ARTICLES
July/August 2000 ARTICLESLETTERS
Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
We Told Her Not to Get Pregnant!
The Dark Side of The World Economy
By Christopher Zehnder
Some call it the "global village," this world economy that is capitalism's latest boast -- a warm and homely image, it is true, redolent of town squares with cobbled streets where children play, of the town well where the women launder and gossip, of the neighborhood pub where their men drink, sing -- and gossip. The reality, however, appears colder, impersonal, even brutal. For instead of small, mom-and-pop shops, one finds large factories; instead of mothers with children at their skirts, mothers working long hours, under sub-human conditions, for little money; instead of a neighborhood of families, a herding of humans for profit, sustained with contraception.
This is a portrait of much of the "third world," one I have gathered from reading and from conversation. One such conversation I had with Lydia Sanchez, who lives in a town north of Los Angeles. For many years, Sanchez has worked as a labor organizer for a number of labor unions, including the United Farm Workers, Ladies' Garment Workers Union, the Textile Workers Union, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. In 1987, she went to Mexico, to what is known as the maquiladora, to assist workers who were in unions or who were working to unionize in U.S.-based factories in Mexico. Since then, she has worked in plants throughout Mexico and El Salvador. In our conversation, Sanchez described for me what she saw in the maquilas, both in Mexico and El Salvador.
Maquiladora (short form, maquila) is a word associated with a manufacturing arrangement. Beginning about thirty years ago, United States corporations, with the
support of Mexico and other governments, have established factories on the other side of the border to which they could ship raw materials and components, duty free, and export them again to the states. Often, American companies will establish, in the third world, "twin" factories to their existing factories in the first world. Later, the first world factory will be shut down. The number of maquilas is not negligible. Solunet Info-Mex's Complete Twin Plant Guide for those who want to do business with maquilas lists 2,770 maquilas in Mexico alone.
In the late 80s, Lydia Sanchez, representing the United Electrical Workers Union, worked to organize workers at a Chicago-based Uppco plant that manufactured fractional horsepower motors. In organizing workers, it was discovered that Uppco was transferring work to a mequila plant in Mexico. The union sent Sanchez and another worker to the plant in Mexico to meet with workers who were trying to organize. "I entered disguised," said Sanchez. "I looked like one of the women we had interviewed, and I passed for her for several days in a row. Nobody noticed. We took our contracts with us so that we could show them what kind of work we did, what kind of agreements we had -- the whole idea being, its fine that you want to do the work, make them give a true living wage; you know, because in comparison to what we were making [in the United States] they were making nothing. We'd get $7, $8, $10 an hour, depending on what we were doing, and they were getting that a day."
What is the work culture of a maquila? Built in industrial sites like those found in the United States, the factories employ either an all-male or all-female work force, said Sanchez. Though maquilas on the border, said Sanchez, might have slightly better working conditions than a Mexican-owned factory, since they compete with factories across the border, "there are not a whole lot of good things going on. They'll pay slightly better in a maquila -- let's say the average daily wage [in a Mexican-owned factory] is four dollars a day; the maquila will pay five to six dollars a day" for a ten to twelve hour work day.
"The work they were doing [in the maquila]," said Sanchez, "was highly skilled work done in the United States by workers who had long-term jobs and had been making $10, $12 an hour with benefits." Though maqula workers had it better compared to other Mexican workers, they suffered from the continual fear of losing their jobs. "In Mexico," said Sanchez, "there are certain obligations that a factory has to the state, because the state has to provide 'social security' -- which is really the medical system which provides a very basic service. They have what is called an 'indemnity clause,' so that if the employer doesn't like you for whatever reasons, if there's no union there, they can fire you. They are obligated to give you a severance pay, but your collecting it is a whole different story. So if you toe a line, and if you are well-behaved, and you don't get into trouble with the employer, you don't have to worry about this indemnity clause. But if you get fired, then you run into a problem, and the turn-over rate in these maquilas, I'm told, was relatively high, because it was one of the ways that psychologically they would keep people in check."
Sanchez noted another source of tension for the worker. A factory in Chihuahua where she worked rented inexpensive housing to the workers. The longer one worked, the more chances he had to rent this housing, built on the perimeters of the factory. "Frankly speaking," said Sanchez, the housing "was no big deal. I went in the winter time, and there was no heating in those apartments; they were freezing cold -- Chihuahua gets very cold in the winter. They had one or two bedrooms with a living room and kitchen -- like a studio apartment. They had paper-thin walls; you could hear the wind kicking up outside. They had whole families living in these places." Since these apartments were built outside of town, parents would have to bus their children into town for school -- "so they were paying for transportation," said Sanchez. "That slightly extra amount of money they would be making was deteriorated quite rapidly."
The goods workers bought were not cheap. "Wherever the maquilas are located," said Sanchez, "the things that they are purchasing are comparable to U.S. prices. It costs more for everything unless you go into an interior area, and have someone guide you through, and then you have to go from location to location to find the things that might be less expensive; so you're spending a lot of time looking for the cheaper deals -- what kind of a savings is that?"
"Oftentimes, in a maquila," said Sanchez, "an employer will take the work that is no longer safe -- and this is where I think machines should come in, where the work is so dangerous that humans should not be doing it. Instead of then investing in technology, which is quite costly, an employer will actually transfer the work from the United States to another country, knowing that the standards for the environment or for chemical exposure are either non-existent, or are in their beginning stages. Some of the maquilas are still dealing with mercury. You often see, only after they've discovered the dangers and hazards of workers having stillborns, massive amounts of stillborns, massive numbers of miscarriages by women who are in the shop, that they begin calling in the environmentalists who, for the most part, had to come to the United States to be trained and then go back to identify what was actually taking place."
The kind of work done in maquila, said Sanchez, deskills workers and reduces them to the level of machines. One maquila, owned by the United States-based Eagle Knitting, used a machine that would feed clothing components to workers sitting at sewing machines. The workers, all women, were arranged in six lines, ten deep, a line for each process. The machine, which operated over the women's heads, was equipped with five pronged mechanisms on rails, called "hands," because, as with fingers, they would grab the clothing components, and pass them to workers. These "hands" would start a the first line, said Sanchez, where, "if it's a shirt, the front and the backs are sewn together, with, maybe, a collar. The machine would send the work to the first six operators. Pieces that were to be sewn were put through these fingers -- a back, two fronts -- and it would fall immediately in front of the woman where the machine was sitting, so close to the needle that there was little movement that needed to be made. The women grabbed the material off of the clamps that were holding it, they would put the pieces together evenly, sew it -- it's two seams, one, two -- then push it back up, and it would go overhead, go to the next line that had to do the [next] operation; and when that one would lift up, another hand would come down, so there were seconds between when the first one was sent off and the second piece was put in front of the worker."
This machinery, said Sanchez, effectively controlled the worker's timing. "It would slow down workers who were very fast at sewing," she said, "who had the system down in the old way where the rails were not operating, and would be even faster than this machine. And when you're talking about industrial workers in the clothing industry, their wages are based on the number of things that they produce, not on an hourly wage, so the fastest workers, who were the highest paid, would realize a lowering of their wages. On the other hand, a slower worker would find this machinery increased her wages. You begin to see a leveling off of the wages; by the speed of the machine the employer could control how much each worker made, and never have an unbalance in guaranteeing his product had a standard price."
The machinery, too, said Sanchez "also chained workers to their machines, because as long as this machine is operating, they have a need to continue to work; it's a wonderful thing in terms of push and motivation, because the employer can actually control the work. He can come to the worker, and tell her, 'you're wasting time here. I see so many seconds between this piece and the next; if you're the beginning of the line, then the one at the end of the line doesn't have enough.' And then you see them pitting the one worker against the completion work.
"On top of all this, this machinery gets very hot, because they were operating it continuously to maximize profits. The women were getting sick. They were using these women as if they were an extension of this machine, and not taking into consideration that there is a need to apply the human factor, the need to rest -- and each of us is different in this. Women were passing out from the heat. The machine was getting air-conditioning, because it required a computer, and so was kept at a certain temperature. One woman passed out, they said, because she was pregnant -- like, this is acceptable -- if she weren't pregnant, she could put up with it. 'We told her not to get pregnant!' was actually one of the responses from the employer."
Pregnancy is discouraged in maquilas, and employers pressure women to use contraceptives, according to Sanchez. "In El Salvador it's more common than it is in Mexico," she said, "because they are a little more sensitive, because people are watching. [Maquila employers] like a young work force. They have a facility there and a nurse who will administer birth control and encourage women to pick up their supplies. They know when they've missed their birth control pick-up. In El Salvador, they not only administer the quantities, they obligate women on a daily basis to come in and swallow it in front of the nurse, to guarantee that she's actually taking it, so that there are no accidents. In the back of one of the factories you actually see where they've thrown away the discarded packets. The reasoning is that they've trained the workers, and they don't want to go through a re-training process."
What happens to a woman who gets pregnant? They "are usually just fired," said Sanchez, "because usually they can get someone to work in their place. It's a horrible position to be in, especially if you are a young woman with a dependent family -- because oftentimes the younger workers are supporting their older family members. In this one place where I was working in El Salvador, the kids were working, but not the older people. It's almost an age discrimination thing, because older workers are more skilled, they're stronger, for the most part, to defend themselves, and they're not as easily intimidated."
Such treatment of workers reduces them to mere instruments of production, without regard to their life outside the factory. "There's a fear element when you go into a factory that's established," said Sanchez. "The relationship between the supervisor and the worker is one of a superior and an inferior. When the supervisor actually came from the floor, he was kinder because he has actually done the work; but for the most part they hire professionals with no experience of the floor, who are ordered to produce on quotas that oftentimes cannot be met, and the people pushing the quotas put pressure on the managers who get their bonuses and wages based on the workers' production. So eventually you see them crack the whip to get out quotas to meet production, which oftentimes means an inferior product, or that the level of accidents increases and the amount of work increases. You're not necessarily looking at time-and-a-half and double-time for the extra time that is being invested by the worker on the work floor, compounded by the fact that they're not spending any more time with their families. That kind of work is not supposed to be the purpose. We're not pieces of machinery; we should have lives as well. So, we elevate their incomes, but at the expense of breaking bonds that are necessary for a society and children to be raised in a decent manner."
The moving of manufacturing to maquilas to take advantage of low wages and barely existent, or non-existent, environmental standards -- and to exploit the poor in their weakness -- points, says Sanchez, to the need for world standards for a living or just wage and for environmental standards. "Capital has no borders," she said, "unlike the people who live in those countries that work for capital."
But how does one set such standards, since conditions differ, often dramatically, from country to country? "This is something that is debated right now," said Sanchez. "Humans need to know they have a safe place to live, that their children are in an environment that is clean and sound. It should be an expectation for the third world to have some kind of running water -- but it is not at this point. Country to country there may be some variables; however, there are certain things that human beings deserve -- that there are no people living in the streets, particularly no families living without shelter, so that clean and decent shelter is provided; that there is sufficient food on the table to nourish the family; and that there has to be a standard for guaranteeing that the wage covers the most basic needs. If the state does not provide certain needs, then the person has to pay for it, and that has to be calculated in the cost. So we're talking about food, shelter, clothing for the family, medical care. I always add (as every staunch trade unionist will add) time to spend with the family.
"So we're constantly getting back to the beginning of the labor movement -- the fight for the eight-hour day. The actual slogan was, eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours recreation -- recreation, so that if you have a creative streak, you have the sufficient means to allow that creativity to flourish; so that you may be physically fit; so that you can afford to take your children someplace. This is the minimum standard that should be met."