‘Shut your mouth’: Low-paid women still waiting for their #MeToo

“You need the work,” one woman said, “so you shut your mouth.” #MeToo may have helped change the landscape for women in Hollywood and in the boardroom, but cleaners, secretaries and supermarket workers who have suffered sexual violence at work say it has yet to do much for them.

Yasmina Tellal, 42, spent six years picking and packing fruit and vegetables in the south of France.

“From the start” her bosses “established a system of fear”, she told AFP. “They would come to kiss us during breaks, touch us and try to make us take 300 euros ($350) to sleep with them.

“One day while I was in the car with my supervisor, he stopped at a rest area, grabbed my hand and placed it on his thing,” she said, struggling to get the words out, even a decade on.

Tellal arrived in France from Spain in 2011