I went to Mexico to study Spanish. My adventure led me to Buenavista, a small town that is home to a tiny Spanish Language school (where I was the only student for the two months I spent studying there) and also home to six maquiladora factories.
The factories interested me at first because I had spent so much time working in campaigns against sweatshop labor. However, they began to interest me a little bit more when my money ran out and I still wasn't ready to leave the life I was creating or the friends I was making in Buenavista. I decided to get a job to stay on a little longer and that's when I learned first hand about the job market in Buenavista; apart from what is offered by the maquiladora factories, there is none.
So when I heard stories about another student who had stayed on and worked for a while in one of the factories I decided I could do the same. After being thrown out of the first two simply for being a "gringa" I had a friend take me to talk to the manager of the smallest one around. Somewhat amused, he gave me a job on my pretext that I just wanted to improve my Spanish and earn enough money to pay my rent.
There's nothing in the world like the rhythmic cliking humming and snipping of a clothing factory. I think I had always imagined that my jeans were spit out of some big machine with perfect stitches, looking exactly like a million other pairs spit out by the smae machine. Even in my three years working in anti-sweatshop campaigns I had never stopped to really think about what, besides the abuse, was actually accompli shed in these sweatshops.
Equipped with tiny efficient scissors that fit right in my palm, opening and shutting between my thumb and forefinger and a piece of chalk to mark errors, I was put in my "line" to start my first day of work. Suddenly I understood. Everyday bundles of pant legs, back pockets, and belt loops arrive, already cut. Someone's careful hands guide the material through the sewing machine, one connecting the front to the back, another adding the waist or attaching the back pockets, the labels, and finally hemming the bottoms. Next the millions of extra strings are cut off and finally the whole piece is checked to insure that no strings were left behind, no stitches are crooked and everything looks just right. Every eye in the place is glued to its work, every hand moves with amazing precision and speed. The end result is thousands upon thousands of jeans that get packed up and shipped off the be sold in the United States.
I entered the maquiladora factory as a sort of back-up in case I wasn't able to find better work. I left after a little more than a week because I was able to set myself up giving English clases as an alternative was to earn money. But even in the short time I spent in the factory, I learned a lot more about exploitation. The first shock came with the realization that almost no one I worked with in the factory actually lived in Buenavista. The majority were from even smaller neighboring towns. Unlike the people from Buenavista, who are known for miles around for being light-skinned, tall and supposedly more good looking, these folks were of obvious indiginous descent. At first the idead really surprised me, but I soon realized that this was the Mexican capitalist's very own brand of divide-and-conquer racism. It works very much like racism in the United States. The light-skinned people have better jobs as secretaries or managers or own small family businesses while the people of more obvious Indian descent, from the other surrounding towns work the worst jobs in the factories. Tension exists between the two groups even though both earn very little. There are almost no rich or even very well off families in Buenavista; the overwhelming majority are working class.
Seeing all this, I finally understood why Buenavista was such a popular site for these maquiladora factories. The workers not only do not live in Buenavista but are also considered to be racially different. This creates a division between them and the rest of the town. Without the support of their community, organizing a union will only be that much harder for these workers.
The second big lesson I learned in the factory had to do with the real source of exploitation of labor. I have to admit that at first I was of the opinion that these factories were "better" than the ones I had read about in other places. While they still had a nine-and-a-half hour day they are actually paid overtime wages when they are forced to work more. They factory was well ventilated and we were not restricted from using the bathroom. I heard no stories of forced abortions and there was even a clinic with very limited services provided to all employees.
We weren't yelled at to hurry up and they even played the radio for us sometimes. I had always described the terrible exploitation in the maquiladora factories by the dangerous working conditions, forced overtime, and general intimidation by the bosses. How could I explain it now? The answer was as close as my measly pay check. For almost 50 hours a week one worker makes less than 35 dollars a week base pay. Beginners doing piece work (being paid for each pany they worked on), sometimes come away with the equivalent of $5 or $10 a week until they are able to speed up and meet their quotas. An average quota is 75 pairs of pants an hour or over 700 pairs a day. While I worked in the factory the brand of jeans we made were "MUDD," a popular womens brand, which sell anywhere from 30-55 dollars a pair. With one weeks base pay a worker cannot even buy back one pair of jeans they helped make. And that relationship is the main exploitation. Poor working conditions and a repressive environment add to corporate profits, and at the end of the day it is the low wages paid to the workers and the high prices charged to consumers that make these multinational corporations so rich, and the rest of us so poor. And in the end this will be one of the biggest challenges that workers will face in our times. The issue is now even bigger than black, brown and white unity. A global corporation can only be fought by global unity. Our new battle cry must be "Workers of the world unite"!
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