Transcript for: Hana Razga describes her culture shock after leaving Czechoslovakia

Hana Razga

[on camera]

I come from Czechoslovakia.

We came after the Russian came to Prague in August 1968.

They put us all at this old King Edward Hotel and right around the corner was

the Employment and Immigration offices.

So we had to report there and basically I started working at the GWG because that's where I was sent.

I felt that all of the immigrant women were sent out there.

Because there was some people, highly educated people,

[on camera]

and the only reason they were there because they didn't speak English so what do you, what do you do? So they sent them over them there.

It was dusty, it was noisy. That was hot and humid because they had some steam kind of things in there and there was a supervisor.

[on camera]

She showed you and then you do it. Right? It was, there was not too much verbal communication because very few of us at that time when we started there, very few of us actually spoke any English.

It was dollar twenty-five an hour, that was the minimum wage at that time.

You know after a week or so they were testing how fast you can go, they had stop watches.

You were being paid according to the bundles that you were able to produce

I knew that I was not going to make the dollar twenty-five an hour. Used to say at that time I had to quit because I couldn't make enough money to buy salted water (laughs).

[on camera]

I felt a little bit more regimented than I was used to and I was prepared to tolerate in terms of watching, watch, you know, being stop, using stop watches to see how fast I was going. Being monitored with respect to how long I spent in the washrooms, how often do I go and all this and it was, it, it felt like having my wings clipped for a dollar twenty-five an hour.

[1:42]

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