Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 23:27:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Paul Antschel <antschel-AT-m-net.arbornet.org>
Subject: Re: Endless War


What do any of you really know about war? For those of you who might live
in the US, you don't need to look as far away as Iraq to find a state of
war. All you have to do is look south, towards Mexico.

For those of you in Europe, all you have to do is look east, towards
Chechnya or south, towards Algeria.

How many of you who speak of war as if you know something about it, have
actually ever lived in a war zone or been anywhere near one?

But let's looks away from Iraq for one moment, where so many of you have
suddenly found an social conscience and look south, towards Juarez,
Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

And I won't even speak about the rapes and murders and disappearances of
young Mexican women working for approximately $3.00 to $4.00 dollars a day
in US owned factories, just south of the border. Women who, on their way
to work, get kidnapped by guys who rape them and kill them. The yound
girls who work in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the young
girls who leave for work when it is still dark and often don't make it to
work alive. No, I won't go into details, I'll spare your delicate
sensibilities, so you can focus your high-minded thoughts on the people of
Iraq, who no one seemed to care about as long as Saddam Hussein was
slaughering them.

So let's look away from Iraq, where you've suddenly found a social
conscience and south towards Juarez Mexico for just a moment.

(But for those of you in Europe, before you become too smug and
complacent, think about Bosnia and Kosovo, think about the situation in
Algeria, just to your south, think about the eastern or African immigrants
living in poverty and desperate conditions all over Western Europe.)

In Juarez, the workers, most of them young women, leave their homes at six
in the morning to go to work. The best of these homes are three or four
rooms made of concrete block and adobe; the worst are one or two rooms
made of discarded lumber and tar paper. Many have no running water or
toilets. The workers walk unpaved side streets which, depending on the
season, are dusty, muddy or occasionally snowy to wait for the city bus or
company van to pick them up and carry them to work.

Many of these workers labor in modern factories owned and operated by U.S.
corporations. Equipped with the latest combination of electronic controls
and robotic machines, these factories are located in well-paved and
well-lit industrial parks served by superhighways and railroad lines. The
plant managers and supervisors are usually U.S. men earning six-figure
salaries who live in El Paso, Texas and drive their BMWs across the border
to work. The lower-level supervisors are Mexicans who translate the
employers instructions into Spanish. In other cases, the workplace may be
some subcontractors hole-in-the-wall facility. There, conditions are
worse: wages may be as low as $3.75 per day, and workers may not be
covered by the national health program for workers.

This is life in Mexican towns and cities along the U.S.-Mexican border,
where multinational corporations, drawn by low wages, have set up
maquiladoras, or manufacturing and assembly plants, bringing dangerous
environmental pollution and a host of social problems into desperately
poor neighborhoods.

"There are a whole series of problems which are linked to the
maquiladora," says Teresa Almada, a social worker with the Independent
Popular Organization in Juarez. "There are problems with the urban
infrastructure, such as the lack of water, sewers, electric light." Other
problems, she says, include low wages, industrial pollution and pervasive
sexual harassment of women workers. "The issue of the maquiladora isnt
just the factory which comes here," she says, "but rather that in cities
along the border in Mexico, the size of the maquiladora industry is so
great in relation to the city, that the maquiladora limits and determines
the entire social reality of the city."

Conditions in the maquiladora communities in cities like Tijuana, Juarez,
Reynosa or Matamoros provide an insight to the frightening future, for, as
Mexican Secretary of Commerce Jaime Serra Puche has stated, in many
respects NAFTA is Mexicos maquiladora - or border industry - program, writ
large. Mexicos maquiladora program allows foreign companies to set up
factories that produce for export; NAFTA would allow foreign businesses to
invest freely throughout Mexico. Just as multinational corporations have
shifted production to Mexicos maquiladoras in order to take advantage of
cheap labor and lax environmental regulations, so it can be anticipated
that U.S. and Canadian corporations will find the main attraction of
investing in Mexico to be the countrys low social standards, some of which
are dramatically inferior to those of its industrialized Northern
neighbors.

 The new frontier

 In 1965, the Mexican government established a limited free trade zone
along the U.S.-Mexican border through the Border Industrialization
Program, which encouraged foreign corporations to build factories and
create jobs in Mexico. Many U.S. corporations, including General Motors
and Zenith , moved factories to Mexico to take advantage of low wages or
to escape U.S. environmental or workplace safety regulations. The program
mushroomed in the 1980s when repeated devaluations of the peso
dramatically lowered Mexican wage rates. Today, 850 U.S. corporations
operate one or more maquiladora plants, and more than 80 percent of the
maquiladora companies are U.S.-owned. About 68 percent of all investment
in the maquiladora zone comes from the United States.

The maquiladoras have drawn hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to live in
border towns and cities. Over half a million workers, two-thirds of them
women, labor in over 2,000 such factories, for about 50 cents an hour or
$4.50 a day. Cities like Tijuana and Juarez grew at the spectacular rate
of over 7 percent a year, burgeoning to a population of over one million
inhabitants today. Juarez now has about 340 maquiladoras employing 150,000
workers in a city of 1.3 million inhabitants. Many of these cities
residents live in shacks and hovels in neighborhoods without sewers,
running water, electricity or paved streets.

"The maquiladora is the axis of the economy in cities like these,"
explains Almada. Local politics have come to be dominated by business
consortiums, such as the Bermudes group or the Fuentes group, which build
industrial parks for the multinational corporations. These Mexican
business interests, closely tied to multinationals, become important
forces not only in the local economy, but also at city hall and in the
state legislature.

 Given this sort of power structure, the citys economic resources are
frequently diverted from the needs of the working class inhabitants to
those of the Mexican and multinational industrialists. The domination of
multinational corporations and Mexican real estate interests leads to the
construction of highways, rail spurs, airports and other facilities,
rather than to the building of homes or the paving of streets in working
class neighborhoods. For example, according to Almada, Juarez officials
are placing a budgetary priority on paving the streets and highways which
connect the industrial parks. "Pavement is the priority," she says, "in a
city where half the people have no sewer system."

 Hazards of the maquilas

 Work in the maquiladoras involves tasks such as assembling wire harnesses
for automobiles or electronic circuit boards for computers, putting
together stereo systems or sewing shirts and blouses. The pace of work is
usually rapid and intense, lasting for nine-hour days, 45 hours per week.
The turn-over of the workforce is extremely high.

Virtually all maquiladora supervisors and technicians are men, while more
than three-quarters of the operatives are girls and women. In this
situation - where most workers have no labor unions and the government
does not protect workers rights - sexual harassment is endemic. "Many of
the girls are between 14 and 20 years old," says Almada, and, "[as] they
leave the factories they are in a lot of danger. Rapes occur frequently,
many of which go unreported. Many young women become pregnant with no
possibility of a stable family life." Attorneys, social workers and women
activists report that sexual harassment and rape often go unreported
either because women fear reprisals in the form of firing or because a
lack of resources to deal with rape and harrassment lead to a climate of
shame and humiliation for the victims of these crimes.

 "The majority of women workers in Mexico are not protected by the legal
system as established by federal labor law," according to Patricio
Mercado, a leader of Women in Labor Union Action (Mujeres de Accion
Sindical). There are many reasons why women are not protected by the law.
Young women workers, some coming from the countryside, may not know their
rights, or may be afraid to assert those rights in the face of male
authorities who represent employers, the government and unions. Simply
put: they fear losing their jobs if they complain. Some have gone to work
illegally at the age of 14 using forged documents and may be reluctant to
attempt to exercise their rights. Others work in small shops or factories
which have an ephemeral existence; Mexican workers call them golondrinas
or swallows because they may fly away at any moment. These run-away shops
often do not pay the aguinaldo or annual bonus, and they do not make the
annual distribution of profits under the constitutionally mandated
profit-sharing law. In other cases, the exhausting pace of work forces
some women to leave the workplace before they are entitled to any
benefits.

In the factory itself there are many threats to worker health and safety.
A 1991 study of the Matamoros-Reynosa area by the Work Environment Program
of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell concluded that "the working
conditions identified in this study are reminiscent of the nineteenth
century sweatshops of the U.S. industrial town." The study found "clear
evidence that maquiladora workers are suffering from musculoskeletal
disorders related to working conditions, including rapid pace of work,
poor workplace design and other ergonomic hazards. Acute health effects
compatible with chemical exposures were also identified, indicating the
potential for the future development of chronic diseases in the
workforce."

According to the Mexican Secretary of Commerce, almost 40 percent of the
maquiladora plants produce electronic equipment. While there are few good
studies of occupational illness in the Mexican maquiladora industry,
studies of electronic plants in North America and Europe have revealed
problems among workers including increased rates of miscarriages and high
rates of muscle skeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Some
solvents used in these plants may cause peripheral neuropathy, that is,
numbness and tingling in the hands and feet. One Mexican study reported
that some Mexican plants use benzene, a known carcinogen. Over 80 chemical
plants operate on the border, including Stepan Chemical of Chicago, which
has been accused of toxic dumping. In addition, metalworking plants use
lead and zinc, both of which are also potential health hazards. Lead can
cause reproductive and kidney problems and hypertension.

 Mexican occupational health professionals such as Asa Christina Laurel,
the author of several studies of Mexican health and safety laws, have long
criticized the Mexican government for its failure to enforce occupational
health and safety laws. In general, Mexican authorities have failed to
collect information or carry out studies on workers health problems.

 The rapid industrialization and urbanization of cities like Juarez has
also resulted in severe social problems. For example, neither the
employers nor the government provides child care for workers children.
"Child care is a real issue now because both parents have to work" in
order to earn a subsistence income, says Lilia Reyes, a labor lawyer who
works with the Workers Center (Centro Obrero) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.
She notes that single working mothers "may have to wait months before they
can get a place. There just arent enough child care centers."

 The maquiladoras are also a factor leading to the proliferation of child
labor, with children from desperately poor families often using forged
birth certificates to begin working in the maquiladoras at 14 or 15 years
of age.

Employers, social workers, womens groups and academics all agree that
there are significant numbers of children working in the maquiladoras,
although there are no concrete figures on their actual number. One
employer speculates that 5 percent of maquiladora workers are underage.

Repressing unionists

 Mexican workers who have attempted to organize to address some of these
maquiladora-created problems have met with harsh repression. A strong
upsurge of labor activity occurred during the late 1970s among a youthful,
militant workforce which joined labor unions, organized strikes and
attempted to negotiate contracts for improved wages and benefits.

But the combined efforts of multinational employers, the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party and the one-party-states labor unions,
the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the Regional Confederation of
Mexican Workers (CROM) and the Revolutionary of Workers and Peasants
(CROC), soon succeeded in crushing the labor upsurge [see "Mexican Labor:
The Old, the New and the Democratic," Multinational Monitor,
January/February 1991].

 Employers fire and blacklist union activists and other outspoken workers.
These practices have gone on for years and continue today. Consequently,
most maquiladoras are unorganized, and state-controlled unions represent
workers in those that are organized.

These unions are of little use in improving conditions for the workers.
Some are "ghost unions," that is, unions unknown to the workers. These
phantom unions negotiate "protection contracts" that protect the employers
by giving workers contractual wages and conditions inferior to those
guaranteed by labor law. Others are what Professor Jorge Carrillo Viveros
of the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana calls "low profile
unions," or unions with no presence on the shop floor.

In April 1993, workers at the BESA plant in Juarez petitioned for the
right to form a "coalition" which under Mexican labor law would give them
the right to bargain with their employers. All 113 workers who signed the
petition were immediately fired, the employer preferring to pay them their
severance rather than have a union in the plant. One worker, who must
remain anonymous, explains that because the labor authorities give the
activists names to the employers, those who sign such coalition petitions
are always fired.

 Union dissidents who demand democracy and insist that their unions fight
for economic and social justice are fired with the collusion of
management, the union and the government. The Mexican Boards of
Conciliation and Arbitration and the labor courts are notoriously
worthless in the defense of workers rights. Activists are blacklisted by
the employers and the unions, and in some cases threatened and beaten.
Today workers and independent unions like the Authentic Labor Front (FAT),
and some leftist parties like the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) are
forced to organize by building secret union cell structures within plants
and corporations.