Inside Guatemala's Maquiladoras:
$3 per Day, and You Fit the Boss with Condoms
(by Jane Slaughter - da "Labor Notes", dicembre 1995)
There's a good chance that shirt you bought at The Gap was sewn by a Guatemalan teenager who was paid $3 a day. In the last few years, hundreds of maquiladoras (factories solely for export) have opened in Guatemala, the country with the lowest minimum wage in Central America. About 70,000 workers, mostly women, work in 500 plants, making shirts, dresses, shorts, and pants for sale in the United States.
They are sold in stores including J.C. Penney, Sears, Montgomery, Ward, The Gap, Walmart, and K-Mart, brand names include Phillips-Van Heusen, Levi, and Liz Claiborne.
The maquila owners association lists the advantages to clothing manufacturers of locating in Guatemala. These include:
The salary levels are the lowest in the area.
The labor laws are reasonable.
To maintain these advantages, the maquila owners are ruthless, and the Guatemalan government supports them. Add to these facts Guatemala's history of crushing violently any kind of organizing by the poor, and you have a recipe for repression of union organization.
Today only five unions exist in Guatemala's maquilas, and only one has a contract.
Nevertheless, in several specific cases, international solidarity has made a difference for Guatemalan maquila workers, allowing them to win at least temporary victories.
WORKING CONDITIONS
The working conditions in maquilas are what you might expect: the factories are often converted warehouses, hot, lacking ventilation. Sanitary services are often poor and cafeterias nonexistent. At L&L Modas on the outskirts of Guatemala City, a sign by the toilets reads, "Pour water in so that they don't smell."
The minimum wage is $2.80 a day, with a bonus of 42 cents. Some plants, however, pay as little as $1.40-$1.75. A large proportion of the workforce is under 18. Although legally minors are supposed to have a workday of only seven hours, in practice they work the same as adults.
Though forced overtime is illegal, it is the norm. In a survey of 15 maquilas by the Guatemalan research center AVANCSO, the average workday was 10 hours and most worked Saturdays.
Since the maquilas operate under contract deadlines with American retailers, employers require workers to stay till a particular shipment completed. It is not unusual for workers to work till dawn, and then return for their regular shift two hours later. Some workers report being locked in by armed guards.
Here's one worker's shift: "We came in at 7:30 a.m. [Friday].At noon we had a half-hour break for lunch then at 6 they would give us a meal of beans, tortillas, and a bit of chicken. At midnight we had another 10 minute break and at four in the morning, if we had reached our quotas, we could leave. Otherwise we worked until our shift started again at 7:30 Saturday morning".
About half of Guatemala's maquila production comes from large factories owned by Korean investors (the rest are Guatemalan- or U.S.- owned), and it is there that workers have the most serious complaints of mistreatment. For example, many owners refuse to pay into the legally-required government health care system, making their workers ineligible for treatment. And the factories are often behind on their pay, by as much as two weeks.
But the most common grievance is that supervisors hit the workers and yell at them. Armando Amado, L&L's head of personnel, says that this is why workers there formed a union. "It's hard for the Koreans to comply with the laws because of their ideology," explained Amado. "They are demanding, they want you to work fast."
According to AVANCSO, Korea has the longest work hours in the world, and Korean owners and diplomats say that it is common practice there to "give light blows to the workers."
One Guatemalan manager in a Korean maquila explained, "The people are culturally accustomed to being treated badly; lf you don't treat them badly they don't understand."
Despite all these problems, neither ordinary workers nor union activists want the maquilas to leave. They are providing at least some salaryÑand some independenceÑfor thousands of young women.
VIOLENT REPRESSION
Over the years Guatemala's labor movement has lost hundreds of ac tivists to death squads sponsored by employers, the army, or both.
A year ago, the seven-person ex ecutive committee of the union at the Marissa maquila was abducted, taken to a nearby plantation, and threatened with death if they did not resign. Two hundred union supporters were fired, and the union was destroyed. The Marissa maquila is owned by New York-based GHR Industries.
In May, Flor de Maria Salguero was taken off a bus at gunpoint, drugged, taken to a house, beaten and raped. Salguero works for the union federation FESTRAS and had been advising some workers at the Juana Modas factory. Earlier, Salguero had helped a group of girls, 12 to 17 years old, to get severance pay after they quit Juana Modas because of constant sexual harassment from the factory owner. Among other things, the owner, Grek Sung Bang, had the habit of calling them into his office to ask them to fit him with condoms.
At a meeting with the workers, Grek told Salguero that what she needed was "a little present." Threatening phone calls followed, and then the abduction.
U.S. RETAILERS
When confronted with this information about conditions in their Guatemalan contractors, how do J.C. Penney, Sears, and other American corporations respond?
"U.S. retailers have put out to the media codes of conduct that supposedly govern the behavior of their suppliers," says Stephen Coats of the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project. "But none of the major retailers really monitor their codes.
"When we've contacted them about violations by their suppliers they simply ask the supplier, 'Have you done wrong?' The accused always claim their innocence, and then the retailer tells us, 'We've investigated the allegation and found no evidence of wrongdoing.'
"Nevertheless suppliers who receive a phone call or a letter from a Walmart or a Sears about reports of violations often take steps to end the violations, even while denying that they happened."
In 1992, women unionists fired from the INEXPORT maquila camped out in front of the National Palace for three months, demanding their jobs back. The workers' tenacity, combined with pressure from U.S. activists and the threat of losing trade benefits, resulted in reinstatement of fired union members.
More recently, unionists stopped the owner of the M&M maquila from sneaking his machinery out of the plant during the night. Some workers who happened to be in the neighbor hood saw what was happening, mobilized other workers, took over the plant, and kept the machines inside.
Later, they took over the street in front of the plant, blocking traffic for hours, went to the Korean embassy, and then marched to the Labor Ministry, demanding (successfully) their severance pay.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Despite these efforts, only the INEXPORT union has a collective bargaining agreementÑand the owner there is threatening to shut down. Half a dozen other maquilas where workers have started unions have already closed.
In fact, the highly portable nature of the maquilas is one of employers' greatest weapons. Closing down and setting up elsewhere under another name is standard operating procedure, as are threats to move to Mexico.
At this point the maquila union closest to achieving a contract is UNSITRAGUA's affiliate at L&L, which makes flannel shirts for Montgomery Ward. Getting a contract there would set an example for the rest of the maquila sector. Write to the Korean Ambassador, asking him to urge Korean maquila owners to respect worker rights, especially the right to negotiate a contract at L&L. Write: Jae-Hwan Kim, Avenida La Reforma 1-50, Zona 9, Guatemala City. Fax O11 502 2 34 55 17.
Then write to L&L's owner: Mr. Lee, L&L Modas, Callejon El Silencio 5-451, Canton San Lorenzo, Amatitlan, Guatemala.
You can also contact U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, urging him to continue pressuring Guatemala to enforce labor rights. Write him at 600 17th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20506. Fax: 202/395-3911.
[For more information, contact the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project at 333 S. Ashland Ave., Chicago, IL 60607; phone 312/262-6502; fax 312/262-6602. E mail: usglep@igc.apc.org]
A NEW GLOBAL DIVISION OF LABOR
There's a new global division of labor. It used to be that big corporations biult most of their factories in the rich countries; they used the poor countries merely as sources of food or raw materials, like coffee or cotton. Today, the division of labor between rich and poor countries is changing: transnational corporations are locating more and more manufactoring in countries where wages are paltry.
Now and in the future, the division of labor will be between high tech production in the U.S. Japan, and Europe, and low tech, labor-intensive work in the poor countries.
Maquilas have grown so fast in Guatemala that clothing exports are now the country's fourth largest source of foreign exchange, after the traditional coffee, sugar, and tourism.
The Guatemalan research center AVANCSO says, "The world economy is becoming global, but this does not mean thet the lopsidedness of international economic relations is over. On the contrary, the lop-sidedness is intensified... The undedeveloped world is perfecting its role as a supplier to the developed countries. Now it contributes industrial products as well, but especially its people's capacity to work."
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