Garment-Textile Boom Brings Wrenching Change to Mexico

TEHUACAN, Mexico

As production of Guess jeans and other name-brand apparel has moved south of the border, thousands of jobs have tumbled from Los Angeles into the Third World--bringing seismic changes, for better and worse, to one tradition-rich Mexican valley.

Though the work generally pays 50 cents to $1 an hour, peasant farmers have poured into this quiet town from the surrounding countryside. They appear to prefer a steady wage in a garment factory to scratching out a living from the region’s cactus-studded farmland--or immigrating to the United States.

Feeding strong U.S. demand as well as Mexico’s own growing market, Tehuacan’s clothing assembly industry has surged from 15,000 workers in 1994 to more than 40,000 today, in more than 600 factories. That makes Tehuacan, three hours’ drive southeast of Mexico City, one of the garment capitals of North America--and for some, a vibrant example of community growth fed by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But others, like the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, or UNITE, the main U.S. garment union, have attacked big-name companies about the treatment of employees at maquiladoras--Mexican factories that assemble products for sale abroad, usually to the U.S.

A report issued in July by the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, a Chicago-based labor activist group, says investigators found youths ages 13 to 15 working illegally in the Tehuacan plants, employees forced to work unpaid overtime and many other “violations of workers’ basic rights.”

Industry officials defend the working conditions here, saying they are closely monitored, particularly in the larger plants that produce bluejeans and other clothing for export because name-brand clients like Guess Inc. cannot afford to be linked to labor abuses.

Accusations of mistreatment of foreign garment workers have long been voiced in the United States by human rights groups as well as by labor unions angry over the loss of jobs to countries where wage rates are much lower. UNITE distributed the Interfaith Committee’s report at stores in California and 15 other states in the first week of September in trying to get consumers to adhere to its “Back to School Boycott” of Guess products.

Garment factory employees in Tehuacan who were introduced to a visiting reporter by local activists voiced labor complaints including periodic all-night shifts, lack of food services and threats of dismissal. The mainly Mexican-owned factories refused to allow visits without lengthy advance notice, however, so the complaints could not be checked independently.

Yet, in a Third World country with a long history of labor exploitation, it is not immediately obvious that the clothing assembly workers are treated or paid any differently than other Mexican factory employees.

Tehuacan’s Population Nearly Doubles

Far more striking in Tehuacan--a region with strong Mixtec Indian and farming roots--are the wrenching changes the boom has wrought.

Alcoholism and drug use have increased and gangs have emerged, community activists say, as indigenous farmers have come in from surrounding villages and adjusted to their new factory lives, suddenly flush with cash.

Many surrounding fields now lie fallow or have been bought by speculators, and new shanty neighborhoods have latched onto the edges of the city as Tehuacan’s population has nearly doubled to 350,000 in the last two decades, in part because of the textile and garment industry’s growth.

Even as these unsettling problems of urbanization have multiplied, industry proponents say, more families are now staying together in Tehuacan and other maquiladora centers.

Indeed, what may be the most significant result of the boom in Tehuacan is that more young men are staying home; fewer are leaving to find opportunities in the U.S., stripping poor rural towns of healthy young people.

It is impossible to pin down accurate emigration figures because most who leave Mexico sneak into the United States illegally. Some recent Mexican reports have suggested the number of migrants has declined over the last year or two. It is unclear, though, whether that results from tougher border controls or increased job opportunities within Mexico. There is no doubt, however, that export-driven growth has created jobs. This year, the number of people employed nationwide in all maquiladoras rose above 1 million for the first time.

The impact in Tehuacan has been dramatic.

“We have made a leap from the Middle Ages to post-modernism, almost without stopping in the Industrial Age,” said Jose Luis Sorcia, director of the Tehuacan regional office of the national clothing industry chamber.

“Suddenly an American quality inspector, with a master’s degree from UCLA in engineering or industrial psychology, confronts 200 or 300 workers from traditional farming areas in a new plant, and there is a clash of two cultures. But nevertheless, the people have learned to adapt, and they manage to achieve productivity as well.”

Sorcia acknowledged that treatment of workers is not ideal in the industry, particularly in the smaller firms. But the larger producers ensure fair treatment, including decent pay, training opportunities, proper ventilation and hygienic conditions, he said.

“The pressure from the North American clients has certainly improved conditions for Mexican workers,” Sorcia said. “They have changed the mentality of Mexican business owners.”

A 27-year-old employee at Top Jeans, one of the big export maquiladoras, said he learned to sew in a small family-run clothing shop where conditions--such as longer hours--were worse than at his current job. He declined to give his name as he talked with a reporter late at night on the rutted dirt road outside his family’s small corrugated-metal house. With three years’ experience, he earns $48 a week working nine hours a day five days a week and half-days on Saturdays. He said the clothing maquiladoras offer better treatment than the region’s poultry industry, the other major employer, and about the same conditions as the spring-water bottling industry for which Tehuacan is nationally known.

Employee Tells of Pressures on Workers

The apparel workers’ union, however, is weak and “officialist,” the worker said, meaning it is aligned with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and avoids making waves. Workers are fined a week’s pay if they arrive late three times in a month, he added. The factory foremen constantly pressure workers to raise production, he said, “and recently they have threatened people with dismissals if they don’t improve. This is what they do in all the maquiladoras.”

Such accounts from clothing factory workers outraged American members of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, who visited the town in February and subsequently issued a report called “Cross-Border Blues: A Call for Justice for Maquiladora Workers in Tehuacan.”

“By moving production to places like Tehuacan, U.S. manufacturers have been largely successful at avoiding scrutiny of how maquiladora workers who make their clothing are treated,” the report said. “It is time for apparel retailers and manufacturers to take responsibility for the ‘cross-border blues’ they have created.”

Among the major customers of the mainly Mexican-owned Tehuacan maquiladoras is Los Angeles-based Guess, which has gradually moved much of its bluejeans production to Mexico. UNITE, the garment union that had unsuccessfully tried to organize Guess workers, accuses Guess of “running away” to Mexico and other cheap-labor countries.

Daniel Petrocelli, Guess’ general counsel, maintained that Guess has set the pace in the American garment industry by establishing a voluntary monitoring system to ensure decent working conditions at factories that make its clothing. “And we have an extensive monitoring program in Mexico, with people from Los Angeles going down there as long as two weeks at a time.”

Guess’ in-house director of compliance, Irma Melwani, said she makes unannounced inspections at Top Jeans and at Lavapant, the main Guess contractors in Tehuacan, and that she also uses an independent Los Angeles inspection firm, Cal Safety, to make sure the maquiladoras are in full compliance with Guess’ code of conduct. Those rules cover everything from basics such as making sure toilet paper and soap are available to detailed inspections of payrolls to ensure pay rates are correct.

Richard Reinis, a Los Angeles lawyer, is the founder of the U.S. garment industry’s largest self-monitoring organization, Compliance Alliance. The group monitors treatment of employees by contractors in the U.S., Mexico and elsewhere for 18 large clothing manufacturers.

“What’s happening in Mexico will be looked at as something of a velvet revolution,” Reinis said. “We are seeing that Mexico is able to produce quality garments at about one-eighth or one-ninth of U.S. wages--about $1.60 an hour all-in [that is, including the cost of benefits] versus $9.60 per hour in the U.S., and $7.80 in Southern California. Yet we found that in the newer [Mexican] plants in particular, the conditions are absolutely equal to or better than employee treatment in shops in Southern California.

“Within the laws of Mexico, workers are treated fairly,” Reinis said. “They are earning enough to put food on the table, to clothe themselves; it’s roughly equivalent to earning $15,000 to $20,000 per year here,” and thus above poverty level.

Human rights workers in the town acknowledge that because of the maquiladoras, younger residents are now staying home, but they worry about the consequences.

“There is work, but at what price?” asked Martin Barrios, a co-founder of the town’s nongovernmental Human Rights Committee. “We see that the young people do have buying power, which they never had before, and a big advantage is that the young are no longer leaving, but it is causing a big change in the way of life in indigenous communities.

“The pueblos that were the birthplace of corn are no longer producing corn. The greatest producers of agriculture in the Americas are now becoming laborers!” he exclaimed. “This is transforming our lives.”

More Maquiladoras Locating in Interior

The minimum wage in Tehuacan--the lowest of the country’s three regional minimums--is 26.05 pesos a day, or about $2.60. Pay in the garment industry is based on completing a set number of tasks--for example, sewing 1,200 inseams per day--rather than on hours worked. So workers say slower colleagues must often work longer days to get their tasks done.

Raul Hinojosa, head of UCLA’s Center for North American Integration and Development, said maquiladoras are increasingly locating in the Mexican interior in places such as Tehuacan rather than on the border. Labor further inland from the border tends to be more stable and cheaper, Hinojosa said. And living costs are lower in the interior, so living standards of interior maquiladora workers may in fact be better than for workers near the border.

“If you can get a factory wage in a place like Tehuacan, you are doing pretty well,” he said.

The threat of moving U.S. factory production to Mexico “does have a depressing effect on American factory wages,” he said, “but if such maquiladora centers end up reducing immigration to the United States, that could increase wages in the U.S. because there will be fewer newcomers competing for those jobs.”

It is hard to quantify the flow of jobs south from Los Angeles, even as major manufacturers such as Guess have confirmed shifting large proportions of their production to Mexico and employment has soared in Mexico’s three largest garment centers--Tehuacan and the more northerly Mexican cities of Torreon in Coahuila and Aguascalientes in the state of the same name. The loss of lower-skilled jobs in Los Angeles may have been offset by the creation of higher-tech garment jobs.

“The statewide employment figures [in California] have actually held steady and even gone up in the last couple years,” said Joe Rodriguez of the Garment Contractors Assn. in Los Angeles. “On the other hand, I hear of a lot of plants closing because clients are contracting in Mexico. There are contradictory stories, [but] our membership has held steady.”

Labor activists in the U.S. say brand-name companies that profit from low-wage foreign production have a moral responsibility to raise standards where their products are made.

Kim Bobo, executive director of the Interfaith Committee, said: “It may mean lower profits, but I think there are some higher values at stake here. Capitalism is supposed to raise the overall standard of living--that’s why you’re supposed to want their factory in your town.”

She and other commission members who visited Tehuacan heard numerous allegations of maquiladoras’ violating Mexican labor laws, she said, apart from the basic issue of extremely low pay.

“In one small house we visited, there were 10 people living there and six worked full time in these factories, and this was all they could afford. It’s just wrong,” she said.

Industry official Sorcia replied that capitalism is working in Tehuacan and the surrounding valley; because of the industry’s rapid growth, the current shortage of about 5,000 workers has pushed up wages and allowed employees to change jobs and improve their situation, he said.

“The more jobs we create here in Mexico, the fewer problems the U.S. will have from Mexicans immigrating to the U.S.,” he said. “And it is healthy for Mexico because we are avoiding the disintegration of our families.”

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Bursting at the Seams

Mexico’s textile and garment industry is exploding as it serves the U.S. and Mexican markets.

Textile Gross Domestic Product

Year-to-year percentage growth:

1997: 9.7%

*

Employees

In thousands:

1997: 462,683

*

Maquiladora Exports

Maquiladora textile and clothing exports in billions of U.S. dollars:

$4.1 billion

Source: Ministry of Commerce