February 18, 2015
After our first night in a real bed for a while, all I can say is, hurray for mattresses! Alberth picked us up at the top of the hill and we went to his house for the day. They have four bedrooms, one for each of the two grown sons in university, one for Albert & Magdalena and one for Alberth’s 87-year-old grandmother, who also lives with them. This morning, Alberth’s mother came in wearing a toddler on her back. Later on, two nieces on vacation from school arrived to spend the day in one of the bedrooms playing and listening to music. With us on the couch in the living room using our laptops, and the artisans popping in to speak to Alberth, it was Grand Central Station all day.
I was engaged nearly all day in financial tasks for the business. After paying our mortgage online (yayyy!), I tried unsuccessfully to download a repaired file from QuickBooks which I had received a week previously. I was on the phone nearly all day (at 20 cents per minute, this is going to be a big expense!) trying to download this file. Intuit on January 14 said it would take three days. It took more than 30 days. Guess what, my friends—the case had been closed, the file disappeared and I had to upload it to them again to wait another putative 3 days for it to be fixed. QuickBooks—now there’s an oxymoron. I can only hope it won’t take another 30 days, the case closed and the file disappeared again. I feel like the movie Groundhog Day.
While I was wasting my day online, Vincent was in the workshop photographing the process of producing beads for another order. It came home to us both how much work is involved in the production of a single bracelet or necklace. Juanita and Andrés purchase their beads from suppliers on the coast. Alberth and Magdalena make theirs from the raw dried seeds. Alberth is a gifted mechanic and has designed and constructed most of their machinery. The women wear all kinds of protective gear—masks for the dust, safety goggles to ward against any flying chips, ear protection against the noise of the equipment, aprons, gloves, etc. The room in which they work is murky with dust—they are working toward purchasing evacuators. One fact which came home to us today in a much clearer way—every single bead is cut, shaped and smoothed individually by hand. It is literally unimaginable. As many as 10,000 beads for one order of 400 bracelets! Tomorrow they get dyed in different colors for each type of bead.
Next time I look at a tagua bracelet, I am going to remember this. This isn’t really mass production. The tools make the drilling, cutting, sanding and shaping simpler and quicker, but that is all—there aren’t any automated processes, or molds or anything. Vincent noted that this jewelry really is the work of human hands.
Once the beads were finished, Magdalena pulled out her clipboard and told Alberth how many of each color there should be. Alberth, Vincent and I did the counting, assisted by Alberth’s grandmother, who could not be dissuaded from helping. She struggled with the task for about forty minutes and then quietly put all the ones she’d tried to count back into the bowl for us to count. Bless her, she tried her best!
After supper, the four of us had a conversation about the workers, what their incentives are, how the training is done and what the challenges are (getting them to wear their protective equipment, for one).
In 2007, there were four workers in the shop. The business has grown significantly in the last 8 years. Most of their output is sold in France. Only about 25-35% of it is sold in the U.S., with the remainder going to England, Switzerland and Japan. None is sold in Ecuador. In October of 2014, there were so many orders that they had to hire nine temporary workers to complete them.
They remember the difficult years. They try to hire people who need the work most—single moms, mildly disabled folks, people without many opportunities for employment. We noted yesterday that most of the people in the shop had found out about the opportunity through friends, neighbors, and relatives. This makes for a friendly team of workers, but there are problems, Alberth and Magdalena noted. She does all the training and most of the discipline. In October, when she had nine new employees to train, she devoted most of her time to them, resulting in the senior workers feeling abandoned. They said she didn’t care about them any more, just the new people. She had to explain to them all that she did still care about them, but that the new people needed to be trained so that they could get all their tasks accomplished. She also noted that as the disciplinarian, she is sometimes called “bruja,” as she has to keep the work on schedule, prevent the women from coming in late or manufacturing excuses, and so on. To me, the fact that the senior workers felt she didn’t care about them indicates just how much they normally feel she DOES care about them.
It’s not a job she takes lightly, and she related how hard it is to hire temporaries, because it is so challenging to tell someone, “We don’t need you any more.” Of the nine, four left for one reason or another, and they have employed the other five full-time. It is a challenge to keep the orders coming in, and they feel the responsibility for the now 15 women who work for them, to keep them employed and able to take care of their families. Work is so hard to come by here. The women in the shop related there are many, many more women whom they know who are looking for work and can’t get any.
They feel lucky to be in a place where they are treated well, paid well, and have a friendly, relaxed atmosphere in which to work. We discussed the benefits the Espins provide to keep trained, skilled workers. They include excursions, an annual trip to the coast where families are invited, help with school expenses in May, an annual bonus (if profits allow), insurance, lunches brought in on occasion, 15 days paid vacation with an extra day for each year worked above 5. These all make the production costs higher for them. They feel that without making their own beads, the quality would suffer so much that they would lose customers. They feel the pressures of the market to lower costs, to keep people employed fairly, innovate new designs, cover their costs and increase their sales. At times they get tired, Magdalena noted. But their passion is to keep their 15 employees, and more if possible, in good work as long as they possibly can. We can only applaud—and try to sell as much of their jewelry as possible.
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