Email this page

Corporate Social Responsibility

Lupita’s Reward

Lupita is a factory worker who assembles automotive wire harnesses for the global corporation Alcoa in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. She is one of hundreds of workers who every day come up with innovative ideas to simplify the assembly processes. One of Lupita’s ideas was selected by managers for Alcoa’s “Go for the Gold” program, allowing Alcoa to reap gains in efficiency, to the benefit of its bottom line.

Under this program, Alcoa was supposed to reward Lupita with a cash bonus proportionate to the savings the corporation was going to make by implementing Lupita’s idea, in this case approximately 500 pesos ($45), equivalent to a week’s wages for a typical maquiladora worker.

Alcoa management withheld cash rewards for several weeks from Lupita and nearly 100 other workers. The workers feared that their innovations were being stolen by supervisors — in the past, supervisory employees have taken credit for innovations by line workers, pocketing the cash.

Things changed overnight for Lupita and her coworkers when she met Julia Quiñonez, coordinator of the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s (CFO), and Ricardo Hernández, director of AFSC’s Mexico-U.S. Border Program. Julia and Ricardo suggested that Lupita attend an upcoming meeting between religious institutional investors and Alcoa’s top U.S. management in San Antonio, Texas.

A maquiladora worker from Reynosa visiting corporate headquarters to raise worker's issues.

Ricardo provided Lupita, along with three other workers whose U.S. visas enabled them to cross the border, with background information on the ongoing conversations among Alcoa’s religious shareholders, company management, and rank-and-file workers. These conversations have taken place over the past eight years and have included five-hour meetings in San Antonio, New York City or Del Rio, Texas, a border town.

During the three-hour drive north from Ciudad Acuña to San Antonio, Ricardo also explained to the workers the contents of “Alcoa’s Values,” the company’s code of conduct. At the meeting in San Antonio, Lupita spoke candidly about the irregularities in the “Go for the Gold” program. Then Ricardo offered an interpretation of her case, so that the shareholders and the company president could more easily undertand it, presenting similar cases from other Alcoa plants at the border. His remarks were a mix of incident reports and specific recommendations to solve the problem, encouraging the company’s top leaders to put in place an immediate remedy to Lupita’s complaint as well as to several other issues raised by the workers.

A week later, Lupita and dozens of other workers were paid thousands of dollars that had been unfairly withheld by Alcoa.

A Permanent Dialogue

AFSC’s Mexico-U.S. Border Program promotes corporate social responsibility through engaging in permanent and constructive dialogues with U.S. corporations operating manufacturing facilities in Mexico. AFSC efforts have focused on those companies where it has contacts among workers through its strategic partnership with the CFO, which focuses on worker education and organizing among maquiladora workers.

Through this partnership, AFSC can present direct testimony of labor rights violations or abuses taking place on the shop floor of those companies. In addition, AFSC has used its shareholder status in certain companies, including Alcoa, to gain greater leverage. This dual approach allows the Service Committee to bring forward specific examples in its discussions with corporate management, specifics that are of great value to company officials who otherwise would be ignorant of the details of labor violations in their facilities.

A key element of AFSC’s approach has been to support maquiladora workers to speak for themselves in shareholder meetings. To foster that kind of empowerment, AFSC provides tactical advice, updated information on corporate operations, and translation of important documents, as well as workshop presentations on a regular basis.

For more than a decade, AFSC has worked together with the CFO and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) to develop an approach that has proven successful in holding some corporations accountable to their host communities in Mexico. In general, maquiladora workers do not believe voluntary codes of conduct are the solution to improving workplace conditions, seeing them rather as complementary to enforcement of national labor laws.

Building credibility in these dialogues has been a long and arduous process, which has earned the trust of stakeholders who often hold sharply polarized views. The AFSC-CFO-ICCR partnership, and the integrated approach it has developed, has made it possible to obtain real-time information about conditions in specific plants, offering a reality check to corporate officers in the United States and monitoring the implementation of their promises.

Thousands of workers’ families have seen concrete economic benefits as a result of the CFO and AFSC’s joint efforts, combining grassroots organizing with advocacy in meetings with company’s executives and shareholders.