
“When you don’t have money, you’re trapped, forced to stay and keep quiet,” she said. Then her body began to give.
The dizziness and paralysis started in 2015. Doctors diagnosed multiple sclerosis, which she puts down to the stress and trauma.
“They ruined my life,” Moroccan-born Tellal told AFP. But she used her anger to...
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