In Yucatan, a lesson in women's labor rights

Poorly paid garment workers learn to speak up for themselves

(2007 Ceprodehl photo)
Onlookers read a public display created by Ceprodehl, a Mexican labor rights group, last fall for the Day of the Dead. The display commemorated four women maquiladora workers who died, Ceprodehl says, because of employer negligence.

Ariel Jacobson, a resident of Dorchester, is an Associate for Economic Justice with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an international human rights organization based in Cambridge, Mass. She recently returned from a visit to Mexico as part of a 12-person delegation organized by the UUSC's JustJourneys Program. The delegation met with garment workers, economic migrants, small farmers, and others in order to assess how globalization and free-trade agreements are affecting the lives of ordinary people.

By Ariel Jacobson

MEXICO CITY -- Labor activist Isabel Canché was timid and soft spoken -- until she felt she had to speak up.

This was at the heart of the story that Isabel and her colleague Socorro Chablé told us about their work at the Center for the Promotion and Defense of Human Labor Rights (Ceprodehl), UUSC’s grassroots partner in the Yucatán. We were sitting in a hot room on the top floor of Casa de los Amigos (The Quaker House) in Mexico City. To allow some air circulation, we kept the windows open, inviting in layers of sound from the street: vendors selling snacks from their carts, car alarms, children crying. But my ears were tuned in to Isabel’s story.

Isabel used to work in the quality-control area of a maquiladora -- or “maquila” for short. Maquilas are factories that import materials on a duty-free basis for manufacturing and then export finished products. Each day, she worked alongside a group of twenty other women, checking garments individually to see if they were sewn well enough to pass factory standards.

This was monotonous, but detailed and fast-paced work, in a factory where the Yucatán heat can reach the high 90s. They earned around 60 pesos per day, or about $0.58 an hour. In other maquilas, women earn the minimum wage of just 49.50 pesos per day ($0.48 per hour). “You can see that this type of treatment is violence,” Isabel told us, “To work in a maquila is like working in a prison.”

One day, Isabel said, the manager asked her to work overtime, and to relay the message to the other women in her group. In some maquilas, workers are locked in the factory to work overtime, but in this case, Isabel said, the manager put pressure on her because he noticed that she had taken on a leadership role among her peers.

Isabel had worked in another factory before. By the time she’d come to this maquiladora, she’d begun to feel that she needed to speak up and voice the concerns of her fellow workers. She felt the women were working too much already -- often not even allowed to go the bathroom -- so she refused to tell the others to stay late. As a result, Isabel was moved to a different line where she worked by herself, isolated from her coworkers. Her supervisor held her up as an example: “If you don’t obey me, the same will happen to you.”

Eventually, Isabel decided to leave. When her coworkers considered giving up their jobs out of solidarity, she told them not to quit, knowing that they needed the steady pay. But she also made them promise her one thing, “Struggle for what you believe is just.”

Now Isabel is a key leader of Ceprodehl, where she and Chablé conduct workshops for maquila workers to educate themselves about their rights. They aim to reach workers in more than 70 maquiladoras around the state. Women represent more than 50 percent of the workforce, and are often most affected by abuses of their labor rights, so Ceprodehl focuses on outreach to women and issues of workplace health and safety, sexual rights, and the right to organize.

Workers in the Yucatan rarely have any information about their rights in the workplace. Ceprodehl sees its role as serving as an interlocutor between workers and management, but without worker-led unions, it’s extremely difficult to establish a dialogue.

Since abuses are rampant, Ceprodehl also documents cases of labor violations. For example, Ceprodehl says, there have been cases of workers suffering a catastrophic injury like losing a finger, and the management sending them to an on-site clinic for a bandage then telling them to return to the line. In other instances, pregnant women have been denied permission to go to a doctor’s appointment. According to Ceprodehl, doctors often receive kickbacks from the factories so that they will not report on-the-job injuries. In addition, there is little training of workers about workplace hazards, which has resulted in widespread cases of illnesses and accidents.

One of the messages Ceprodehl has been trying to transmit to raise public awareness is that this level of abuse in the workplace is a form of violence. Ceprodehl was instrumental in ensuring that the Law of Access for Women to a Life Free from Violence -- a Mexican law aimed at preventing intra-familiar violence -- included forms of violence that pertain to women workers, especially in maquiladoras.

But for me, what stood out from Ceprodehl’s presentation was the message that both Isabel and Socorro underscored: once maquila workers get training and have information about their rights, they change. Isabel concluded her story by saying, “I’ve grown as a person, and now I feel so much more self-assured because I’ve learned so much. Before I was afraid, and I didn’t speak unless I had to. Now I’m not afraid to express myself and speak up.”

For more information about UUSC JustJourneys and the Economic Justice program, visit the UUSC website at http://www.uusc.org. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.