Sweatshops

The maquiladora or "sweatshop" is sadly not new. In the early 1900sAmerican labor history documents the treatment of European immigrantwomen who toiled 12-15 hour days for the pittance of wages. The infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which produced the popular clothing for women of the leisured class of the day, forced its female laborers to work overtime against their will in order to meet production deadlines by locking all exit doors. One day a fire broke out and 146 young women lost their lives to a disastrous tragedy. The inhumanity that describes the sweatshop may no longer describe mostworking conditions on American soil today. Instead, it has been exported to other countries where multinational corporations can subcontract with factory owners and managers who often place a higher value on production deadlines than on the health, safety and well-being of the working poor.
Articles

Comité Fronterizo Por los derechos humanos y laborales de los trabajadores de las maquiladoras

http://www.cfomaquiladoras.org/

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR MURDER IN THE MAQUILADORAS:

http://www.womenontheborder.org/accountability_murders.htm

The Globalizing Economy and the Divisive Immigration Debate

Although there has been an increased focus on Mexican immigration to the United States, Mexicans have been migrating north for better opportunities since our nation was formed. When the U.S. gained control of the Southwest, the Mexican population that was living there became U.S. citizens. The expanding nation needed workers and many looked to the Mexican-American population already living within its borders. This use of Mexican labor not only laid a foundation for employers, but it also established a resource for working poor Mexicans as they traveled north to earn a better wage and hopefully a better life. Over the years, U.S. and Mexican public policy has furthered immigration and the use of Mexican labor by U.S. employers. The historical foundation for immigration was solidified with the passage of NAFTA in 1994. Supporters of NAFTA argued that it would bring more jobs to Mexico and slow immigration. But the proliferation of U.S. factories only furthered the atmosphere for exploitation of workers on the Mexican side of the border, did not deliver on increased prosperity for the migrant laborer, and drove more Mexicans to seek a living wage north of the border. As the nation’s politicians look to “fix the immigration problem,” it is important to understand the history, politics, and economics behind the process. U.S. corporations earn profits off of the labor of working class Mexicans who want a job that will allow them to feed, clothe, and educate their children. Possibly the flow of illegal immigration would stop at the doorstep of the U.S. if the wages and working conditions in the maquiladora jobs that lure the migrants from the South allowed them to care for their families. Most of them do not. This struggle and the circumstances that created their lives of contestation are what continue to drive so many Mexican migrant laborers to follow in the footsteps of the millions before them, who have historically traveled north for a better life.

Environmental Justice Case Study:

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/maquiladora.htm

A Case Study of Women Maquiladora Workers in Mexico.

This paper is a case study of mobilization by a group of maquiladora workers in Mexico’s northern border region, the Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s (CFO) (Border Committee of Women Workers). Although sometimes characterized as a community-based organization, the CFO is also seen as an NGO that is part of a larger women’s movement and one that has found alternative ways to help workers claim their rights, through the use of transnational networking. In fact, as we will see in this paper, the CFO has a complex history that has much to do with patriarchal relations and North/South dichotomies and can only be fully understood through a gendered analysis. As one of the first efforts of organizing Mexican workers in the maquiladoras located along the northern border, the CFO is fairly well known in both academic and social activist circles who concentrate on Mexico-US cross-border activism and has been characterized as a great example of empowerment of women from the ground up. The irony is that it is only through a gendered analysis of the context in which the CFO was created that we can realize that the CFO cannot be defined as a purely feminist organization that developed from consciousness-raising efforts such as those espoused by the second wave of feminism. The focus of this paper is to delve into the specific history of the formation of the CFO in order to understand how the CFO developed into an autonomous Mexican women’s worker organization with transnational ties.

http://www.cfomaquiladoras.org/