It’s 11 p.m. on a Thursday and you’re trying to decide what to wear to Cornerstone or Washington. The blue polo? The pink halter? GAP jeans or Sevens? You throw on what looks best, not giving a second thought to where your haute couture came from.
We’ve all heard of factories in developing countries making clothes for chain stores such as Wal-mart, but has anyone ever thought about the lives of the (mostly) women who are forced to toil in these abhorrent conditions?
These sweatshops on the border of Mexico and the U.S. are called maquiladoras. Women are hired by these companies because they can pay them much less than men. They go to the hot, dusty factories in the morning either by walking long distances or taking a bus they must pay for. They are searched at the factory, because bringing their own food is not allowed – they must buy it from the factory. Often, they are forced to take a birth control pill after being told it is a vitamin because a pregnant factory worker is no good. An average shift is 10-12 hours, with many being as long as 16. If you don’t finish the quota assigned to you, you don’t go home. For all this, the average Mexican garment worker makes about $3 per day.
Why is this allowed to go on? University sociology professor Nazneen Kane attributes it to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is associated with neo-revolutionary economic policies. Though complicated, it basically sums up to this: NAFTA shifted the responsibility of regulating labor or environmental infractions from the corporations owning the factories to the Mexican government. Kane says developing countries such as Mexico try to be integrated in the world economy, so they take NAFTA-related loans. NAFTA is associated with opening trade borders, and as Mexico is tied up in these NAFTA loans and policies, it doesn’t regulate the factories as it should. The Mexican government makes a large amount of money from these maquiladoras, and if it regulates the corporations it’s afraid they will move (which they do). However, notes Kane, this wealth is not trickling down to the workers, which only increases the division in inequality.
This only highlights the blatant self-interest of corrupt government officials’ pride over human rights of their own people. Aside from the abhorrent conditions the women work in, the maquiladoras affect their lives in worse ways. Pollution from the maquiladoras is rampant – women living near them are having an unusually high number of children with birth defects. Because women are hired for less money, male unemployment is higher, causing men to feel emasculated, which they then take out on the women in the form of violence. Ciudad Juarez, a factory-rich city on the border of U.S. and Mexico, is a horrifying example. Over 200 women have been brutally murdered there in the last 15 years – and almost all of these cases remain unsolved. What’s worse, the police are implicated. Imagine living in a place where you could get gang-raped, sliced and beaten – and the only people that can help are the ones perpetrating the crimes.
So why should you care? The most basic reason is simple human rights, but if that doesn’t do it for you, the economic processes that are creating the situations for these women affect us in other ways, such as outsourcing. We are sending jobs overseas that take away from manufacturing labor here. Still not convinced, since you, the educated college kid, will never work in that sector? Globalization will affect us more and more because outsourcing creates an unstable economy, and labor can be undercut, meaning negative consequences for the U.S.
Be more conscious about your consumer practices. Think about who is really making the clothes you buy and what is being made invisible by these corporations. Write letters to companies telling them you want to buy clothes from workers who earn fair wages.
At the very least, visit www.maquilasolidarity.org or www.motherjones.com/
news/feature/2002/05/juarez.html to learn more about these horrors. It will open your eyes to the fact that there is much more to the clothes strewn about your room, waiting to be worn to the bar, than meets the eye.
Nikkee Porcaro is a junior journalism major. She can be reached at cole120@umd.edu.
