FOCUS ON WORKING CONDITIONS IN 'MAQUILADORA'
(Latin American Weekly Report - 20 June 1996)

  The Honduran government and business community are up in arms about the hearings being held by the US Congress on working conditions in their export-processing zones (EPZs). Labour minister Cecilio Zavala says the charges of abuses and exploitation are untrue and 'reflect a campaign organised by US labour leaders to bury the growth of industry in our country.' Juan Bendeck, president of the Consejo Hondureno de la Empresa Privada (Cohep) says that the aim of the charges is 'to seek confrontation and further impoverish the country.'
  The charges being made against Honduras's EPZs are not new, Indeed, their dismal record was recently highlighted in a study published by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) - and it is also aired in another study included in the 1996 edition of the ILO's World Labour Report.
  Honduras has 156 maquila (assembly) plants in EPZs, which employ 75,000 people. The ICFTU study notes:

- In textile establishments, working days can exceed 12 hours, and subcontractors often employ children aged between 13 and 16.
- Under the Callejas administration, Korean investors were enticed into Honduran EPZs with the promise that unions would not be tolerated and that the labour code would not be strictly applied. In May 1995 there were only seven unions in a position to sign collective agreements, all of them in the govemment-controlled Puerto CortŽs zone.
- Elsewhere, workers who sign up to form unions are routinely dismissed; a government measure designed to protect the anonymity of workers during the registration phase is frequently circumvented.

  Of course, Honduras is not alone in tolerating these practices. The ICFTU study also homes in on two other Latin American countries, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. A summary of its findings:

Mexico Maquila growth has been explosive, from 789 establishments employing 211,968 workers in 1985 to 2,747 establishments with 676,518 workers 10 years later. More than three-quarters of maquila workers are female, which is more than twice the national average.
  Unionisation is either non-existent or ineffectual. Two main maquila centres, Ciudad Ju‡rez and Tijuana, were considered virtualy 'union-free' up to 1990. As recently as 1994, a company in Tijuana entered a secret deal with an umbrella labour body, CROM, to try to prevent the formation of an independent trade union (the law allows only one union per enterprise).
  Elsewhere, in Matamoros, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, maquila workers are almost all affiliated to the Confederaci—n de Trabajadores de MŽxico (CTM), virtually an arm of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

Dominican Republic All 114 unions in the 31 EPZs have reported harassment; in February 1995 their leaderships were declared null and void. Companies have threatened to transfer their operations abroad rather than accept unions.
  Only since the beginning of 1995 have EPZ wages been brought into line, on paper, with the national minimum wage, but in the textile plants women earn less than the legal minimum.
  Most employees work 50 to 75 hours a week without overtime, though the legal ceiling is 44 hours a week.

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