A BORDERLINE CASE
Russell, James W.
A Borderline Case The sweatshops cross the Rio Grande BY JAMES W. RUSSELL The Third World and the First World meet on Juarez Avenue, a strip of bars, restaurants, and curio shops catering to...
...The border zone is hardly unique: It competes with similar corporate havens in Asia and in other parts of Latin America...
...On the outskirts of the city, in the barren Chihuahua desert, it rises like a gleaming mirage: row upon row of modern buildings and well-manicured lawns...
...Challenges to the system are few...
...The movement of women into the maquiladoras has strained traditional sex roles...
...One of them was Father Oscar Enri-quez's parish in the working-class colonia of Alta Vista...
...The finished goods are usually stamped, Assembled in Mexico of U.S...
...It simply rigged the 1983 state elections: "Privately, PRI officials admit that votes were manipulated," U.S...
...Companies have also been known to swap workers, eliminating accrued seniority in the process...
...market, labor costs became a vital factor in maintaining a competitive edge...
...He can also see the smoke of ASARCO's copper smelter as it poisons both sides of the border with lead and other toxic chemicals...
...But the militance of the CDP has not moved maquiladora workers...
...Since electronics assembly must be done in a clean, temperature-controlled environment, the new factories are air-conditioned, to protect the parts, not the workers, from sweltering desert heat that can send the mercury to 114 degrees...
...side...
...Runaway plants deprive U.S...
...corporations...
...He has lived in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez area...
...the pace of work is faster, and Mexico's high unemployment rate disciplines the labor force...
...The CDP, the largest left-wing organization in Juarez, is a leading political force in two dozen of the city's poor and squatter neighborhoods...
...A new and important component of the opposition is the Catholic lay communities...
...That year, she and her co-workers planned to strike for an 18 per cent raise and a reduction in hours from fifty to forty-five...
...The PRI, which exercises firm control over Mexican affairs, has coopted most of the popular movements, including the unions, and brutally suppressed the rest...
...U.S...
...Though maquiladora wages lag far behind those in the United States and represent a fraction of the workers' productive output, the pay is good by Mexican standards...
...Desperation is what keeps the workers mute...
...local newspapers warn that 100 families a day are moving into Juarez...
...Materials...
...A firm can maintain its capital-intensive operations in the United States and meet its labor-intensive needs a short distance away...
...RCA goes so far as to dress up its workers in red-and-white cheerleader skirts, and male managers bark out marching orders through megaphones...
...The border cities were opened to maquiladora exploitation in 1965 with the inauguration of the Border Industrialization Program...
...For example, U.S...
...multinational companies started shifting production to such cheap labor suppliers as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and the Mexican border zone...
...Most of the maquiladoras operate within spanking new industrial parks, where security is tight and rent is cheap...
...Funds were raised from passing motorists and, after more than a year of occupying the plant, the workers sold the goods and machinery and divided the revenues...
...A Borderline Case The sweatshops cross the Rio Grande BY JAMES W. RUSSELL The Third World and the First World meet on Juarez Avenue, a strip of bars, restaurants, and curio shops catering to tourists who spill over the border from El Paso...
...In fact, guerrilla warfare had erupted in Chihuahua...
...by late 1983, it had shrunk to $6.80...
...The unemployment rate in the region remains at least 40 per cent today...
...Richard Michel, who manages General Electric's seven maquiladoras in Mexico, boasts of a 2 per cent absentee rate in his factories, compared with 5 to 9 per cent in the United States...
...A year earlier, the Bracero Program, which provided U.S...
...wages, following the law of supply and demand, were accordingly low...
...Productivity, he adds, is 10 to 15 per cent higher south of the Rio Grande...
...The Border Industrialization Program ensured multinational corporations absolute freedom...
...The damage north of the border has not been offset by benefits to the south...
...The maquiladoras are a tremendous boon to the corporations...
...multinational corporations across the border...
...But even as the skepticism builds, new maquiladoras rise against the desert sky-concrete reminders that for the people of the Third World, growth is not necessarily development and industrialization is not necessarily salvation...
...The assembly plants have become magnets for displaced peasants...
...To see it, one must take a frustrating drive through streets choked by traffic, bus fumes, and food vendors...
...If a tag could be placed on the profits of the corporate giants who have plants along the border strip, it might read, Assembled in the U.S...
...Participation in the CDP-sponsored parade has steadily increased—from 2,000 three years ago to 15,000 last May—as the nation's economic crisis has intensified...
...The Mexican government absolved them of tax obligations, and the U.S...
...workers of jobs, and the maquiladora competition drives down wages in the United States, particularly along the border, where there is a palpable threat that more shops will flee to Mexico...
...corporate giants—including General ElecJames W. Russell teaches sociology and Latin American studies at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon...
...workers can cut cloth— a task that is relatively skilled and requires major capital investment—and maquiladora employees can then sew it...
...The total number of maquiladoras grew from twelve in 1965 to more than 600 by 1980...
...President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz was facing skyrocketing unemployment in the border region—and rising unrest...
...Spanish-language radio and television stations in El Paso and Juarez regularly broadcast appeals from wives searching for runaway husbands...
...The Mexican Army engaged Gamiz and his followers in battle on September 23,1965...
...The companies have turned the border zone into a terminal on their global production line...
...Garment manufacturers do not have that concern, so many of their factories are scattered about Juarez in old, uncooled buildings...
...In response, the workers seized the factory to prevent management from retrieving machinery and finished goods...
...But the Mexican frontier has a special selling point—the "twin plant" concept...
...A host of U.S...
...But there is a permanent American presence in Ciudad Juarez, invisible to the sightseers though manifest to the city's inhabitants...
...The story of Acapulco Fashions is unusual, not in its description of management but in its portrayal of border-zone labor relations...
...Between 1971 and 1978, the government's Board of Arbitration issued 482 judgments involving maquiladora employees...
...companies farm out, or "outsource," the fabrication work to Mexico to save on labor costs...
...High turnover is seen as a key to high productivity, and workers are pressured to leave when they reach their late twenties...
...The official unions enroll only a quarter of the work force, and seem to do little more than maintain discipline for the employers...
...The maquiladoras run smoothly, but not because the interests of the workers are protected...
...Even before the Bracero Program ended, Mexico's border cities suffered unemployment rates of 30 to 40 per cent...
...tariff code to the companies' advantage...
...Enriquez has become a leader of the Christian community movement, which now encompasses about seventy groups, with ten to fifteen members in each, that meet weekly to discuss social and political issues...
...For Americans who want to photograph, purchase, or eat a bit of Mexicana, Ciudad Juarez is a convenient sally...
...Dressed in red and black, members of the Comite de Defensa Popular (CDP) march behind portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pancho Villa, guerrilla leader Arturo Gamiz, the Haymarket martyrs, and effigies of Uncle Sam and a charro syndicalist^ or sell-out labor leader...
...Labor costs generally run 20 to 25 per cent of what they would be in the United States...
...Family strife has increased, and the idled men often turn to alcohol or crime...
...growers with seasonal armies of unorganized Mexicans, had been canceled...
...the work week is 25 per cent longer...
...Unemployment in Mexico's frontier area has not been reduced, and living conditions have remained, at best, unchanged...
...Arturo Gamiz, a rural school teacher, had organized a base of guerrillas to combat fraudulent land reform, fight the sale of forest and mineral concessions to corporations, and defend the Tarahumara Indians...
...prices affect Mexican prices...
...More than 70 per cent of ma-quiladora work involves electronics or apparel, both product lines that require intensive labor for final assembly...
...A marginalized, "surplus" population lives in cardboard shacks and feeds its young by begging or selling items scavenged from American parks, alleys, and dumps...
...trie, Zenith, RCA, and General Motors— as well as many smaller subcontractors have set up shop along the 2,000-mile Mexican frontier, dominating the economies of such cities as Juarez, Tijuana, and Mexicali...
...In choosing a Third World outpost, business executives consider three variables: labor costs, freedom of operations, and stability...
...They drive in, soak up the ambience around the "mar-iachi plaza," and go home...
...The second parade shatters the image of labor pliancy projected by the first...
...Two provisions pegged customs duties on maquiladora products to the low wages paid in Mexico, not to the value added to the materials in the production process...
...After a long period of unbridled expansion, they were facing heightened competition from Japan, West Germany, and other nations...
...Only fourteen were favorable to the workers...
...The buildings are maquiladoras, assembly plants run by foreign-based multinational corporations, most of which are headquartered in the United States...
...Other workers, including many from the maquiladoras, fall in behind company standards: Young women predominate the formations, which could be mistaken for girls' high school contingents...
...Government molded the U.S...
...A small group continues to occupy the abandoned offices...
...a full-time, resident maid in El Paso earns $30 to $40 a week...
...When the 1979 Puebla Conference of the Latin American Church called for a Christian-based community movement to raise the social and political consciousness of the poor, a number of churches in Juarez responded...
...Most of the guerrillas were killed, and their bodies were thrown into a common grave...
...News & World Report recently noted, "because 'it was too dangerous to lose elections during a major economic crisis.'" Cheap labor, freedom from regulation, and political stability have conspired to bring U.S...
...side...
...The independent unions, which are more militant than the major labor groups, have yet to make significant inroads into the maquiladoras...
...This bonanza came at an opportune time for U.S...
...Both take place on the city's main street, separated by ninety minutes...
...The study groups have been growing, fostering a healthy skepticism toward capital among Juarez's citizens...
...If the day trippers from the United States bring dollars and leave with knick-knacks, the multinational employers bring capital and leave with ready profits—superprofits, in fact, derived from superex-ploitation...
...They recovered about half their losses...
...The Mexican government sensed that tensions in the border area would exacerbate as growing numbers of impoverished peasants left the land and filled the already swollen ranks of the urban unemployed...
...Opposition to the system is most visible among the squatter organizations, such as the CDP, and among the leftist electoral parties...
...one year later, take-home pay had slipped to $8.00...
...Maquiladora managers prefer to hire teen-aged women, believing them to be more dexterous and tractable than men...
...Preempting the strike, the company abruptly shut down operations...
...From his church, Enriquez can see across the Rio Grande into the United States...
...of Mexican labor...
...So Diaz Ordaz designated the frontier region a free-trade zone, waived import duties, and granted tax breaks to the U.S.-based multinational companies...
...In the first parade, most of the approximately 30,000 participants march behind banners of government-controlled unions...
...Some of the poor become servants on the U.S...
...A tenuous labor peace reigns within the assembly plants, though there have been isolated and sometimes violent confrontations...
...Gustavo de la Rosa, a lawyer who specializes in maquiladora workers' cases, found that the government's peso devaluations have markedly reduced real pay in Juarez: In February 1981, 80 per cent of the maquiladora employees were taking home the equivalent of $9.19 a day...
...As foreign garment and electronics manufacturers began making inroads into the U.S...
...The signs proclaim loyalty to the ruling Partido Institucional Revolucionario (PRI...
...More revealing is the annual May Day in Juarez, when there are two parades—the government's and the Left's...
...Maria Munoz, who began sewing for Acapulco Fashions in Juarez at age sixteen, was earning $48 for a fifty-hour week in 1981—and she had accumulated eleven years of seniority...
...As in the rest of Latin America, the currents of liberation theology flow through Juarez...
...Juarez is home to about 125 foreign-owned factories that employ 45,000 people—a manufacturing nexus larger than Youngstown, Ohio, in its steel-producing heyday...
...However, border-zone wages are declining in real terms because of unfavorable exchange rates with the dollar...
...companies import American parts into Mexico, assemble the parts in maquiladoras, and export the products back to the United States...
...moreover, the workers spend between a third and half of their earnings on the U.S...
...Mexican law requires that senior workers be assured job security, but there are many ways for multinational corporations to get around the requirement...
...The company never paid indemnities to the employees for closing down, as required by Mexican law...
...Many abandon their families to take jobs as undocumented workers in the United States...
...The managers of Acapulco Fashions returned to the United States carrying the workers' last paychecks and some $6,000 in credit union funds...
...Employers can slash hours or shut the plant down for a period, thereby forcing the employees to seek work elsewhere...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
