 So earlier this month factory workers at the Frida LA plant in Topeka, Kansas went viral after they went on strike and Explained just how terrible the working conditions are at this particular factory and the situation It's not necessarily super surprising and I don't think that this is an isolated incident I think that this is happening across the country and we just don't know that this is the case but what they describe here is Absolutely inexcusable and every single person in America should condemn this because this should not be happening So as vice news explains many of the 850 workers at the facility say they work 84 hours a week with no days off Workers are nominally supposed to work eight-hour shifts But because of shortages workers are often forced to add an extra four hours before or after their shifts Workers call these extended shifts Suicides because they say the schedule kills you over time Some workers haven't had a single day off in five months including Saturdays and Sundays Now just to put this into perspective to work 84 hours every single week That is extremely Destructive not just to your physical well-being but to your mental health as well The most that I ever worked in a week was 74 hours. So 10 hours less than these workers here and It was almost like I felt like I was going insane. I almost had a nervous breakdown It was incredibly destructive to my emotional well-being. It was it was grueling But for them to deal with this every single week, I mean, this is It's excruciating now I want to share some stories from the workers before I get to the reason why I'm talking about this story Not just because it's important but because there's an update to the story that I think people should know about the strike has concluded and they did reach an agreement now It's not a good agreement the terms I think are still more beneficial to Frito lay than to the workers But nonetheless, I just really want to put things into perspective for you and explain how bad this situation is So there's a 59 year old Frito lay worker named Mark McCarter who worked at Frito lay since he was 19 years old And he claims that even though he's worked there all this time. He is still forced to work 12-hour shifts. He's required to work 12-hour shifts Seven days a week doesn't get a day off and he says he hasn't gotten a raise in a decade and explains this job wears you down It tires you it makes you mentally exhausted It plays with your mind some of these guys who work 12 hours a day every day are destroying their marriages They're destroying their families. My wife passed away, and I don't have a wife to go home to to say hey, babe I'm only working eight hours tomorrow But a lot of these guys come in with the understanding that they'll be there for eight hours But then they got to call their wives and kids and say guess what it's not eight hours It's 12 hours, and then I have to go back to work at 3 a.m Now part of the reason why these workers at the factory have to work so hard is because of the high turnover rate they have a reputation that's bad and typical for good reason and Because of that people don't really want to work there and when they work there They end up quitting so that leaves the workers who are employed there having to deal with you know in excessive amounts of tasks That's just it's too much for them. They're they're overburdened And on top of that besides that story, which I think is it's gonna be pretty common There's a story from more perfect union, and I don't necessarily know that this is about the Topeka plant But just to kind of show you how bad Frito Leia's to their employees one man named Brandon actually got injured on the job and He shares his experience and this is honestly gut-wrenching Was using the doctor you press the button and it automatically does what it's supposed to do I got electrocuted I was taken to the ER, but the emergency room they took me to was 45 minutes away We pass four hospitals on the way to the hospital They wanted to take me to and the reason it is is because they sign a contract with a certain hospital And a certain network from the very next day after the accident My husband was never the same he was working really hard to even just get up on to the side of the bed Usually he's like hops out of bed and yours of puts his clothes on and he shoves food down his throat And he's out the door, you know in 30 minutes. He was used to it He was trained to do that in the service when I say I was healthy as an ox I was healthy as an ox. We just didn't have any answers. They said he should have been fine But he wasn't I didn't get any time off after the incident. I was I had to call off the next day as a sick day. I Told you I was in pain. I told you it hurts when I walked and it was like, okay You know, are you gonna be here tomorrow? I was a site lead and I know what that entails your leadership of the whole warehouse So if you have to fill in you have to fill in I asked for some type of relief period because I was still obligated to work like picking cases and unloading trucks or Rotating product on a forklift. I asked for a chair that I could probably that I could sit in that would make me more comfortable While I'm doing my office work. They denied it. You're either a hundred percent or you can't work It just felt like they was just trying to push me out Eventually I got an MRI by my primary doctor and he showed that I had two herniated discs in my back And he was like you shouldn't be doing anything. They could only fix it with surgery And my husband still had to work this whole entire time They had to remove two of the discs in my neck because they were bulging into my spinal cord I wasn't getting enough fluid to my brain if I didn't have the surgery the doctor said Any small fall or accident or something like that and I would have been paralyzed from the neck down or dead I still have to have surgery on my lower lumbar spine from the moment that he couldn't work anymore and needed Short-term disability Frito lay abandoned us. I had to file for short-term disability And then long-term disability got approved for a long-term disability, but that was months later So no income coming in They require you to go to the doctor so many times And the doctor has to say that you're in this condition over and over and over But guess what? You don't have any insurance anymore through PepsiCo slash Frito LA because they cut you off I had to pay for that out of pocket too Didn't have the money to do that So guess what I borrowed money or used credit cards or whatever I could I even took money on my kids Had to take from our children to live Now I'm not going to play the full video for you because I really want you to watch the full video from a more perfect union So if you're watching this on youtube, I'll link to it down below Also, I want you to check out Brandon's go fund me to help him fund the surgery that he needs Which obviously is going to be very very expensive uh, but just to kind of give you the TLDR version of that story if you don't want to watch that video um He was injured on the job because of no fault of his own And then they still pressured him after he was electrocuted to show up to work He was then cut off lost his insurance. They abandoned him He decided to sue and after that then Frito LA tried to prove that he wasn't actually injured and was faking it And they began stalking his family taking videos of him and his children all because They're greedy they couldn't admit that the worker that was injured At their plant at their factory It was their fault that they're actually liable This is such a cruel disgusting company And if you can absolutely do not purchase frito lay products Now I say that Knowing that the alternative brands are probably not much better But there has to be some level of accountability When companies treat their workers like this, this is a human rights violation. This is abusive And it shouldn't just be that frito lay factory workers get better working conditions But the individuals responsible for this should be persecuted legally This is abuse. This is borderline torture but The dispute has essentially been resolved and I say that because the strike ended But workers even though they got some Benefits It's really not that great So as maria kramer of the new york times explains hundreds of frito lay employees ratified a contract on saturday Ending a nearly three week strike over forced overtime and long hours that many workers had said pushed them past the point of exhaustion union official said Paul clam a chief shop steward who has worked at the tabeka plant for nine years Said he has once worked three months straight without a day off I missed a lot of time with my children when they were in high school because of the shift that I worked and the hours that I worked He said it's physically draining. Mr. Clems said the new contract guarantees one day off a week for workers Does a way with forcing workers to take the suicide shifts and increase his wages He declined to provide precise numbers because he said he was not authorized to give that information kareena christensen a spokeswoman for the international union declined to provide additional details of the agreement or say how the membership voted One warehouse worker who has been at the plant for roughly two decades said there was more disappointment than happiness with the contract The man who spoke on the condition of anonymity fearful of retaliation from the company I wonder why said that many workers who crossed the picket line or voted to approve the contract did so out of need Quote a lot of people had to vote yes because they were running out of money and didn't have insurance He said so there you have it instead of working 12 hours a day seven days a week They're presumably going to be working eight hours a day Six days a week It's an improvement, but this still obviously isn't enough We need to be changing the terms of the conversation Around work in the united states Get out of this work hours ourselves to death mentality and start focusing on ourselves human development How to make human beings thrive and we should be talking about a three to four day work week not A six day work week as a success But when you are in a late-stage capitalist society Where big money and employers have so much power over their employees and they're afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation. It's just You're going to get situations like this even workers at free to lay who have unions That doesn't solve everything unions are incredibly important And they probably wouldn't have even had this small victory had it not been for their union but still To do this to work themselves to death It's it's borderline torture like i'm trying not to be hyperbolic, but this is totally inexcusable And it's all to produce chips and dip it's uh Disgusting we have this news and on top of that activision blizzard is being sued for rampant sexual discrimination misogyny sexual harassment And their response is basically Trumpian i mean companies are going to continue to behave this way unless you rein them in with legislation This is totally unacceptable