wait, isn't lack of wage increases good because it allows more people to be employed?
Do you consider shooting random workers to enforce wage controls a good thing?
Does any of the following from just the first article that you haven't looked at sound like something you want to support?
The impoverished maquiladora workers really have few choices and are forced to choose between working for starvation wages and not having employment at all. A husband and a wife working full time jobs in these factories still cannot earn enough money to decently support a family of four. It is economic subjugation. In too many instances, workers put in gruelling 10 hour shifts 6 days a week doing difficult unhealthy jobs at an unreasonable work pace often around hazardous and toxic elements.
During the 1980’s, the American auto industry beginning to shift large numbers of America’s premier jobs to oppressed foreign workers. Labor activists began speaking out and taking groups of autoworkers to Detroit to stage protests and demonstrations. They did TV and radio shows and confronted G.M.’s CEO Roger Smith at G.M. stockholder meetings. They raised issues such as corporate restructuring that was done without regard to social consequences, the practice of apartheid in G.M.’s plants in South Africa or the exploitation of foreign workers.
On the stockholder floor, labor activists would challenge and debate Smith and tell him that his Mexican workers were falling over on the assembly lines from hunger. He once shot back that wasn’t true and claimed that G.M. was furnishing one meal per day to these workers. That statement was immediately picked up and then quickly forgotten by the national press. The truth was that G.M. was having a yearly labor turnover rate of almost 90 percent, because workers couldn’t afford the meagre costs necessary for work including food, clothing and transportation expenses.
Maquiladora plants in general have an especially dismal record of exploitation relative to women and children. It has not been uncommon to find young children as young as 12 years old working in these factories under forged documents.
In 1999 the net wage for the average maquiladora worker was $55.77 per week, after 4 percent union dues of $2.32. The weekly minimum living expense for one worker was $54. In addition to the pathetic wages and disregarded labor standards, the living and health conditions around these maquiladora factories are beyond belief.
A recent New York Times article said that because these workers have no financial resources, a nutritious meal for their family is an unattainable luxury. Many live in a squalid grid of dirt streets, rotting garbage, swamps of open sewers with unsafe water, overburdened or none existent schools and violence against the women.
A December 2007 Global Exchange article, discussing maquiladoras since NAFTA, discussed how worker settlements were sprouting up around these factories with housing made from cardboard, sticks and sheet metal. These shanties had neither sufficient clean water nor adequate sewage systems. The article talked of sweatshop blue jean maquiladoras making millions of dollars off their workers, including children under the age of 11 and of young women workers suffering sexual harassment. It told of laborers putting in 12-hour workdays producing thousands of pairs of Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Wrangler jeans per week for weekly wages of 700 pesos ($53 U.S.). These jeans were being sold in Los Angeles stores for 1000 pesos ($75 U.S.) per pair.
These jean factories pollute the local water. The stone washing and bleaching leaves highly toxic wastewater with heavy metals in the effluent. The article stated that the runoff makes the nearby farm fields become iridescent and radiates a metallic blue because of this chemical run-off.
An article titled "Maquila Neoslavery" by journalist and human rights activist Gary MacEoin in the National Catholic Reporter, noted that a typical maquila 9-hour day quota for a woman is to iron 1,200 shirts. MacEoin said “few survive the unhealthy working conditions, poor ventilation, verbal abuse, strip searches, and sexual harassment for more them six or seven years.
Dr. Ruth Rosenbaum, executive director CREA, said the wages do not enable them to meet basic human needs of their family for nutrition, housing, clothing, and non-consumables and that one maquiladora worker provides only 19.8 percent of what a family of four needs to live.
Author Rachel Stohr talked of the brutal treatment, the wage slavery, of how the Mexican government gains economically from these factories and how the enforcement of Mexican labor laws is just not happening in a 2004 University of New Mexico story.
To the U.S. companies who run maquiladora factories, the workers are expendable and only the financial investment is important. According to Rev. David Schilling, director of ICCR’s Global Corporate Accountability Program, for years religious institutional investors have been pressing corporations to pay their Mexican employees a sustainable living wage.
Martha Ojeda, director of Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, said “they work long productive hours for the world’s biggest corporations and still cannot provide the most basic needs for their families, they cannot afford to consume the items they produce”.
Brian Chasnoff wrote in the Comite Fronterizo de Obreros that the Immigration Clinic of San Jose says that it hears of so much rape in the maquiladoras that it is disgusting.
