Ka Moyo said she would have never accepted the job.

An official from the company did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The woman in the article, a woman named Rachel, said she received a phone call from the company at 1 a.m. this past Tuesday. When she got there, her company had been paid, she said. But this was different.

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“I told them, the only reason we’re working is because you have your money,” she said.

She said workers in the warehouse were so exhausted from the 12-hour shift that an employee had fallen asleep in the waiting room and woke up to find four other workers staring at him for 15 minutes as he tried to leave the building.

“One of them had an erection,” she added.

The company, she said, would pay for the woman’s bus fare to work with her, though she did not know how it would compare to the $5,000 a couple or group workers usually make here.

Some workers said the company had pressured them, forcing them to accept job offers by insisting they stay at the warehouse “forever,” or until they had worked through the night.

“There were a lot of people who wouldn’t sell that night of work for money,” an unnamed worker said. “They wanted to see who would be doing it the next day.”

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There were several instances of workers being forced to work more than they were willing to do, as the company pushed them to reach agreement with the workers, said one worker whose company is in a similarly precarious situation.

“They forced us on, forced us to move forward, and it’s not sustainable,” he said. “If we can’t move forward, there’s not enough money to pay the rent.”

The Guardian contacted more than a dozen of the 25 people interviewed and all of them spoke on the condition that their name not be used, citing the concern of potential retaliation by the company.

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Still, in interviews, they said the men and women were generally happy to work in the warehouse, for less than $20 a day. The women said they had made about $500, and the men said they made about $500.

The workers, they say, feel treated with utter disrespect.

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