THE MAQUILADORA WORKERS OF JUAREZ FIND THEIR VOICE
By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, 11/20/15
Fermina, the mother of a disappeared maquiladora worker, marched in one of the many protests over the murder of women in Juarez.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, CHIHUAHUA -- After more than a decade of
silence, maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez have found their voice. The city, just across the Rio Grande from El
Paso, Texas, is now the center of a growing rebellion of laborers in the border
factories. At the gates to four plants,
including a huge 5000-worker Foxconn complex, they have set up encampments, or
"plantons," demanding recognition of independent unions, and
protesting firings and reprisals.
"We just got so tired of the insults, the bad
treatment and low wages, that we woke up," explains Carlos Serrano, a
leader of the revolt at Foxconn's Scientific Atlanta facility. "We don't really know what's going to
happen now, and we're facing companies that are very powerful and have a lot of
money. But what's clear is that we are
going to continue. We're not going to
stop."
About 255,000 people work directly in Juarez' 330
maquiladoras, about 13% of the total nationally, making Juarez one of the
largest concentrations of manufacturing on the U.S./Mexico border. Almost all the plants are foreign-owned. Eight of Juarez' 17 largest factories belong
to U.S. corporations, three to Taiwanese owners, two to Europeans, and two to
Mexicans. Together, they employ over
69,000 - over a quarter of the city's total.
Five (two U.S. and all the Taiwanese companies) are
contract manufacturers of electronics equipment. They assemble, and even design, laptops,
cellphones and other electronic devices that are later sold under the famous
brand names of huge corporations. One
contract manufacurer, Foxconn, is the world's largest. The Taiwanese giant became notorious several
years ago when workers in a huge plant in China committed suicide over
stressful and abusive conditions.
Three Juarez plants produce auto parts and electronics,
including the city's largest factories - Delphi, with over 16,000 workers and
Lear with 24,000. Eleven of the top 17
maquiladoras are electronics manufacturers, whether for autos or consumers.
In most other maquiladora cities like Tijuana or
Matamoros, workers are rigidly controled, and independent organizing
suppressed, by a political partnership between the companies, government
authorities and unions tied to Mexico's old ruling party, the Institutional
Revolutionary Party. Often when workers
file papers to gain legal status for an independent union, they discover that
the company has a longstanding agreement with one of the "charro"
unions. The local labor board then
places obstacles to prevent any independent organizing. This arrangement is used as a selling point,
to convince foreign corporations to invest in building factories.
Juarez has been an exception, however. Its selling point has simply been some of the
lowest wages on the border.
Manufacturing consultant Chet Frame told the El Paso Inc. website that
while company-friendly unions have agreements in other border cities,
"they have not been able to get a toehold in Juarez." As a result, a survey by the Hunt Institute
for Global Competitiveness found that the average pay of Juarez maquiladora
workers was 18% less than the average for manufacturing workers in Mexico's
border cities.
The Juarez protests come just as Congress gets ready to
debate a new trade treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which opponents
charge will reproduce the same devastation Mexican workers experienced as a
result of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Critics charge NAFTA cemented into place a
regime of low wages, labor violations and violence on the border after it took
effect in 1994. Today, economic pressure
has become so extreme that Juarez' workers feel they have no choice but to risk
their jobs in hope of change.
Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC
CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. "The only way a single
mother can survive here is with help from family or friends," she
says. Lopez has two daughters, one 13
and one 6 years old. "I can't spend
any time with them because I'm always working.
When I leave in the morning, I leave food for the older one to warm up
for lunch. Childcare would cost 200
pesos a week or more, so I can't afford it."
A cold winter has already descended on Ciudad Juarez,
close to freezing at night. Parents
worry that children at home alone with a heater for warmth risk fire in highly
flammable homes of cardboard or castoff pallets from factories. "We just have enough money to eat soup
and beans," she explains. "We
don't eat meat." Lopez' wage is 600
pesos a week (about $36). "No one can
live on this. A fair wage would be 250
pesos a day. In the U.S. people make in
one hour what it takes us all day to earn."
Rosario Acosta and other mothers march behind the banner
of the group they organized:
"Nuestras Hija de Regreso a Casa" - "May Our Daughters
Come Home"
This new workers' movement began last August. At Foxconn, people started talking in the
bathrooms, at lunch and on the lines.
Anger over conditions quickly started to rise. Operators on the line there make 650
pesos/week (about $39). A family with
kids, according to Serrano, needs 700-800 just for food. A gallon of milk in Juarez costs the same as
it does in El Paso, on the other side of the Rio Grande.
"Some foremen would tell young women that they had a
good body, and demand to go out with them," Serrano adds. "If they didn't, they'd call the women
lazy or burros or good for nothing. If
the women went to Human Relations, the harassment still didn't stop." In order to survive, some women were putting
in two shifts, back to back, or even working three days straight through. When they protested harassment, overtime was
cut off, he says.
At CommScope, supervisors charged 50 pesos a week to put
someone's name on the list for overtime, charges Cuauhtemoc Estrada, lawyer for
the workers in the plantons. "They
felt so humiliated that some would break into tears." According to Raul
Garcia, a CommScope worker, those who protested were sent to a special work
area known as "the prison," or simply, "hell." Older or slower workers were sent to another,
called "the junkyard," where they were humiliated and ridiculed.
On September 16, Mexico's National Day, a group of 190
CommScope workers went to the local labor authorities, the Conciliation and
Arbitration Board, and filed a request for a "registro," or legal
status, for a union. According to
Garcia, the new union's general secretary, the company then started cutting
overtime. Some married couples had been
working different shifts, so that each could be home to take care of
children. Managers reassigned them to the
same shift, forcing one to quit.
Finally, 171 workers were fired on October 19. The terminated workers then organized a
permanent planton at the factory gates.
Soledad Aguilar, mother of a murdered daughter
At Foxconn workers also asked for a registro for their
own union in September. The labor board
set up meetings with company managers to discuss their grievances. "The managers agreed to do small
things, like reinstate the 'employee of the month,'" Serrano recalls. "But on the big issues like wages and
mistreatment, they just promised to do something next year."
Workers organized a demonstration at the gates to
pressure Foxconn. When managers
threatened them, the demonstration went on for a week. The company filed a civil suit for damages
against its own workers, and in mid-October the firings began there also. Serrano was the first, and by the end of the
month 110 people had been terminated. On
November 2 they set up a planton, and have been living at the gate ever
since. "They're treating us like
criminals," he says, "but we're workers who have been there for many
years. They have to reinstate us, and
the government has to give us our registro."
Neither Foxconn nor CommScope responded to interview
requests, but Rick Aspan, vice-president of corporate communications for
Commscope told Frontera Norte Sur, a news site published at the Center for
Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces,
"We terminated fewer than ten people from the facility recently," for
violating company rules.
Plantons have now spread to two other maquiladoras - a
Lexmark factory making ink cartridges, and an Eaton Corporation auto parts
plant. Lexmark workers just filed their
own request for a union registro.
This insurgent wave threatens the established economic
order in one of the main centers of maquiladora production on the border. Even as Mexico continues to feel the impact
of the U.S. recession, Juarez still has more than 330 plants employing more
than 178,000 workers. By U.S. standards,
many are huge. Foxconn's two factories
employ over 11,000 people. CommScope
employs 3000, and Lexmark 2800.
Protesting the murders.
Companies are attracted to the border because of low
wages and lax enforcement of labor and environmental laws. In 2013, the minimum wage in Juarez was less
than 65 pesos a day (today about $3.88).
At the beginning of the NAFTA era, this low wage system
was challenged by several attempts to organize independent unions. In 1993 a partnership between the Mexican
labor federation, the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) and the U.S. union, the
United Electrical Workers, mounted a campaign at the General Electric factory,
Compania Armadora. Workers were fired,
but pressure from UE members in U.S. plants forced GE to rehire several of
them. Nevertheless, the FAT lost the
election that would have given it the right to negotiate a contract.
Other worker protests took place in the same period. At Clarostat, a division of Allen Bradley
Corp. (now Rockwell Automation) workers tried unsuccessfully to organize to
raise wages. When one of them, Alma
Molina, was fired and then tried to get a job at a GE plant, a manager told her
that her name was on a blacklist.
Worker activism of the period was fueled by a wave of
birth defects. Between 1988 and 1992,
163 Juarez children were born with anencephaly - without brains - an extremely
rare disorder. Health critics charged
that the defects were due to exposure to toxic chemicals in the factories or
because of their discharges.
Protesting the murders.
In the mid-1990s Mexican and U.S. unions cooperated in
opening a Center for Labor Studies to help educate workers about their
rights. It focused on the three
factories owned by Lear Industries, which supplies car seats to General
Motors. Lear still employs over 7,700
people in Juarez.
"When I was being hired, after the interview, they
asked me when I would have my next period," one worker explained. "They said I couldn't actually start
work until I had my period. On the first
day of my period, I came back. The nurse
was there, and she said, 'Let's see it, show me the sanitary napkin.' They accepted me that same day."
CETLAC director Guillermina Solis charged at the time
that companies didn't want to hire pregnant women, and even fired women when
they become pregnant, in order to avoid government-mandated maternity benefits. Her allegations were supported by the Women's
Rights Project of Human Rights Watch.
Juarez' worker activism of the 1990s, however, declined
as the city's women became victims of a notorious series of mass murders that
terrorized them for a decade. By
February 2005 over 370 women had been murdered since 1993. In 2010 alone 247 women were murdered, and
between January and August of the following year, another 130.
The mothers of Juarez organized despite the terror to
fight for the lives of their daughters.
They charged that larger social forces are responsible for creating a
climate of extreme violence against women.
Juarez has become a huge metropolis built on the labor of tens of
thousands of young women, overwhelmingly migrants, who have traveled north from
cities, small villages, and rural areas in central and southern Mexico.
Soledad Aguilar
"While the
city and its industry depend on them totally, they are important only as
productive workers, not as human beings," Rosario Acosta, mother of one of
the disappeared women, explained in a 2003 interview. "We've opened the big door, our border
to the U.S., in order to allow big multinationals to settle in our city. We give them a permit to do absolutely
anything. They don't have to guarantee
the most elementary aspects of life, from wages women can live on, to basic
service in our communities, or even just security."
Residents of the border are treated as throwaway people,
whether they're factory laborers in the plants, or barrio residents living
along dirt roads, in cardboard houses with no sewers, running water or
electricity. According to Julia Monarrez
Fragoso, a professor at Tijuana's College of the Northern Border (COLEF)
"the practices of the maquiladora industry towards the workers reveal a
consume and dispose cycle."
This new wave of worker protests, therefore, is breaking
the fear and terror that has gripped working-class neighborhoods for over a
decade. Elizabeth Flores, director of
the Pastoral Center for Workers for the past 15 years, says "each week a
woman comes through our center looking for her daughter. At the same time,
parents have lost hope that any better future awaits their children other than
a job in the maquiladora. And young
people themselves don't want to go to work there. Spend their lives - for what?"
Nevertheless, she says, "People are tired of the
abuse, which has been terrible. They had
to lose their fear to protest, but desperation and anger are potent antidotes
to fear."
This year the business community of Juarez is celebrating
50 years of the Border Industrial Program, which opened the door to the
maquiladora boom. In that time, two and
a half generations of workers have passed through the plants. "They were always the fundamental part
of production," concludes Cuauhtemoc Estrada. "But the global economic model imposed
on us by free trade meant the objective was always producing the most at the
lowest cost. Now we see the result. And as difficult as it may be, workers are
determined to change it."
Fermina
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