Women Workers in the Maquiladoras and the Debate on Global Labor Standards

Abstract

This paper represents a collective contribution to an ongoing debate on the benefits and disadvantages of export-based, industrial jobs for women as well as on the implications of global labor standards on these types of jobs. On the basis of extensive research on women in Mexico's and Central America's maquiladoras (assembly plants that produce export goods), this paper aims to problematize the viewpoints that present export-based, industrial jobs as dignified alternatives for women in the South and to question the skepticism about global labor standards as a possible alternative for improving work conditions in all sectors producing for export. In so doing, the paper stresses three interrelated issues: a) the relevance of local and regional contexts that inform diverse industrialization paths over time, b) the agency the women workers represent, and c) the legal instruments already existent in our common efforts to improve working conditions.

Keywords:

• Export-oriented growth
• women's labor force participation
• globalization
• labor standards
• maquiladoras

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to the associate editor and the reviewers for their enormous help in producing the final version of this article. It has been a long process but a fruitful one. We are also grateful for financial support from the Institute of Iberoamerican Studies (research-environment support) in order to revise the final version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ See Brígida García and Orlandina de Oliveira (1994) and Fussell (2000). In interviews carried out during 2004–5, Domínguez and Quintero have also found these testimonies, especially in the cities of Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuña, border areas in northeastern Mexico.

² This fieldwork, carried out during July 2009 in El Salvador, is part of the project Maquilas and Remittances in El Salvador: Transnational Processes, Women and Gender financed during 2009 by the Swedish Agency for Development Cooperation (SAREC-Sida). Edmé Domínguez leads this project with the assistance of Åsa Stenman.

³ Fieldwork in Tijuana, Piedras Negras, and Matamoros carried out by the authors, as well as Domínguez, Quintero, and Lopez's already-mentioned fieldwork in El Salvador in 2009, support these findings.

⁴ In government regulation, a “race to the bottom” is a phenomenon that is said to occur when competition between nations or states (over investment capital, for example) leads to the progressive dismantling of regulatory standards.

⁵ For examples of different campaigns trying to fight companies for environmental damages, see Edmé Domínguez (2002). See also the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM 1993), and the documentary films produced by CJM and other NGOs involved in labor issues in the northern Mexico border area (Dan Oko 2001).

⁶ Human Rights Watch, together with several local NGOs, undertook a campaign to stop these compulsory pregnancy tests in 1997. The result of the campaign was that some, but not all, of the big maquiladoras stopped testing (Domínguez 2002).

⁷ Cirila Quintero Ramírez (1999) distinguishes two types of unions in maquiladoras: traditional unions, which focused on better wages and labor benefits for workers, and subordinate unions, which were controlled by managerial interests. In spite of their differences, the labor board (Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje) recognizes both.

⁸ However, studies of different transnational networks, like Factor X and CJM, have also found complicated relationships with international donors and internal conflicts within the organizations themselves (Domínguez 2007).

⁹ An interesting case of combative union activity occurred in the Dominican Republic, where the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de Zonas Francas (FENATRAZONAS) organized a sizable percentage of the companies in the free zones during the 1990s. By the end of the decade, this organization had unionized at least twenty maquiladoras.

¹⁰ Trade unions like the Sindicato General de Costureras [General Seamstresses Union] and the Federación de Asociaciones y Sindicatos Autónomos de El Salvador (FEASIES) are either organizing women directly or cooperating with NGOs in training women workers to organize and claim their rights (fieldwork in El Salvador, summer 2009).

¹¹ See Domínguez (2002) and Luce (2005) for examples of such successful campaigns.

¹² By labor rights, we understand those included in core ILO conventions: 1) abolition of forced labor, 2) abolition of child labor, 3) elimination of discrimination, 4) the right to organize and freedom of association (Luce 2005).

¹³ Our interviews with several Mexican labor organizations since 2004 and our fieldwork in 2009 in El Salvador also support these findings.

¹⁴ Publicly, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Méxio (CTM) argued that Mexican labor legislation was more advanced than that of Canada or the US, and therefore, the NAALC was both irrelevant and a violation of Mexico's sovereignty (MacDonald 2003).

¹⁵ See the examples in MacDonald (2003), Bensusan (2002), and Domínguez (2007).

¹⁶ In 1984, there was an amendment to the GSP legislation that provided an opening for requiring that specific labor standards, such as the freedom of association and the abolition of child and forced labor, be respected by countries granted GSP treatment (Luce 2005).

¹⁷ Rosario Ortiz is the main leader of the RMSM, a women's trade union network in Mexico and one of CJM's member organizations.

¹⁸ See Domínguez 2007. Other critical voices also claim that codes of conduct have created new business opportunities for NGOs, which market themselves as independent teams monitoring the implementation of such codes (Wolf Herrera, Mármol, and Martínez 2003).

¹⁹ There have also been multiple stakeholder projects involving international institutions like the World Bank, multinational corporations, NGOs, and national governments that propose comparative advantage schemes focusing on the respect of decent labor norms and other advantages like geographic proximity to central markets (Marion Traub-Werner 2006).

²⁰ The Mexican program “Oportunidades” is based on transferring cash amounts to mothers in extreme poverty on the condition that their children attend school and health clinics and that the mothers act as volunteers to clean clinics and schools and promote the program (Molyneux 2006). According to Sylvia Chant (2007) and Molyneux (2006), these women are made responsible and empowered to deal with their own poverty.

²¹ In analyzing the Mexican Jefas de Familia[female family heads] subprogram, which is part of the government project Habitat, López Estrada and Ordoñez (2006) found that Jefas de Familia reinforces traditional divisions of labor.

²² For Pakistan and India, see the Pan Asia Cooperation Society's clothing stores, which are rapidly spreading in Sweden. For the case of Zapatista women in Mexico, see Christine Eber (2003) and Yolanda Castro Apreza (2003). For other experiences in southern Mexico, see Lynn Stephen (2005).