ST. LUCIA'S SCRAMBLE
Beers, Deirdre Kelly and David
ST. LUCIA'S SCRAMBLE A Caribbean island hustles for high tech BY DEIRDRE KELLY AND DAVID BEERS It is early morning in Patience, a community of twenty shacks balanced neatly atop one of the...
...These benefits, officials say, have helped keep the three American electronics components factories operating on the island...
...Lucia, a U.S...
...Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services...
...Sometimes, in haste, she scalds herself...
...And last year, after a brief stint in St...
...Lucia ended...
...You come here with a factory, and you want some water pipe—there is no water pipe...
...Many are never called back, and some are convinced that the companies use "temporary" layoffs to avoid paying accrued benefits and severance pay...
...But luring jobs is no easy task...
...St...
...Sparks from the welder fly into your eyes...
...After you must pay transport, sometimes you cannot even buy a tin of milk for your child...
...They should just tell us we're fired...
...Of the women who work at Manu-Matics and Cariman, 85 per cent have been sent home indefinitely at one time or another...
...She is paid $4.40 a day...
...Lucians...
...Kelly and Beers are associates of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco...
...had several hundred women piecing together pop-up greeting cards but ran to Dominica when its tax holiday in St...
...Anselma works with some fifty other women at Manu-Matics, the enterprise of a Hyde Park, New York, businessman who sells parts to major home-computer makers...
...Factory work may not please me, but I can't stay home or look for another job, so the next day I must forget...
...Then they are herded next door to Grandmother's house, where they will spend the day while their mother goes to work, not in a banana field but in an electronics factory...
...Three out of four work with dangerous chemicals such as the toxic solvent xylene, which, as one worker said, "burns like chili pepper"—and almost none wears protection...
...St...
...Lucia, if an assembler is to eat, she must plant her own garden or rely on relatives who farm...
...Short-term exposure to xylene can cause irritation of the eyes, nose, throat, and skin...
...Anselma gathers lunch—a piece of starchy dasheen root, salted fish, a Coca-Cola bottle to fill with water—and wraps it all in a plastic bag while her children, both too young for school, pull on clothes and accept her breakfast of ripe mangoes...
...And that's the bottom line...
...David Beers is an associate editor of Pacific News Service who concentrates on Caribbean and Latin American issues...
...The nation promises tax holidays of up to fifteen years, subsidized factory space, and dutyfree importation of raw materials, equipment, and spare parts...
...In Hong Kong, if you need some wiring or spare parts for your machines, you go out in the street and buy it and you're back to work immediately...
...You feel dizzy and your eyes hurt...
...Lucia, South Korea outlaws strikes, and the workweek averages fifty-six hours, the longest in the world...
...In St...
...Using her bare hands, she dips one wire, then another, into an open pot of molten lead-tin solder, a task she must perform 500 times a day to make her quota...
...Despite this pattern, St...
...In 1983, the government spent precious foreign exchange to send a delegation to South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to study the competition, and it dispatched another team to the Silicon Valley to woo high-tech investors...
...Worse than the starvation wages is the uncertainty of employment...
...You can't do anything with it...
...We must work two weeks to buy a pair of shoes," Anselma says...
...Two other U.S.-owned electronics components companies operate on the island, Data Delay Devices of New Jersey and Cariman of New Hampshire...
...We bring money...
...However, few employers provide even the most rudimentary protections...
...xylene home and using it as a cleaning agent...
...Almost 90 per cent of the 108 workers we surveyed reported at least one ailment they associate with their job: eye strain and irritation, headaches, burns, swollen and peeling skin, or dizziness and stress...
...You can hardly see them...
...Unlike St...
...The Voice, St...
...People are waking up, hoisting machetes, and slipping into the banana groves that surround the village...
...They give work to some, lay off some, and then hire new people...
...The same year, an American-owned electronics company named Shields Engineering opened a shop and hired fifty assemblers, only to fold a few months later...
...But for workers like Anselma, underpaid and working under dangerous conditions, this could be as much a curse as a blessing...
...We are in a very difficult bargaining position, and one that is very simple," Joseph says...
...a regular user over several months risks anemia, a disrupted menstrual cycle, and reversible damage to the eyes, liver, and kidney, according to a joint report by the U.S...
...They really don't have anything to lose but their chains...
...We can't just sit down and wait for industry," St...
...The motor [which winds the wires] is quick and sometimes vibrates...
...Right now, what we need is jobs, jobs, jobs...
...Manu-Matics has been there the longest, seventeen years...
...Lucia is trying to become the Korea of the Caribbean, the next manufacturing colony for the high-tech industry in the United States...
...The workers are so uninformed about these hazards that one woman nonchalantly mentioned taking Deirdre Kelly is a researcher and consultant specializing in industrial development policy for Third World nations...
...Waves of heat and fumes rising from the solder burn her eyes and make her head pound...
...You want some electrical wiring—there is no electrical wiring available...
...an ideal location for your offshore electronics plant," boasts a government promotional brochure...
...the islands are desperately in need of it," says company owner Edwin Farber...
...There is no slackness, there is no idleness," he said...
...St...
...The island's electronics workers pool their hard cash earnings with family and friends...
...companies—and especially electronics firms—to the island...
...It's only because of my kids that I do dip soldering...
...Lucians must "accept the discipline of our competitors, and our competition comes from the East," Prime Minister Compton said after his Asian tour...
...Lucian officials were elated when they landed a big-name American firm in 1979...
...Everybody gets on with the job...
...LUCIA'S SCRAMBLE A Caribbean island hustles for high tech BY DEIRDRE KELLY AND DAVID BEERS It is early morning in Patience, a community of twenty shacks balanced neatly atop one of the volcanic ridges that undulate across the Caribbean island of St...
...Lucia's leaders implore the citizenry to remove such obstacles through hard work...
...He especially admired the discipline of South Korea's factories...
...Lucia faces...
...One solderer explained that gloves might prevent burns, but would slow her down and keep her from meeting the production quota...
...Where protective gear was available, workers said the rigors of the piece-work payment system discouraged its use...
...In our section, the wires are very tiny," one coil winder says...
...Dimensions Ltd...
...Harry Joseph has the job of attracting more foreign investment...
...At one factory, fourteen women complained they had been shocked at least once by inadequately grounded equipment...
...As general manager of the state-financed National Development Corporation, he knows the troubles St...
...From her $22 weekly salary, she loses $5 for bus fare to and from the job...
...Even if you ask for goggles, you don't get them...
...We allow St...
...The "green gold" is by far the country's biggest export...
...Anselma's meager wage, tied to a piecework quota, is the norm...
...Absenteeism, low productivity and carelessness, fete, drink, fun, and good ole indiscipline seem to be the high points of Caribbean life...
...At the moment, the governments of these islands are not geared properly for industrializing," says Michael Lewis, co-owner of a small plastics molding firm that recently arrived from Hong Kong...
...Lucians to perform a service that does not in any way strip them of their resources...
...Lucia's Prime Minister John Compton said in a 1983 special advertising section in Business Week...
...We don't take their oil...
...Lucia...
...Together, these firms employ about 300 St...
...Lucia...
...Lucia's national newspaper, echoed Compton's sermon...
...Milton Bradley hired about 300 St...
...With redoubled effort and generous incentives, St...
...manufacturer of food flavorings abruptly moved to Jamaica...
...But barely a year later, when automation at home proved cheaper, it closed its offshore plant...
...Those who do not work directly with chemicals have to contend with antiquated machines that throw off sparks and deliver electrical jolts to the operators...
...The salary is too low," she says...
...Lucia might succeed in drawing a few more electronics companies to its shores...
...After her co-workers—all of them women—have finished a series of repetitive, detailed tasks, she inherits a batch of thumbnail-sized components with wires coming out of either end...
...Anselma sits in a metal folding chair at one end of a cafeteria-style table...
...We spend so much time undermining, gossiping, and being laissez-faire that production targets cannot be met," the paper editorialized...
...I don't want the company to thieve me," one woman grumbled...
...We have to go out and get [investors], and when we get them, we have to be prepared to accommodate them...
...Lucia's leaders remain determined to bring U.S...
...Lucians to make components for its electronic games...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
