HOW TO COPE WITH POVERTY WAGES? For their coping strategies, workers heavily rely inter alia on families and friends who provide agricultural products and support for their utility bills; other problems are associated to their need to have their rent payments rescheduled, which is also associated to their inability to afford housing loans; their high indebtedness, irregular or inexistent medical check-ups(especially dentist check-ups); poor housing conditions; inability to pay for the school supplies; lack of a recreational/cultural agenda; their inability to travel outside the town. Subsistence agriculture is especially common among single mothers working in the factory(an estimated 1/3 of the factory employees are single mothers). BULLYING AND VERBAL ABUSE Bullying and verbal abuse by managers is endemic in the garment industry according to most of the interviewed workers. Workers say managers put pressure on them to complete their orders as fast as possible; workers are not allowed to take days off, and may be punished for raising issues with managers, e.g. they may have their allowances cut or may be threatened with dismissal. In 2017, the Romanian media published a recording showing a foreign manager of a Romanian garment factory telling workers who had claimed their overdue wages that they were peasants and animals.³⁶ The company declared bankruptcy following the incident. WAGE PRACTICES: STEALING MONEY AND TIME Workers see overtime work as an opportunity to supplement their low income. In other cases, pressure from management pushes workers to work additional hours. In the two factories that were researched in 2017, workers said they were afraid to refuse working overtime even though it was not paid, out of fear of losing their jobs. The overtime was neither re lected on payslips nor paid. Workers said overtime was needed twice a week for 4 hours and for 7 hours on Saturdays, but that no overtime had been recorded or compensated for any of the previous three years. In spite of working an average of 15 hours of overtime per week and at least 60 overtime hours per month, they could only earn a minimum wage. Under the Romanian law, all overtime hours should be paid at a rate of 175%. I.e. an overtime hour should be paid at a rate of 10,60 RON net per hour, considering the amount of the minimum wage rate (1,065 RON/€176 monthly working hours x 1.75); and the payment for 60 overtime hours should be of at least an extra 635 RON per month. Workers at another factory described the same situation: 635 RON or€139 was stolen from their monthly wages. A widespread example of abusive disciplinary wage deductions are the daily meal vouchers. Meal vouchers, which employers offer to employees as a bonus and are used as a means of reducing wage taxation/social security payments, are a crucial top-up to the already small wages, and are usually offered for each workday. One meal voucher is worth 9 – 11 RON(ca 2 EUR) in 2017 and 11 – 13 RON (ca 2,50 EUR) in 2018. Often they would only get between 5-10 meal vouchers(instead of 22 per month) as a penalty for not completing their assigned work quotas; i.e. in 2018 they get 55- 130 RON(€12 – 28) instead of 264 RON(€57). The management uses meal vouchers to punish workers for not com ­pleting their assigned workloads. Even if the value of the meal vouchers is low, they can still be used as a pressure method: workers may be deprived of their meal vouchers unless they work or behave in a certain way. Workers' wages are so low that€40 makes a tremendous difference. Also transport allowances are relevant to workers. Most Romanian garment workers commute from rural areas to nearby towns or cities. More than half of the workers reported spending up to 20% of their already meagre wages on commuting. “They say we don't meet their quotas so they cut our meal vouchers as a penalty. Last month I and other women on my line got five vouchers. These coupons buy us food that we could not afford otherwise. We went on a strike to raise awareness on our wages and meal vouchers. The foreign manager was also there. He listened to us, but said everything was fine as it was. Nothing changed.“ ROMANIA 2018 10