By Thar Gyi - Jun 07, 2025

#Letter

The toilet conditions are terrible at Myanmar QT, a label sticker manufacturing factory located on Industry Road 9, Shwepyithar Industrial Zone 1.

There are only two toilets in the factory. The total number of workers is fewer than 60. The factory has two floors. Previously, both floors used the same shared toilet space with no gender separation. The upper floor toilet has leaking water, a non-functioning flush, and broken doors. Because of that, no one uses the upper floor anymore, and workers—both male and female—now share two gender-separated toilets in the yard below. That arrangement was working fine.

Recently, during an audit visit, someone raised the issue of poor toilet conditions. The factory responded that female workers should go upstairs and that the upper toilet would be fixed. But whether they’ll actually repair it is still unclear.

Among the three toilet rooms available, one has leaking water, another has puddles on the floor up to our ankle, and the last one is unusable because the locker is broken. Female workers have continued using the downstairs toilets as before because of this.

However, a female worker who used the male toilet was secretly photographed by security and reported to HR. HR then said that her pay would be docked.

Every factory should have a cleaning staff. We used to have one too, but after the cleaning lady left, the factory never hired a replacement.

Now it’s the staff—including us—who have to clean the yard, pull grass, and take care of general cleanliness. But our job descriptions never said anything about cleaning. We were hired to do the work specific to our departments.

Now they’re even making us clean the overflowing toilets. If we don’t, HR says they’ll cut our pay.

We reported the issue to the WCC (Workplace Coordination Committee), and they brought it up with HR.

In response, HR instructed us to mop up the flooded toilet room and scoop water manually to flush it because the flush doesn’t work.

The current HR officer used to be a interpreter and working as a HR unofficially with understanding. They said we could voice concerns and promised to resolve issues.

As for our wage negotiations, WCC proposed a daily wage of 10,000 kyats, but they only raised it by 2,000, bringing it to just 8,800 kyats. We also requested an OT raise to 2,200 kyats per hour, but it was only increased by 200, which currently is 2,000 kyats.

The wage they deducted is more than the wage they raised for us.  During the audit visit, they promised to improve things for everyone. But now they’re threatening to deduct wages. They cut 5,000 kyats per incident. What we want is simple: if the upstairs toilet is unusable, let us continue using the downstairs toilets without penalty. We just want understanding.

Using authority to deduct pay unfairly is not okay.