Mexican Factory Workers Seek To Unionize Against Low Wages, Mistreatment
When you start your car, power your laptop or load your washing machine, you’re using products that likely traveled the globe. The reason— manufacturers in search of low-cost production. At the start of that journey is someone like Miriam Delgado.
Delgado was one of 700 workers who make printer cartridges in Ciudad Juárez for the American-owned company Lexmark. She and her coworkers are the main reason foreign companies choose to set up factories, also known as maquiladoras, in places like Mexico. Workers like her toil for as little as $7 a day.
After five years working nine-hour shifts on an assembly line, Delgado recently began pressing for a raise. Last week, she was fired.
Delgado is now part of a wave of unrest rippling among Mexican factory workers who labor just beyond the Texas-U.S. border in Juárez. Some 300 workers from at least four factories want to start independent unions, something practically unheard of here— challenging a system that’s been a key economic driver in the region for the past 50 years.
Delgado has joined about 70 workers who've set up a protest camp outside the Juárez factory, located just 10 miles south of the Texas border. Like her, they claim they were fired soon after demanding higher pay. They say they’re tired of struggling to provide for their families on a salary that, according to government figures, puts them below the poverty line.
By the end of her pay period, Delgado said, she's skipping meals so her kids can eat.
Poor wages aren’t the only issue. Lexmark workers claim they endure sexual harassment by their superiors and are given inadequate safety gear. Workers from at least three other Juárez maquiladoras— Foxconn, CommScope, and Eaton Bussman— are protesting similar conditions and have petitioned the state to authorize their effort to unionize.
Elizabeth Flores, a local labor attorney, compares worker protests to a ticking time bomb that’s finally exploding.
"It's not just a fight between a worker and some maquiladoras, it's a matter of the life that everybody deserves to live,” Flores said.
After years of economic recession and a period of heavy drug violence, Juárez is finally recovering. Today there are more jobs available than people to fill them. And as industry grows in Mexico’s interior, fewer people are migrating to northern border states in search of work. All of this has empowered workers in Juárez to speak out.
"If you talk to labor leaders and people of maquilas, they're very worried as to where the future labor force is going to come from,” said Jerry Pacheco, president of the Border Industrial Association in southern New Mexico.
Pacheco recently wrote an editorial about the need to raise factory wages in Juárez as a way to attract more workers. But he also defends the maquiladora industry, which is the backbone of more than half a trillion dollars in annual trade between the U.S. and Mexico.
“It's not just the wage that they pay,” he said. “A lot of these employees are getting two or three meals a day. They have sports activities: the maquila will sponsor a soccer team, for example.”
Multinational companies wield a lot of political influence, thanks in part to the millions of jobs they create on both sides of the border. Mexico's politicians have historically resisted the creation of independent unions. One of the selling points about locating in Juárez, as listed on the website of a business consulting firm in El Paso, is a "cooperative, predominantly non-union workforce."
"Any sort of objective assessment would tell you that labor rights are not perfectly upheld in Mexico,” said Chris Wilson, co-director the Mexico Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.
He argues that a well-functioning union could improve a company’s relationship with its workers and lead to greater productivity and prosperity for both. Lexmark reported its 2014 revenue to be $3.7 billion dollars.
“Ultimately the workers and the company have a similar set of interests," he said. "In that they both need the company to be successful."
A spokesman for Lexmark wouldn’t comment on worker allegations in Juárez, saying instead that the company was committed to open and honest conversation with its employees.
