Youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKV9e_ZDBWU

I’m an avid viewer of Youtube.com and found this video when I was searching for information. Nogales, Mexico: Las Maquilas, is a short documentary that captured the essence of maquiladoras in Nogales. Teresa Leal, an activist, is trying to help female employees better understand their rights in the factories. She contends that, “victims don’t realize they are being battered.” Many workers do not understand that they long hours they are working in such hazardous conditions can be bad for their health and are not legal

Change in me

I am surprised how little I actual new about Native American society. Having already taken various women’s studies classes, I expected this class to elaborate on the same issues. However, to my surprise, this class taught me so much more. Learning the history of how the children were forced into a school system that disrupted their native culture and taught them to be more western civilized shocked the hell out of me. I never realized how strongly we have imposed our culture onto an already civilized nation. In addition, the continuing battles of lands that we American’s have taken from the Native people who are striving to get it back. It is embarrassing to see what our country has done to these people who are just like us. I mean, realistically, they were here first and we have no right to take all their land and treat them like dirt. In a society where parents are teaching children how to behave and share with one another, our country can’t even follow those guidelines with the natives that were here first. It is unfortunate that schools aren’t teaching more about our history in relation to the Native American’s and how Christopher Columbus day truly shouldn’t be celebrated and is honoring a man that murdered thousands of natives.

Chapter 5: The Changing Gender Composition of the Maquiladora Workforce along the U.S.-Mexico Border

· Women’s massive influx into maquiladora jobs represented a dramatic departure from previous labor market dynamics in Mexico, where prior to the 1970’s women had on e of the lowest rates of formal labor force participation in the hemisphere
· Between 2000 and 2003 led to the loss of almost one-third of a million maquiladora jobs.
· In turn-of-the-century Mexico, when textile production was the main form of manufacturing, about 76,000 women held factory jobs; after forty years of industrial diversification, the female labor force had been reduced by half.
· Among many of the ironies of the maquiladora program is that, although it was intended to provide jobs for men, women were preferred for assembly jobs.
· The maquiladoras’ hiring practices continued despite criticisms, creating in the first decade of the program a workforce in which between 80 and 90 percent of the maquiladora workers were women.
· In the industry’s early years, most women workers were young, single, and childless. Their recruitment reflect TNC labor practices worldwide, which favored younger women because they were seen as being easier to train, less apt to organize, and unlikely to acquire the job seniority that could legitimate demands for wage increases.

The trend shifted:

· Now they related that married mothers made better workers because they were more mature, reliable, and less apt to jump from job to job than single women, who were immature, frivolous, and more interested in finding a man that in devoting themselves to their jobs.
· In 1980, the maquiladoras employed about 120,000 workers; by 1990, their numbers had risen to over 400,000; and at its high point in 1999, some 1.3 million held maquiladora jobs.
· The preferential recruitment of women that characterized the industry’s early years had by 1997 given way to alternative practices that were pulling men into the workforce. That year, when job growth peaked at 18 percent, women constituted a very slight majority (50.9 percent) of maquiladora workers:

1998—men 49.9 percent, women 50.1 percent
1999—men 50.9 percent, women 49.1 percent

· Since then, women’s proportionate representation in the border maquiladora labor force has shown a slow but steady decline, with women constituting less that 48 percent of the border maquiladora workforce in 2003.

Why?

· In Mexico border cities, where the recurrent economic crises plaguing the country have forced most of the working-age population to generate income through any available means and steady stream of migrants has augmented the economically active population, firms have generally enjoyed a plentiful supply of applicants for maquiladora employment.
· The composition of the maquiladora workforce has thus depended on recruitment practices that reflect employers’ demand for workers with specific characteristics and qualifications.
· Men’s increasing participation in skilled assembly jobs, in effect masculinizing jobs that were originally defined as women’s domain. The changing gender composition of the maquiladora industry, where men have increased their representation not merely as technicians, engineers, and administrators but also as production operatives, reflects this dynamic.

Nogales, Mexico

When I was searching for a picture of a maquiladoras town I came across Nogales, Mexico. The major problem in this town is the toxic drinking water that has been contaminated by the factories that flood the city with toxic waste. The town is using a 50-year-old water distribution system that is leaky and does not produce clean water anymore. With more and more people moving to the border region to acquire a job at one of the maquiladoras, “An estimated 40 percent of residents on the Mexican side lack water, sewers, or both,” (Davidson). As I was talking with Margo the other day, most money in Mexico is being spent on developing a new military to keep the maquiladoras from protesting. The time and money that could be spent on fixing the toxic waste dumping is being spent on developing a military. Along with Nogales, Ciudad Juarez and many other towns and cities along the border are being affected by this devastation.

http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson04.jpg
This pictures illuminates the 80 or so maquiladoras in Nogales.




http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson07.jpg
I found this picture to be interesting. This young woman is walking on the U.S. side of the border while smoke from a plastic burning factory trickles over the fence.

Davidson, Miriam. “Bridging Troubled Waters in Ambos Nogales.” 1999. http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1901/Davidson/Davidson.html

Women vs. Men

When maquiladoras were first being thought about, men were the targeted audience. They could do the heavy lifting and more labor intensive things. However, will the economy the way it was, men didn’t want cheap labor jobs, so it became the target for women. As Doreen Mattingly and Ellen Hansen suggest, “ Women are preferred both because they are less expensive to employ than men are and because their gender socialization and inexperience with labor unions presumably make them more docile and less easy to organize,” (Mattingly, 74). Young, single, childless women were originally the most wanted employees for the factories. They were naïve and wouldn’t think to organize against such torturous working conditions. In addition, they were easy to train and didn’t need any prior experience. Overtime, however, these young women would jump from job to job hoping to find something better that paid more leaving these factories without any employees. The trend started to shift towards older women with children who would be less likely to move from one job to the next. Factory owners, “now they related that married mothers made better workers because they were more mature, reliable, and less apt to jump from job to job than single women, who were immature, frivolous, and more interested in finding a man than in devoting themselves to their jobs,” (Mattingly, 80). Having to take care of a family, especially children, kept them rooted at one job with no intention to leave. In addition, they were more mature and could perform the daily tasks more eloquently.

Mattingly, Doreen, and Ellen Hansen. “Women and Change at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” The University of Arizona Press. Tuscon, Arizona. 2006.

Carmen Durán & Lourdes Luján

I have lived a sheltered life unaware of what the rest of the world is like. Through watching the “Maquilapolis: City of Factories” I was exposed to a whole different world I hardly understood. Several women suffered health problems because of the chemicals used in the factories. Carmen Durán contracted anemia and was forced to stop working. As a mother of three, working at the maquiladoras was her only form on income. The doctors basically told her if she continued to work in the factories, she would experience severe health problems that would eventually lead to death. Soon after she left, the factory was closed down and transferred to a new location in Indonesia. The relocation provided even cheaper labor costs for the parent company, at the same time putting thousands of workers out of business. Carmen, along with her co-workers faught the company and demanded their deserved severance pay that was striped and left the women with nothing. In the end, Carmen won $2,500. This sum of money does not even begin to cover everything she’s lost and her declining health.

Another heroic women’s story is Lourdes Luján. Lourdes lived in a neighborhood where the toxic chemical waste was poured down into the streets during a rain storm. This was how factories disposed of their left over waste chemicals. When Lourdes was growing up, she used to play in the waterhole near her home, now being filled with toxic chemicals children are contracting diseases and women are given birth to children with deformed bodies and mental illnesses. It is apparent that these communities receive little if any attention from the government and environmental and health services. Lourdes, along with others helped form the Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice to bring this problem to the public. Their main goal was to get the toxic waste dump left behind from a battery recycling factory cleaned up and disposed of, no longer dispensing those hazardous chemicals into the community. Their protests and complaints proved noteworthy because the government soon listened to their complaints and took action in cleaning up the factory remnants.

Sweatshops

One interesting thing that I read, was that at Duke University students, “stages a sit-in in the university president’s office to ensure that clothing bearing Duke’s name is not made in sweatshops,” (Kirk, 391). It is a dramatic move for students of a university to take a stand and demand that their own clothing is not made by poor children. Through this protest, hundreds of other schools took the pledge to ensure that their logos are not being sewn in a sweatshop either. In response to those protests, the U.S. Department of Labor, “mounted a media campaign focusing on industry ‘trendsetters,’” (Kirk, 391). This caught President Bill Clinton’s attention that in return formed the Apparel Industry Partnership that combined the industry, labor and human rights organizations. The partnership created a code of conduct which limited the number of hours someone could work, strict regulations for healthy and safety measures and no forced child labor. One big different it made was that wages must meet the minimum wage.

http://www.tabberone.com/Trademarks/SweatShops/LittleSweatShop/sweatshop.gif

In 2002, the partnership, “won another victory…when twenty-six major apparel companies (including Gap and Gymboree) settled a lawsuit in favor of workers on the island of Saipan in the western pacific,” (Kirk, 392). The companies agreed to pay back several wages in a total amount of $20 million. This sparked sweatshop and maquiladoras workers all over the world. In Mexico, several women after being laid off established the Maquiladora Dignidad y Justicia (Dignity and Justice Maquiladora Company).


http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/clipart/jpeg/IndiaLarge/sweatshop_mumbai.jpeg

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. “Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives.” The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. New York, NY. 2007.

My inspiration

For my final project I have chose to switch from my original topic to Maquiladoras. The film “Maquilapolis: City of Factories”, encouraged me to rediscover this issue and explain more about it. As Americans, we do not consider where our clothes are being made; we just purchase them at various malls and retailers. Especially here at WSU, being in a college town secludes you from the rest of the world, the outside world. I rarely watch the news and really explore the big issues that exist in the media. Last year in my women’s studies 200 class, we began to touch on the topic of sweatshops and maquiladoras. Although we did not watch a film, the text and articles that we read illustrated the horrific working conditions most women in these jobs suffer. Through my final project I hope to explore what a maquiladoras is and the effects it has on society, mostly the women who they employ.