Imperial (153 page)

I remember the union legal assessor, Sergio Rivera Gómez, sitting in his office on that extremely hot day in Mexicali when the walls were abloom with a glory of newspaper clippings and girlie pictures, and I remember the waist-high heaps of cans awaiting recycling, not to mention the Pope and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Does it worry you that foreigners control many of these
maquiladoras
? I asked.

Yes, he replied. A hundred percent of the
maquiladoras
in Baja California are owned by foreigners. And they pay very low salaries to the workers. But they offer social security, pension plans. The workers are happy with their jobs because right now in Mexicali there’s a big problem with unemployment—and then he added, I don’t believe with any irony whatsoever—a problem with
maquiladoras
moving to China, India, and Central America.

(How serious might this “problem” be? In 1994, when NAFTA went into effect, Mexico possessed five hundred and fifty thousand
maquiladora
jobs, which had risen to one point three million by the year 2000, but over two hundred and thirty thousand positions then disappeared by 2004. How significant is an eighteen-percent decline? Economic graphs are always zigs and zags. Perhaps in another four years, the number of
maquila
jobs would have doubled!)

Señor Gómez, I said, when I go around the Mexicali Valley, I feel that its soul lives in the
ejidos.
Everyone in the
ejidos
always tells me that he’s happy, that his children are happy, that he needs nothing. Can the
maquiladoras
harm that?

Of course it will affect the
ejidos,
he replied, because a lot of women and some men come to the city.

I assumed that I understood him, but he went on: If the
maquiladoras
continue to leave, it will diminish the quality of life in the
ejidos.

And if the
maquiladoras
continue to come?

Maquiladoras
bring a lot of toxic contamination, but it won’t affect the
campo,
the fields, because people still come from the south to work the fields. So if the
maquiladoras
bring more workers, Mexicali will grow and develop more.

How much would you like Mexicali to develop? To Tijuana’s level?

I would like Mexicali to develop more, but not with
maquiladoras,
he said to me. He paused, then said: Livestock businesses, not
maquiladoras.

THE CHOICE OF JOSÉ LÓPEZ

Well, what I know, Bill, they been around here in Mexicali for awhile, right? I never worked in one, thank God, or maybe my bad luck, who knows? If I’d gone into one I might even have gotten a good position, since I do speak a little English. But for the salaries and all that, Bill, you know, that’s what disappoints me. That’s the main reason, maybe the only reason. I can think of many reasons why I want to work in one, especially since the majority are girls, know what I mean? And since girls can do it, it’s really not backbreaking. I think I can make a more decent living here on the
línea.
But I don’t have medical insurance here. But even in the
maquiladora,
if you’re insured, you go to the hospital when you’re injured and you find your insurance is just paper for the trashcan. And unjustified firings, this has happened to people I’ve talked to. Then they change managers and just because the supervisor don’t like this person, the way he dresses, the way he walks, he gets all the sudden fired.

This guy was telling me, they been hearing also, it’s just rumors, but it always starts like that, then rumor becomes reality, that they been thinking they wanna move operations to China. Because in China they get away with paying one dollar a day when here they pay ten if we’re lucky.

MOVING THEIR OPERATIONS TO CHINA: ANOTHER ADDENDUM

The
New York Times,
Thursday, September 30, 2004, World Business section: 

Outsourcing Finds Vietnam

Very low wages and strong math skills are a combination that has made believers of some experts.

MOVING THEIR OPERATIONS TO CHINA: STILL ANOTHER ADDENDUM

THE COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL
(AIR: “NELLIE GREY”)

By Ralph Chaplin, International Workers of the World (before 1923)

In the gloom of mighty cities
Mid the roar of whirling wheels
We are toiling on like the chattel slaves of old
And our masters hope to keep us
Ever thus beneath their heels,
And to coin our very life blood into gold.

MOVING THEIR OPERATIONS TO CHINA: ONE MORE ADDENDUM

On April 15, 2003, at about nine A.M., said Magdalena Ayala Márquez, all the workers were called into the office. The person from public relations, Margarita, I don’t know her last name, called us in, and there was the manager, Alfonso Caballero Camou.
²⁸⁸
They wanted to know if we had our ID with us, some kind of elector’s card we had. And since we were a lot of workers, we were over a hundred workers, some said yes and some said no. The ones that didn’t have their ID could get time and go all the way to their houses, but they had to bring their IDs. Some people lived far and had to take two or three hours to come back, and we were all curious about why we needed our IDs. So when we were all back, all of us were led into a cold room, empty, where we usually
²⁸⁹
kept all the avocados. Once we were in there, we were locked in that cold room. They locked the big doors. They locked us in.
²⁹⁰
They said then they had some bad news and some good news to tell us. The bad thing is, there’s no more work. The owners of Flor de Baja, they said they couldn’t maintain the
maquiladora
no more; they couldn’t keep it running. But that the good thing was, that if we would stay united together, we could keep the machinery. They can sell it and that way they can give the workers some money because of the unjust firing. By this time they had already had some kind of form. They were misleading the people and they just wanted to get all the signatures. The man said there was still more avocado and we could work that before we took off. He said he would give us another job in another
maquiladora
also. He was just buttering us up so that we would not ask too many questions. Each person would get a five-hundred-peso loan and get to keep a share of the
maquiladora.
But the money, Camou said it was gonna be just a little bit of money, so there wouldn’t be a lot of red tape. We were kept in that cold room from twelve in the afternoon until six, when everyone put down a signature. And we never knew what we had signed.

Can most of those people read?

Yes, but Margarita showed a sheaf of papers with a little tiny crack of each page, so we were never allowed to know what we had signed. After everybody signed we were sent home.

What would have happened if someone had refused to sign?

Camou asked everybody, do you agree, do you agree? I was the only one who said, Caballero, we are putting our trust in you. And he said, no, I won’t let you people down. Then on my way home I started thinking, what did I sign?

When you were being locked in, were you afraid?

No, no, no. Because the guys were there. Caballero and the rest. The day we signed those papers, we were given an appointment for the next Friday so they would give us a loan. I arrived late that Friday, and most of my coworkers were already leaving. I asked them: Where are you girls going?—To Paper Mate, since that’s the place where they had gotten them a job. I asked if they had given them the money, and they answered me no. I said, we have to go get our loan, and we went back, and they did give us five hundred pesos each, and we signed. By signing I got a bad feeling and felt that we were basically giving up our rights. I told my coworker that we hadn’t received a copy of the documents we had signed. And I told Margarita that I wanted a copy of that, and Margarita said we weren’t going to get a copy.

What happened next?

They started placing guards over the
maquiladora
property. Caballero said he’d given the owners a ten-day limit so they’d pay the people what they were entitled to. It was on April twenty-fifth. And the owners didn’t come to the appointment they had. Since they weren’t present the workers decided to take over the property.

What’s the status now?

They never came to pay us.

What’s happening to the machinery now?

Some social organization has it. Some mediators. It’s in the Industrial Park Las Californias, on the road to San Luis, kilometer ten and a half.

If you go there now, what do you see?

The Americans gave the keys to the owners of the industrial park. So now they start fighting with the workers. Anyhow, there’s something else there now. The people from industrial park, they make some paperwork with government to get the machinery out of that building . . .

So whom do you blame?

Caballero.

Are there any workers who want to take the machinery by violence?

The oliveskinned lady with the long, greying hair and the slightly weathered face did not answer this directly, but replied: The owners tell us that our money is no problem because it’s so small, but the problem is that Caballero wants so many thousands of pesos. What Caballero did was, he made us sign papers to give us consent to take machinery from the Americans with the pretense to pay the workers. He wants to sell the machinery and keep everything. It’s been fourteen months. Every day he adds two hundred and seventy thousand dollars in wages to what he says he is owed. The law says I should get back pay for those fourteen months. But nothing is happening. The law is crooked.

How can we find Caballero?

He lives in Calexico. A brother of his has another
maquiladora
here in Mexicali next to Bimbo. Fluvamex is the name of it. It processes spices and vegetables. Also the conditions are similar to Flor de Baja.

The
maquiladora
where Magdalena Ayala Márquez had worked, Flor de Baja,
²⁹¹
made avocados into guacamole, which they shipped worldwide. I am proud to report that in March 2003, this glorious enterprise produced *** THE BIGGEST TACO IN THE
WORLD!
*** A month later the owners shut it down. Who they truly were and where they might be found I cannot tell you. In 1994, when in a rare display of international reach the Environmental Protection Agency over in Northside subpoenaed some companies about the chemicals they discharged into the New River, a certain Brown International Corporation replied in the name of Flor de Baja. (They were very good, it appeared; their factory excreted nothing but avocados.
²⁹²
) In 2004 their head office reportedly existed in Chicago, and for all I know it may have been connected with this same Brown International Corporation. Who knows? And that, reader, is the only official information I can supply. If, however, you would enjoy enhancing your vocabulary of Spanish bird words, then in addition to
pollo
I will teach you
golondrina,
meaning swallow; this is Southside slang for a fly-by-night
maquiladora.

Magdalena was a Big Knife. She had to cut twenty-seven avocados a minute, ten hours a day, Monday through Friday, from six-thirty in the morning until four-o’-clock. (Compensation: ninety-five pesos a day. Breaks: one per day, at ten-thirty for half an hour. One could go to the bathroom and drink water anytime.) She said that during the three months which her employment lasted, her wrists became injured. She also said that some people got arthritis and frostbite from working with ice in the cold room.
²⁹³

Magdalena said: Margarita and others were getting invented people on the time sheets so the real ones had to work harder. There were a hundred people working at Flor de Baja and two hundred time sheets.

Did any of the Americans know about this?

She shrugged. I don’t know. I don’t think so.

So who is responsible for the bad conditions, the Americans or the Mexican middle management?

The local people are to blame, the people in the office. I’ve heard of thousands of dollars going into people’s offices. They steal your wages, all your bonuses. But if you say something you’re going to get fired and get blackballed.
²⁹⁴

Well, it sounds like a very effective way to get rich.

The people who do that, they get so much money out of the
maquiladora,
they have the money to open up their own business. I think also the American businessmen have to be blamed since they shouldn’t leave this kind of business in others’ hands knowing what goes on here. They should at least have someone keep an eye on it.

In your opinion, was Flor de Baja among the best, the worst or in the middle?

It was a good
maquiladora.
It received several certificates. It was one of the best for productivity, but for the way they treated the workers, it is one of the worst.

Right now, which one is the worst?

They’re all the same. They demand a lot of work, and if they fire you, they don’t give you what you’re entitled to. When you demand your rights, they blackball you.

Have you been blackballed?

No, because the last time I was working for some other plant I made an agreement; I got a certain amount of money; it was less than what I was entitled to, but with the condition that I wouldn’t be blackballed.