by David Bacon
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, CHIHUAHUA — After more than a decade of silence, maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez have found their voice. The city, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is now the center of a growing rebellion of laborers in the border factories. At the gates to four plants, including a huge 5,000-worker Foxconn complex, they have set up encampments, or plantóns, demanding recognition of independent unions, and protesting firings and reprisals.
“We just got so tired of the insults, the bad treatment and low wages, that we woke up,” explains Carlos Serrano, a leader of the revolt at Foxconn’s Scientific Atlanta facility. “We don’t really know what’s going to happen now, and we’re facing companies that are very powerful and have a lot of money. But what’s clear is that we are going to continue. We’re not going to stop.”
The Juárez protests come just as Congress gets ready to debate a new trade treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which opponents charge will reproduce the same devastation Mexican workers experienced as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Critics charge NAFTA cemented into place a regime of low wages, labor violations and violence on the border after it took effect in 1994. Today, economic pressure has become so extreme that Juárez’ workers feel they have no choice but to risk their jobs in hope of change.
Ali López, a single mother at the plantón outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. “The only way a single mother can survive here is with help from family or friends,” she says. López has two daughters, one 13 and one 6 years old. “I can’t spend any time with them because I’m always working. When I leave in the morning, I leave food for the older one to warm up for lunch. Childcare would cost 200 pesos a week or more, so I can’t afford it.”
A cold winter has already descended on Ciudad Juárez, close to freezing at night. Parents worry that children at home alone with a heater for warmth risk fire in highly flammable homes of cardboard or castoff pallets from factories. “We just have enough money to eat soup and beans,” she explains. “We don’t eat meat.” López’ wage is 600 pesos a week (about $36). “No one can live on this. A fair wage would be 250 pesos a day. In the U.S. people make in one hour what it takes us all day to earn.”
This new workers’ movement began last August. At Foxconn, people started talking in the bathrooms, at lunch and on the lines. Anger over conditions quickly started to rise. Operators on the line there make 650 pesos/week (about $39). A family with kids, according to Serrano, needs 700-800 just for food. A gallon of milk in Juárez costs the same as it does in El Paso, on the other side of the Río Grande.
“Some foremen would tell young women that they had a good body, and demand to go out with them,” Serrano adds. “If they didn’t, they’d call the women lazy or burros or good for nothing. If the women went to Human Relations, the harassment still didn’t stop.” In order to survive, some women were putting in two shifts, back to back, or even working three days straight through. When they protested harassment, overtime was cut off, he says.
At CommScope, supervisors charged 50 pesos a week to put someone’s name on the list for overtime, charges Cuauhtemoc Estrada, lawyer for the workers in the plantóns. “They felt so humiliated that some would break into tears.” According to Raul García, a CommScope worker, those who protested were sent to a special work area known as “the prison,” or simply, “hell.” Older or slower workers were sent to another, called “the junkyard,” where they were humiliated and ridiculed.
On Sept. 16, Mexico’s National Day, a group of 190 CommScope workers went to the local labor authorities, the Conciliation and Arbitration Board, and filed a request for a “registro,” or legal status, for a union. According to Garcia, the new union’s general secretary, the company then started cutting overtime. Some married couples had been working different shifts, so that each could be home to take care of children. Managers reassigned them to the same shift, forcing one to quit. Finally, 171 workers were fired on october 19. The terminated workers then organized a permanent plantón at the factory gates.
Workers organized a demonstration at the gates to pressure Foxconn. When managers threatened them, the demonstration went on for a week. The company filed a civil suit for damages against its own workers, and in mid-October the firings began there also. Serrano was the first, and by the end of the month 110 people had been terminated. On Nov. 2 they set up a planton, and have been living at the gate ever since. “They’re treating us like criminals,” he says, “but we’re workers who have been there for many years. They have to reinstate us, and the government has to give us our registro.”
Plantóns have now spread to two other maquiladoras – a Lexmark factory making ink cartridges, and an Eaton Corporation auto parts plant. Lexmark workers just filed their own request for a union registro.
This insurgent wave threatens the established economic order in one of the main centers of maquiladora production on the border. Even as Mexico continues to feel the impact of the U.S. recession, Juárez still has more than 330 plants employing more than 178,000 workers. By U.S. standards, many are huge. Foxconn’s two factories employ over 11,000 people. CommScope employs 3,000, and Lexmark 2,800.
Companies are attracted to the border because of low wages and lax enforcement of labor and environmental laws. In 2013, the minimum wage in Juárez was less than 65 pesos a day (today about $3.88).
At the beginning of the NAFTA era, this low wage system was challenged by several attempts to organize independent unions. In 1993 a partnership between the Mexican labor federation, the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) and the U.S. union, the United Electrical Workers, mounted a campaign at the General Electric factory, Companía Armadora. Workers were fired, but pressure from UE members in U.S. plants forced GE to rehire several of them. Nevertheless, the FAT lost the election that would have given it the right to negotiate a contract.
Worker activism of the period was fueled by a wave of birth defects. Between 1988 and 1992, 163 Juárez children were born with anencephaly – without brains – an extremely rare disorder. Health critics charged that the defects were due to exposure to toxic chemicals in the factories or because of their discharges.
“People are tired of the abuse, which has been terrible. They had to lose their fear to protest, but desperation and anger are potent antidotes to fear.”
This year the business community of Juárez is celebrating 50 years of the Border Industrial Program, which opened the door to the maquiladora boom. In that time, two and a half generations of workers have passed through the plants. “They were always the fundamental part of production,” concludes Cuauhtemoc Estrada. “But the global economic model imposed on us by free trade meant the objective was always producing the most at the lowest cost. Now we see the result. And as difficult as it may be, workers are determined to change it.”
