Sat 16 Oct 2010
Global economy hazards
Posted by Canada / Pat (B/P editor) under Balkers
[4] Comments
If you reached this Balkingpoints.com article by direct external link, stop by the front page for an incredible satellite view of the earth in rotation!
We’ve posted much on Balkingpoints about how global trade can be a benefit. It can lift the GDPs of countries and in the process increase living standards, and we’ve seen it especially as a middle class has grown in Asia because of global trade.
But I say it’s important to see the undersides of it and how workers and their home communities are often badly exploited. That isn’t to say countries can or should just pull the plug on it. But they don’t do anywhere near enough to protect their people.
I’m pasting a description of a documentary film that has run on independent television about the Maquiladoras areas in Mexico just over the US border, around Tijuana and Juarez. It really says how these workers receive maybe $1.00 per hour, are exposed to unsafe chemicals and other work hazards and then go home to shantytown neighborhoods polluted by factory waste. It’s unbelievable to a worker in US, Canada or EU. But this is what goes on and has to stop before global trade can ever fairly spread the wealth it creates.
The film link here, also has video excerpts to watch
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http://www.pbs.org/pov/maquilapolis/film_description.php
Film Description
Just over the border in Mexico is an area peppered with maquiladoras: massive factories owned by the world’s largest multinational corporations. Carmen and Lourdes work at maquiladoras in Tijuana, where each day they confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos.
Maquilapolis: City of Factories takes its name and stores from the maquiladoras, the multinational assembly plants that sprang up south of the U.S.-Mexican border starting in the mid-1960s.
Welcome to the world of Maquilapolis, a border city where it takes an hour of drudgework inside a poisonous factory to earn enough to buy a jug of potable water. Where it takes about two hours to earn a gallon of milk. Where factory workers find bathroom breaks are few, toxins are many, and the pressure — and intimidation — are always on. It’s a place where poverty is so deep that workers are expected to be grateful for the high-end $11 a day they might earn, to give up hope of ever earning more or of ever seeking better working conditions. This daily $11 does not buy them the protection and aid of their local and national governments. In Maquilapolis, undertaxed and under-regulated factories operated by multinational corporations — usually through local middlemen — pollute residential neighborhoods with seeming impunity.
Yet even $11 a day can prove too high a labor cost for today’s international manufacturer. The searing new feature documentary Maquilapolis: City of Factories may take its name and stories from the maquiladoras, the multinational assembly plants that sprang up south of the U.S.-Mexican border in the mid-1960s and multiplied rapidly in the 1990s as a result of 1994′s North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.) But the new global company town that Maquilapolis portrays is also movable. Less than 10 years after NAFTA, the maquiladoras of Mexico were already closing down as corporations began to depart for even cheaper labor in Asia, leaving behind decrepit factory sites, slag heaps of toxic material and endemic unemployment.
Carmen Durán holds a flyback mechanism of the type she manufactured on the assembly line at the Sanyo factory in Tijuana.
Maquilapolis is a powerful and unique film that brought American and Mexican-American filmmakers together with Tijuana factory workers and community organizers to tell the story of globalization through the eyes and voices of the workers themselves — overwhelmingly women — who have borne the costs but reaped few of the benefits. The workers did not just testify on camera, they became an integral part of creating their stories on film. Two women in particular, Carmen Durán and Lourdes Luján, armed with cameras for video diaries, chronicle their struggles. The result is not only an informative and disturbing film, but also an evocative and poetic one.
A heap of a toxic waste left behind by Metales y Derivados, a battery-recycling factory.
The very abutment of Tijuana’s poor barrios against some of the world’s wealthiest communities, and the array of low-cost consumer conveniences and devices — televisions, cell phones, intravenous bags, pantyhose, batteries, electronic components — for which the women have surrendered both health and freedom, make for an ironic, twisted poetry of contrasts. But for all the miserable working conditions, health problems, and broken promises, Carmen and Lourdes and others like them — promotoras who fight for workers’ rights against the new corporate order — are not the pliant female employees anticipated by the companies or the Mexican government. In yet another twist, globalization has brought Carmen and Lourdes greater sophistication about politics and media than existed in earlier generations of the Mexican working class.
Lourdes Luján, a factory worker, helped organize the community group Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice. She spoke at the signing of a U.S.-Mexican accord to clean the Metales y Derivados site.
And they put that knowledge to good use. Carmen, an upbeat single mother of three, did not even earn the $11 a day touted by the maquiladora system’s promoters; she earned just $6 a day working the graveyard shift in Tijuana’s Sanyo factory. That wasn’t enough to get her family out of a dirt-floor shack she built from discarded San Diego garage doors in a neighborhood where sewage and frayed electrical wires run down the middle of the street despite the Mexican government’s promises to provide municipal services. Despite harsh conditions at the factory, Carmen stayed on for six years, partly out of loyalty to her co-workers. She suffers from kidney problems and anemia as a result of her years of factory work. When the company decided to move to Indonesia, Carmen felt angry like the rest of the workers. But when the company decides, as other multinationals have before them, to renege the severance pay required under Mexican law, Carmen becomes an activist and rallies her co-workers, in a David-and-Goliath struggle, to challenge Sanyo by filing a claim with the labor board.
Lourdes lives in a neighborhood in Tijuana that has not just ordinary sewage running down the middle of the street, but a toxic stew of chemicals and manufacturing agents from the factories on the mesa above their homes. In case there is any doubt about what is happening, the factory takes advantage of every rainfall, however slight, to send an extra torrent of chemical-laden waters down through the neighborhood. The results are predictable: an epidemic of health problems including persistent skin rashes, respiratory problems, allergies, and birth defects. Lourdes, as also documented by her video diary, can’t just sit by. She helps organize a community group, the Chilpancingo Collective for Environmental Justice, to fight for an cleanup of a toxic waste dump left behind by a departing battery-recycling factory — a seemingly impossible goal in a country whose environmental protection agencies cry helplessness at every turn.
The river in front of Lourdes’s home overflows with waste water from the hilltop factories.
Through Carmen and Lourdes we learn the stories and daily realities of other maquiladora workers. We also hear from company and government spokespeople, who point to the relative benefit of a low wage in a virtually no-wage country. But Maquilapolis promises no worker anywhere even that low wage, as the Mexican people have been among the first to learn.
Ultimately, Carmen and her co-workers win a relatively astounding victory: the labor board forces Sanyo to pay the workers severances as high as $2,500 (in Carmen’s case), an amount far greater than most companies are used to paying. And Lourdes’s group, simply a committee of neighborhood women working with cross-border activists from the U.S., succeeds in forcing both the U.S. and Mexican governments to recognize the need for environmental cleanup and to begin creating a fund for it.
Jamie Cota, an attorney, represented Carmen and her coworkers in the fight to gain their entitled severance pay from Sanyo.
There is also heartbreak in these victories. Carmen’s severance allows her to put a floor under her children’s feet, but she’s left with little prospect of a new job. And Lourdes’s group has won its point — but whether the political will or, ultimately, the money to accomplish the full cleanup will materialize remains in doubt. While the poor people of Maquilapolis do the work that keeps the malls of the Western World humming, they end up earning no stake in that world. In Mexico, now that the initial wave of off-shore manufacturing has passed to other regions of the world, workers like Carmen and Lourdes face an unemployed future amid a devastated landscape.
"The factory workers who appear in Maquilapolis were involved in every stage of production," says director Vicky Funari. "We wanted to embrace subjectivity — their subjectivity — as a value, and to merge our filmmaking with their voices."
"We wanted to present not just the facts but the everyday reality," says De La Torre. "Can you imagine the feeling of being so completely at the mercy of a global economic system that has no interest in your welfare? What many middle-class North Americans experience as financial pressure, people quite close to them &151; their neighbors, in fact — experience as life-and-death struggle."
Maquilapolis: City of Factories is a co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and is a project of Creative Capital, with support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund.
Copyright © 1995–2010 American Documentary, Inc.
What Say You?
Stop corporations from 3rd World manufacturing?
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Great Balk Pat. Puts a human face on exploitation of workers and environments, in nations that will let these multinational corporations get away with it.
This is the side of it we don’t see from commercial media in the United States. They don’t report it. They just take ad money from the Walmarts, that have the cordless phone for $15.00 or the inkjet printer for $40.00…
There is an efficiency to manufacturing setting up where it is most able
to reduce costs. Why should consumers, who’s numbers continue to grow beyond the First World, have their purchasing power reduced by inflated costs of products that stem from tariffs and protectionism of industries?
I just gave you the capitalistic side of the argument. It only makes sense
if there are adequate safeguards in place. Then nations can settle on the industries they do best and carve their niches in the global economy, while their people are fairly paid and share in the prosperity that trade generates.
We went through these wars in the First World, at the earlier junctures of the industrial revolution of the 1800-1900′s. Unionized workers to demand a fair cut of profits on what they are making with their toil. 40-hour work weeks. No child labor. Safe workplaces. Minimum wages. No spewing your waste in the rivers and the air.
Look at the trajectories. We fought all those fights with corporations, won most of it, and still built that middle class and enormous growing GDP. Not evenly shared of course, but we are exponentially more enfranchised and protected than the Maquiladora workers.
Point being that all of these interests can be balanced out & both can
be accomplished. The growth, and the safeguards for workers and environment. It’s a matter of voting leaders in who will do it, rather
than be sellouts to corporate masters.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about the need to get China and other emerging manufacturing countries to adjust the value of their currency to help the global economy, or more to the point our share of it as it creates an imbalance in trade values. Perhaps if these countries had in place similar safeguards for their workers and the environment, their cost to manufacture would rise negating the inevitable political war on currency manipulation, and in the process leveling the value of manufactured goods globally.
The developing world should be on a path where they have to deal with these issues I think. And they probably will gradually improve conditions like happened in the developed countries.
Leaders in the developed world have a responsibility to take it up as an issue and help push it along. Both for humanitarian reasons since their countries have already found ways to stop the worst of the human exploitation, and to help reverse the trend where they lose jobs to cheap labor. If labor standards can be brought up enough globally it should stop the offshoring of plants I think.
That is going to drive prices up for all kinds of goods, but the wealthier countries people can
assimilate it since it’s all gradual. And most people will willing pay more for some product if they know the person making it was also taken care of. With mass production I don’t think we’re talking about major price increases. Maybe 30 or 40 percent higher to cover the cost increases to the manufacturers.
And the robotics piece of it is still emerging also. They’ve already replaced a lot of human beings on assembly lines, and probably will much more. So then countries with lots of plants will have to adapt to losing those jobs like we have in Canada and US. But again I think they will and morph into new industries. If a company can robotize a plant, there’s a lot less need to offshore it!
There can be little doubt that improvements in manufacturing quality control, indeed owing to computerisation, have allowed a reliable product to be produced in a 3rd world environment. I can remember when something made in China was of poor quality, but no longer.
Naturally it does benefit the consumer whom is able to buy sophisitcated electronics, decent clothing and many other items inexpensively. Few of us would feel as well about it all, if the plight of the workers these plants employ were well understood.
In this I believe the UN has a failing, in that it does a much better job elevating dire emergencies like famine, disease and natural catastophes. It needs to push all of the first world leadership to set humanitarian labor standards for corporations that wish to sell in their nations, irrespective of the nation the firm manufactures in.