Workers Adjust to Life After Shutdown

They were mostly young women, hired for their keen eyesight. They sat under lamps for nine hours a day poring over thousands of O-rings looking for boils, cracks and other imperfections.

At age 30, Teresa Valenzuela Alcala, who left school after the sixth grade, was an exception.

It was her first job, and she excelled, rising to supervisor. She loved the job. It was fun. She remembers being able to listen to the radio as she worked.

“We were happily employed. It was a good work environment,” she said.

Then the Exportadora de Mano de Obra plant shut down, slamming the door on Valenzuela’s joy, not to mention her financial stability.

She and 100 other former employees are suing Exportadora’s alleged U.S. parent company, National O-Ring, of Downey, Calif., for severance pay.

Legal experts say the suit is emblematic of the sort of cross-border legal wrangling that will only grow as the United States and Mexico increase their economic ties.

The lawsuit, which also includes charges that National’s chief executive officer videotaped the women’s buttocks and pelvises during a company picnic, has made Valenzuela an untouchable in the eyes of many local maquiladora owners.

“It’s very difficult for us to find work at maquilas,” she said, sitting in the cavernous and now abandoned warehouse where she worked for five years. “When we ask for work, they tell us no jobs are available.”

“People say, ‘I’ve seen you on television. You’re the one involved in the lawsuit,’ ” she said.

Meanwhile, dust collects on the tables where the women used to work. Cords dangle from overhead pipes, and unopened boxes of O-rings are piled one atop another.

Several thousand dollars of now-idle inspection equipment--conveyor belts and buffing machines--have become the women’s collateral.

Valenzuela’s former manager, Ed Sandoval, hopes to resurrect the business. All he needs is a couple of clients, he figures, to jump-start things.

Meanwhile, National has abandoned plans to move into a new 60,000 square-foot building in Tijuana that was to be its next plant, choosing instead to build “somewhere in California,” said spokesman Dan Melendez.

“Because of everything we have gone through . . . we were just not comfortable going back into Mexico,” he said.

Whatever happens to National, and wherever the women’s suit is eventually decided, Valenzuela believes she’ll be compensated, somehow, for her years of service.

“We believe in justice. What was done to us is unfair. I believe there is a law to protect us,” she said.