From: harelb@MATH.CORNELL.EDU (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: U.S. Foreign Policy & Capitalism Triumph in Guatemala
Date: 30 Jul 92 22:33:03 GMT
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB


    "the women who work in the maquiladoras face daily an exhausting
    production pace [..]five toilets for 500 workers [and pay of]
    about $2 a day.
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    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."
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Topic 190       Wretched Conditions in Guatemalan 
hrcoord apc.labour      12:59 pm  Jul 25, 1992 
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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. 

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See also the article _The Victors_ part II by Noam Chomsky available
by sending the 1-line mesage GET CHOMSKY VICTORS2 ACTIV-L
to LISTSERV@UMCVMB.BITNET

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Excerpts:

Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the
results of their inquiry into maquiladoras "built by Fortune 500 to
take advantage of a desperate people," for profits hard to match
elsewhere. They found factories full of teenage girls, some
14-years-old, "working at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive work" for
wages "well below what is required for even a minimum standard of
living." Corporations commonly send the most dangerous jobs here
because standards on chemicals are "lax or non-existent." "In one
plant," she writes, "we all experienced headaches and nausea from
spending an hour on the assembly line" and "we saw young girls working
beside open vats of toxic waste, with no protective face covering."
Unions are barred, and there is an ample reserve army of desperate
people ready to take the place of any who "are not happy, or fall
behind in quotas, or become ill or pregnant." The delegation "took
pictures of a lagoon of black, bubbling toxic waste dumped by plants
in an industrial park," following it to "where it met untreated raw
sewage and turned into a small river running past squatters' camps
(where children covered in sores drank Pepsi Cola from baby bottles)
to empty into the Tijuana River."

It is more fashionable to bemoan the environmental and human
catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the results of an evil system now
happily overcome in a victory for our humane values.

[...]


THE FIRST PART of this series (Z, November) opened with the
conventional interpretation of the past decade: the U.S. won the Cold
War, a victory for the forces of righteousness. We then turned to the
question that would at once come to the mind of anyone apart from the
most fanatic ideologue: How are the victors faring at this historic
moment, as they celebrate their triumph? We looked first at those who
should be the most overjoyed because of their unusual good fortune:
our "little brown brothers" in Central America and Panama, who have
long been under the protective wing of the leader of the crusade,
becoming a foreign policy obsession in the past decade. The conditions
of their existence help us understand why the obvious questions about
the Grand Victory of democracy and free market capitalism are so
scrupulously avoided in polite and cultivated circles. Needless to
say, the beneficiaries of our solicitude have some thoughts of their
own about these matters. We will turn in the final section to their
interpretation of the triumph of capitalism and freedom, and the
nobility of their protector -- thoughts that do not penetrate the
well-disciplined commissar culture at home.

[...]

The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of Eastern
Europe to the "sick system" (quite accurately), while ignoring the
catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions when some problem
is noticed, attributing it to any cause other than the system that
consistently brings it about. Latin American economists who have

[...]
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