From: Human Rights Coordinator <hrcoord@igc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Date: 25 Jul 92 13:01 PDT
Subject: Wretched Conditions in Guatemalan
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1473800102:000:3740
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!hrcoord    Jul 25 13:01:00 1992


From: Human Rights Coordinator <hrcoord>
Subject: Wretched Conditions in Guatemalan

/* Written 12:59 pm  Jul 25, 1992 by hrcoord in cdp:apc.labor */
San Francisco Chronicle
July 24, 1992

by Susan Parker, Chronicle Foreign Services

(This article is excerpted. Please refer to article for full text.)

Guatemala City - It was a Sunday afternoon, that one day a week
maquiladora workers have off from their jobs sewing shirts at a
nearby factory.

Several women took a break from their normal routine of washing
clothes and preparing meals to talk about their lives in the
maquiladora industry, which largely involves assembling pre-cut
clothing for such U.S. businesses as Phillips-Van Heusen, Sears,
Levi's Liz Claiborne and JC Penney.

One woman in her 40s who would not give her name told of the
backaches she gets sitting on a backless woooden bench all day
and the trouble she has breathing because of dust at the factory.

"The machines are tiring," she said. "I come home at night and the
children are demanding food, when all I want to do is sit down and
rest."

The article states that the women who work in the maquiladoras
face daily an exhausting production pace, the noise from hundreds
of machines, high temperatures, poor ventilation, and five toilets
for 500 workers. It also says that many of the workers are single
mothers working for about $2 a day.

The article goes on to say that the maquila industry is coming
under fire for its harsh labor conditions, low wages, physical
and sexual abuse of a largely female work force, and its anti-union
stance.

A 1991 study by the Guatemalan Labor Ministry found that some 
maquila owners practice "forced labor, for adults as well as
minors...At the end of the day, workers who have not met their
production goals are obligated to stay, (and) in some businesses
the workers are locked in."

The article mentions that Korean owners of a maquila was sentenced
to jail for 30 days for beating workers.

Attempts to organize unions have met with harsh resistance. At
Confecciones Unidades, a maquila factory in Guatemala City, 76
workers were fired last October after trying to unionize.

Workers who have participated in organizing efforts variously
report receiving bribes, death threats and increased workloads.

The report says that two unions have formed inside maquilas but
neither is active according to labor officials. They say that
the government is not serious about enforcing labor law or
protecting worker's rights.

"The government protects the maquila owners because maquilas are
an important part of the neo-liberal economic policy," said Sergio
Guzman, an organizer at UNSITRAGUA, a Guatemalan labor umbrella
group.

Annual apparel exports near $100 million, which makes apparel
Guatemala's second-leading export, the report states.

Today there are 500 maquila factories, which generate $330 million
annually in exports to the United States and provide 70,000 jobs,
according to the Nontraditional Products Exporters' Association.
Refugees returning from Mexico often turn to maquilas for work 
because there is little available land for them to cultivate.

Carlos Arias, a Guatemalan who owns a maquila that assembles shirts
for Phillips-Van Heusen, says that his industry is being unfairly
tainted by U.S. labor groups whose real interest is in protecting
U.S. jobs.

According to the article, Arias says he is providing valuable
training to poorly educated Guatemalans, and that his employees
are paid on a piecework basis, which lets them determine how much
money they will make a day. He says that many earn up to $6 a
day, however, the article states that a family of four needs to earn
between $7 and $9 a day to pay for basic necessities in Guatemala.