Loaves & Fishes, March- April, 1988

BORDERLINKS PROJECT: "Meeting" Our Neighbors

by Rick Chase

Recently I've spent eight days on the Arizona/Mexico border and four days in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border in south Texas. The difficulty that I face as I try to interpret those experiences here in the northeast is where to begin: There's so much to consider, so many things that we have no experience with in this part of the country. In this article I'd like to address the issues surrounding U.S. companies in Mexico, and perhaps in the next "Loaves and Fishes" we can look at some of the current situation for Central American refugees who are arriving in Arizona and Texas.

Maquiladoras are U.S. owned factories that are on the Mexican side of the border. In January, the first BorderLinks trip visited two of the maquiladoras in Nogales, Mexico. One was a plant that makes auto parts for companies like NAPA Auto Parts in the United States, the second was a Samsonite luggage factory that produces soft-sided luggage to be sold in the U.S. Then, last week I visited and toured the Trico windshield wiper plant which moved from Buffalo, New York, to Matamoras, Mexico, about a year ago.

Each of the maquiladoras that I've visited looks pretty much the same, although the auto parts plant employs several hundred people while the Trico plant employs roughly two thousand. Each maquiladora looks very similar to plants that I've toured in the U.S.: conveyer belts, spray paint assembly lines, glue machines, people working at sewing machines or performing tasks as the product moves past them. The workers, too, seem fairly similar to workers in our own country; they smiled at us as we walked by, and when we were able to speak briefly with some of them they were very friendly.

The difference between plants here in the U.S. and maquiladoras there in Mexico are apparent only in the answers to the questions we asked. Minimum wage in Mexico is approximately 7,700 pesos per day, which currently equals approximately $3.30 PER DAY. The vast majority (as high as 95 percent in some maquiladoras) of the workers are young women between the ages of 16 and 22. There is no such thing as health insurance or similar benefits for the workers, much less their families, although generally the companies will pay for any medical expenses that are the result of a job-related injury. Child care is non-existent in the vast majority of the maquiladoras in most cities. Raises, safety precautions (like paint spray masks or safety goggles), and worker benefits are not offered in one factory until all of the maquiladoras in the city are willing to offer them.

In each plant I was struck by the fact that the company officials we spoke with were basically nice people who saw themselves as providing jobs in Mexico and increasing their company's efficiency all at the same time. They talked of 20,000 jobs that wouldn't otherwise be available in Nogales, Mexico. They talked of job skills they were providing the people. They spoke proudly of the fact that less than one percent of their products come off the line with defects. They talked of the increase in profit when you pay the going rate in Matamoras ($3.30/day) instead of the going rate in Buffalo ($15.00/hour). They talked of many things that sounded impressive, and yet somehow I felt they weren't asking themselves the right questions; they weren't probing deeply enough.

They haven't asked what it means to hire young women who are "more manageable" and who aren't generally the primary breadwinners in their families. They haven't asked what it means to pay $3.30 per day along the border where the consumer economy is based on the U.S. dollar (even on the Mexican side). They may not have seen their company's 55 gallon toxic containers (clearly marked, in English, "Toxic Chemical, refill and return to United States for proper disposal") being used as water storage containers in the squatters' community called "Los Tapiros." They haven't questioned their role in the devaluation of the border economy when they provide 20,000 jobs and 100,000 people from all over Mexico come to Nogales to try to find work. They don't seem to have questioned what happened in Buffalo, New York, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and Denver, Colorado, when they closed up shop and left town. From my perspective, they seem to be missing the point.

The more I work in the BorderLinks project, the more I learn that things are rarely black and white. There's a lot of grey area that many of us would rather not think about, particularly with respect to how we as a nation relate to other countries and peoples of the world. It's important, though, that we do begin to ask some of those tough questions that make us uncomfortable, and try to respond in more appropriate ways. The prophets of the Old Testament, as well as Jesus in the New Testament, clearly called us toward their vision of a just world. In 1988, with multi-national companies, Iran-Contra connections, and the myth that our well-being is dependent on the lives of everyday people in third world nations, that Biblical mandate is more difficult than ever.