Women in the Maquiladora
When Teresa Hernández, a promotora (organizer) for the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO), moved to the border from Mexico City to work in a maquiladora, her children were eight and ten years old. Teresa, a single mother, was relieved that her son and daughter were old enough to eat breakfast alone and get to school by themselves while she worked the first shift, from 6:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon.
Teresa explains that income from the maquiladoras is rarely enough to support a family, especially with only one family member working. “There are a lot of single women living here,” Teresa says, “but even in most marriages both partners have to work.”
In the afternoons when her shift ended, Teresa cleaned and ironed for a wealthy family for an extra 50 pesos a week. After that she had to do all the housework in her own home: clean, cook dinner, make lunch for her children to take to school the next day, wash and iron their uniforms. “But,” she says, “we lived well.”
Women constitute a large majority of the maquiladora workforce. On the Mexico-U.S. border, the proportion of women in the maquiladoras reached a high of at least 80 percent in the early 1980s. In recent years, labor shortages and the entry of heavier industries have prompted many firms to hire increasing numbers of male workers. Women, however, are still in the majority, constituting up to 70 percent of the workforce in light assembly industries and 57 percent overall.
While life in the maquiladoras is a struggle for all workers, the greater social subjugation of women increases their vulnerability to economic exploitation. The lower status of the female labor force is reflected in the maquiladoras’ low wages, long hours, and poor health conditions. Around the world, women have fewer options for paid employment than men, face the overt or tacit threat of violence both inside and outside of the home, and bear the lion’s share of responsibility for caring for children, the elderly, and the sick. As several of the readings in this chapter document, maquiladora women are also subject to sexual violence and abuse. This is the social reality that underlies the stereotypical image of the “docile” woman worker.
I went looking for work every day. When one plant was hiring they told me to come every morning and they kept me there until 8:00 at night. Every day they gave us one five-minute test: vision, blood, ears, X-rays, pregnancy test. They asked me how many children I had, how many years I’d been married, what my husband did for a living, how much he earned. They asked what I’m like, whether I had a temper, did I complain much. I said I’m very calm. Every day for two weeks I paid a lot of money to take two buses to get there, wait most of the day with about sixty other people, and then go home. After two weeks they put a list up of the fifteen people they’d chosen, and I was on it. It takes a long time to get a job. They do that to see if you really want to work.
—Elsa, worker at an electronics plant in Reynosa, Tamaulipas
A dearth of paid employment for men is one consequence of the maquiladora industry’s preference for hiring women. Such trends have brought about a restructuring of social roles that reverberates through the entire community. Gregoria Rodriguez, an epidemiologist in the Texas border region, argues that rapid changes in traditional social structures, coupled with economic destitution, have led to increased rates of alcoholism and domestic violence.
In other cases, women are left to care for their families alone, as single heads of households. With or without a partner, maquiladora women often lack a strong support network, as many are migrants from Mexico’s interior who have left everything behind in order to earn a meager wage. Women’s classic “double shift”—at the factory and at home—must be shouldered without the traditional support of an extended family. Cuts in government spending for health and social services only exacerbate the problem.
In the United States, women are also disproportionately affected by the flight of industry across the border. In El Paso, Texas, for example, garment factories owned by Levi Strauss have closed down and moved to Mexico in search of cheaper labor. Women, who make up 85 percent of the city’s garment workers, have been forced to take jobs in the service industry, suffering a cut in pay and status. According to researchers, the greatest number of NAFTA-related layoffs in the United States have occurred in the electronics and apparel industries, both of which employ a predominantly female labor force.
Women in the maquiladoras are far from passive victims of circumstance, however. As women begin to organize in the workplace and in communities, many strengthen their self-confidence and build stronger ties of solidarity. From individual acts of resistance on the shop floor to international campaigns, women stand at the center of maquiladora activism.
Women on the Border: Needs and Opportunities
Originally published in BorderLines, Vol. 5, No. 4, April 1997. Reprinted by permission of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, PO Box 2178, Silver City, NM 88062.
The U.S. Mexico border—the physical juncture of North and South—is a region where the social dynamics of economic integration are held in sharp relief. As such, the border provides a prime opportunity to examine the benefits and problems associated with the project of economic restructuring that consumes both the U.S. and Mexican governments. Examining the status and needs of women on the border is equally illuminating, for women on the border, like women in other parts of the developing world, bear the brunt of the structural inequities that are becoming increasingly apparent in the predominant neoliberal, export oriented development model.
The complex "reality" of the border defies a one-shot characterization of women in the region. Enormous differences exist in the experiences of women on the U.S. versus the Mexican side, of course, and factors such as age, class, ethnicity, and migrant status interact with dominant cultural patterns on both sides of the border to produce a kaleidoscope of women's lives. But women on both sides of the border share certain experiences and realities that cut across lines of race, ethnicity, and class.
Many of the problems entailed by economic integration affect men and women indiscriminately. In Mexico, for example, population growth fueled by the promise of maquiladora jobs has far outpaced the construction of public infrastructure, resulting in severe environmental and public health concerns. In the United States, industries that have shut down and relocated to Mexico have laid off both male and female workers.
Yet women bear the brunt of the high levels of poverty that plague both sides of the border. Researchers have calculated that over 30 percent of the U.S. border population and over 60 percent of the population in Mexican border municipalities have incomes below the poverty line; that is, incapable of supplying the basic needs of a family of four. Women must perform the daily miracle of providing for the family on wages that cannot possibly meet basic needs. In Mexico, this onerous task was made all the more difficult by the devaluation of the peso in 1994, which robbed Mexican workers of over half their pre-crisis purchasing power.
On both sides of the border, women are more severely affected by cutbacks in social spending associated with economic restructuring. In Mexico, austerity measures threaten vacation pay, daycare, and family leave programs. Ongoing reductions in government food subsidies have also had significant impacts on women. In the United States, recent cuts in the welfare program will add countless new members to the ranks of women living in poverty. Both countries have reduced spending levels for education and public health.
For many, poverty on the border is most dramatically illustrated by the proliferation of makeshift housing in unplanned communities that lack basic amenities such as paved roads, electricity, public water, or sanitation services. On both sides of the border, women feel more acutely the effects of the lack of basic services in the border's poorest colonias, which presents them with obstacles that are prosaic but nevertheless momentous—keeping the house clean when neighborhood streets are a muddy soup, cooking a meal without running water, tending to a sick child when the cost of medicine is prohibitive. In addition, women living in colonias in Texas and New Mexico, many of whom are recent immigrants, lack the community and kinship networks that offered a small buffer to such dismal poverty in Mexico.
In Mexico, one result of these trends is the rising number of women who must work outside the home. In addition, increasing numbers of Mexican women are heads of households or primary breadwinners for their families. The logistics of feeding a family on meager wages has traditionally fallen to women; now women must increasingly earn the meager wages in the first place. In the United States, such changes in household structure are less recent and more pronounced. But on both sides of the border, these changes imply significant restructuring of both household and societal power relations.
Women who enter the job market have fewer options than men, constrained by a general lack of education and marketable skills, as well as societal definitions regarding the type of employment appropriate for women. Frequently, their only recourse is participation in the informal economy. Women are the majority of participants in the informal border economy, engaged in a variety of activities, from selling tacos to washing other peoples' clothes. In addition, piecework in the home is a growing trend, as firms ever seek to reduce costs and avoid troublesome unions. Women in the informal sphere are disadvantaged by a general lack of access to capital and decision making about the allocation of resources. As a result, they are often unable to obtain loans or other financing that would enable them to expand their businesses and better provide for their families.
In Mexican border states, one of the main opportunities for employment is offered by maquiladora factories. . . . Although declining since its peak at 80 percent in the 1980, female participation in the maquila work force still logs in at about 60 percent. . . .
Women face specific gender based forms of exploitation throughout the maquiladora industry, including widespread pregnancy based discrimination and sexual harassment. It is no accident that the majority of the maquiladora work force is female. Managers at the plants habitually justify such bias with the claim that women's patience and nimble fingers make them more suited for the long hours and repetitive motions entailed by assembly line work. But actually women workers are preferred because it suits the industry's economic interests. Hiring predominantly young, politically inexperienced women allows management to keep wages low, dominate employer/employee relations, and impose abominable working conditions. Women workers have little access to job mobility in the maquila industry: the better paid, skilled positions, such as supervisors or managers, are almost entirely reserved for men.
Many researchers have argued that women's participation in the maquiladora industry has brought empowerment, as women gain skills, independence, and access to wages. It is probably true that maquiladora work serves to heighten women's consciousness as workers, and provides them with a degree of economic autonomy vis-à-vis male members of the household. But in order for the maquiladora program to contribute to Mexico's long-term development, and for the benefits to women to be more than merely attitudinal changes, women workers of all ages must have access to specific policies that enable them to translate their maquila work experience into opportunities for other employment and an improved standard of living, either through educational programs or access to training on the job. And perhaps most fundamentally, both men and women workers need democratic and independent union structures capable of challenging multinational impunity and strengthening the position of the Mexican working class.
In the United States, the majority of women work in the service sector. The boom in trade since NAFTA has created pockets of economic prosperity along the U.S. border, but many of the jobs generated for women tend to be nonunion, low skilled, minimum wage, service sector positions largely incapable of lifting workers out of poverty. These are the jobs that spring up to fill the void left by factories that have shut down and moved across the border or even further south. El Paso, for example, has seen over two dozen manufacturing plants relocate abroad in search of cheaper labor. It is also the sixth most destitute city in the United States: 15 percent of its working population earns less than the minimum wage, and unemployment for the city is twice the national average. Along the length of the U.S. border, Hispanic and immigrant women disproportionately fill the ranks of the working poor.
Immigrant women on the U.S. border find work as domestic servants in the larger urban centers, or as agricultural workers in the border's rural counties. Women's immigrant status and class standing as workers on the lowest rung of the occupational ladder mean they are especially vulnerable to exploitation. Undocumented employment offers little enforcement of minimum wage or benefits laws, no contract between employer and employee, and almost no protection against being fired at will.
The number of immigrant women coming to the United States from Mexico is rising. According to figures from Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, the percentage of female migrants to the United States has increased from less than 8 percent in 1969 to almost 30 percent in 1990. Women often migrate for familial reasons, as part of a household unit that makes the collective move to another country. But mounting evidence suggests that economic necessity spurs women's migration to the United States at least as frequently as familial relations. As women in Mexico assume more responsibility for family income, the wage disparities between the United States and Mexico become a particularly strong incentive for immigration northward.
Human rights advocates on both sides of the border fear that as the number of women migrants increases, they are being subjected to a simultaneous increase in sexual violence and abuse, both by U.S. Border Patrol Agents and by the "coyotes" who ferry immigrants across the border for a fee. Violence against women is rampant on both sides of the border, and its targets are not limited to illegal immigrants. Many healthcare workers mention violence as one of the primary health hazards faced by women on the U.S. Mexico border. Most often, the abuser is the woman's husband or partner. Ester Chávez, a women's rights advocate in Ciudad Juárez, says that while lack of education is partly to blame, the border's battered women must be placed within an economic context. "Men are frustrated and take it out against both women and children," she says. And increasingly, border women are falling prey to a trend of sexual violence. Chávez notes that Ciudad Juárez has the highest number of rapes and molestation in all of
Mexico. The apparent serial killings in Juárez—nineteen young female victims raped and murdered in the last year-and-a-half—are only the most shockingly newsworthy example of this trend.
Rising violence against women is likely fueled by a general sense of insecurity about economic and social changes entailed by integration and industrialization. Women's increased participation in the work force and their heightened role in the economic decision making of the family have begun to chip away at male authority. In part, the rising violence against border women is an unsurprising, though deplorable, backlash against these changes.
But the dynamics of change prevalent in border life also point to a brighter future for the border's women. The new and evolving circumstances of border life present vast opportunities in terms of organizing women. Indeed, women are at the forefront of much of the organizing and resistance that is occurring in the border region. In the maquiladoras, women are engaged in organizing on the local level, running independent slates of candidate within the conventional union system or setting up committees to function as alternatives to company unions. Women are challenging sexual discrimination and harassment as well: workers at Tijuana's EMOSA plant successfully sued their supervisors for damages in a U.S. court, and workers at a Korean owned plant near Mexicali have formed a committee in response to sexual abuse suffered there.
Much of the organizing done by women moves beyond the boundaries of old models, particularly when it comes to union campaigns. Women's organizing efforts seek to erase artificial lines between workplace, community, and home by drawing upon the connections and interrelationships among the different facets of their lives. Organizations like the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras go out into the community in order to educate residents about labor rights, rather than merely focusing efforts on a particular factory. Others, like La Mujer Obrera in El Paso, operate out of community centers that offer a variety of classes and services targeted to the needs of border women.
It is precisely such an integrated approach to the needs and capabilities of border women that offers the best opportunity for improving living and working conditions in the region. Women on both sides of the border have urgent and tangible needs. Some are as easily curable as providing plastic gloves or better ventilation systems in the workplace. Others require more effort, but are nevertheless feasible, such as adequate prenatal care or access to clean drinking water. But these tangible needs should not be disembodied from the larger problems facing border women. Women's lack of employment alternatives, access to capital, and gender-based discrimination and violence require more far reaching solutions. Above all, courage is needed to challenge the dominant development model and the prevailing economic rationale currently driving the integration process.
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