Employees from Azteca Foods Inc. of Chicago spoke about their current four month long strike in at Tuesday's lecture entitled, "Support Justice."

Josefina Bonilla and Maria Montesof Azteca Foods, employees who walked out on Sept. 30, spoke of the abuses and injustices they and their fellow employees claimed they experienced working at the Azteca Foods factory.

Azteca Foods, a tortilla company that boasts of producing "3 million tortillas a day," is owned by Art Velasquez, a Notre Dame graduate and a member of the Board of Trustees.

Velasquez is said to have made the comment that his company "is the best paid tortilla company in the nation," while his workers are being paid $9 to 10.75 an hour, said Leah Freed, a representative of United Electrical Workers Union. The annual revenues for Azteca are approximately to $33 million, while labor costs is less than 10 percent, Freed said.

Azteca employees said that while the company is making millions, they struggle to make ends meet — with many working almost daily overtime. Bollina regularly worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, often under verbally abusive supervisors and hostile work conditions. Although almost all of the employees speak Spanish, Azteca Foods refuses to translate their proposals or the bargaining meetings said Freed.

"It's an ugly place, it's hot in there and there is metal everywhere," Bonilla said through a translator. "In the summer we are very sweaty, some faint because they can not leave to get water."

Freed said Azteca Foods wants to "cut take-home pay up to 32 cents an hour by increasing health insurance costs by up to 700 percent, while offering raises of 5 cents to most workers. … When you're only making $9 .32 an hour, [this] is a lot."

Freed said the company also wants to remove seniority rights, make cuts on job protection and ban union leaflets from the company property.

"Someone who graduated from this prestigious university, I [didn't] think he could act this way," Bollina said.

Freed said that after four moths of negotiations it was fair to say the workers have not made any progress with Velasquez.

Two weeks into the strike, the union called for a national boycott of all Azteca Foods tortillas and chips. An audience member said Reckers, an on-campus restaurant, serves tortillas chips that are made from Azteca.

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