Globalization and the MaquiladorasIncreased competition across borders means business needs to keep costs and prices down. One tried-and-true way to do that is to move factories out of developed nations and into poorer ones, where worker safety regulations are rare and wages are often exploitatively low. Maquiladora workers are converging on Seattle to be heard. by Jen Soriano
Ojeda is leading a squadron of Mexican factory workers to the streets of Seattle for the summit to denounce the ways free trade impacts the lives of working people in developing countries. "We will be there to ask what happened to the promises of free trade," says Ojeda. "Where are the improved living conditions? Where are the better jobs?" In Mexico, nearly six years after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was supposed to create more jobs and higher wages throughout North America, one of the consequences of free trade has been the proliferation of maquiladora factories, which critics call little better than sweatshops. Relaxed rules on foreign investment and export duties have made it far easier for foreign companies to open these low-wage assembly plants where workers make everything from leather gloves to televisions for multinational companies including BMW, Chrysler, Fisher Price, Sony, and Xerox, mostly for export to the US. There are by now some 4,000 maquiladoras concentrated along the US-Mexico border. According to the Mexican business journal El Financiero, employment in the maquiladoras nearly doubled between 1993 and 1998, and now stands at over one million people. According to a Workers University of Mexico study, maquiladora workers earn between $3.50 and $5 a day - enough to do little more than survive in the border towns, where the cost of living is 30 per cent higher than in the rest of the country. Life inside the factories is often grim. "Workers labor from sunrise to sunset. They never see day light," says Ojeda, who was a maquiladora worker for 20 years. "They are sometimes exposed to toxic chemicals, and in one case workers were given "vitamins" which turned out to be amphetamines. They rarely see their families; often wives will work for one shift, then switch with their husbands who take the next shift." Sexual harassment of women employees, who are the majority of maquiladora workers, is common -- and not prohibited by Mexican law. Some have even been murdered. While NAFTA promoted free trade among Mexico, Canada, and the US, the WTO promotes free trade among 135 member nations. More free trade, say critics, means more maquiladora-style manufacturing. "The maquiladoras are one manifestation of the global sweatshop," says Larry Weiss, labor and globalization program director at the Resource Center of the Americas. "These same export processing zones can be found in Jakarta, Manila, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica -- all over the Third World and in the former Soviet Bloc. This is what globalization is all about." At workshops and rallies throughout the Seattle meetings, the maquiladora delegation will join farmworkers, union members, and activists from all over the world in trying to get their concerns heard. "We are not expecting to make $500 a week," says Ojeda. "In Mexico, as everywhere, we simply want fair wages, good working conditions, and the ability to live with dignity." In short, she says, "We want our rights to be included in the WTO's commercial agenda. " |
