Rachel Becker
Maquilapolis
Response
February 13, 2012
For
me, one of the most striking moments of Maquilapolis
was when one of the women commented that houses in Tijuana were commonly
built from discarded garage doors from the United States. No one in the United States would consider
that their waste would wind up being a housing solution for someone in a poorer
country. There is something disturbing
about the gross irony that a garage door, which represents extravagance in that
is a separate housing place for your car, can be home for an entire
family. Her family didn’t have a floor,
but they did have walls with various American names embellished on them. This made me think about the average
American’s lack of concern for functionality and, instead, their overemphasis
on upgrades and aesthetics. There is a
separate issue in that this is waste that we knowingly dispose of. The bigger picture is that the outsourcing of
United States labor into poor communities means decreased labor laws and health
codes. Through this outsourcing, we are
destroying the environment, the health of workers and those unfortunate enough
to live nearby, and ultimately creating a chain effect of waste.
One
of the women showed how her entire community has become contaminated and
dangerous with the onset of these American factories. The factories are up on a hill and all of the
people who work in them are down below.
Of course, all of the waste filters down and leeches into the soil and
the water; everything that grows and everything that comes into contact with
these chemicals will also be contaminated.
Unfortunately, these people are poor enough that they cannot afford to
refuse to work in these conditions. Maquilapolis followed a group of women
who were taking legal action against a company that had laid them off and tried
to cheat them out of severance pay.
Apparently, through being in operation for only a small, set period of
time and then declaring financial troubles, companies can avoid paying
taxes. This seems to be an overarching
problem – it should not be that the best business practice, the business that
is deemed most successful, is the one that crushes the most people in its
path. This becomes particularly
complicated when the man who owns the factory is a Mexican who has
expatriated. At some point, he must have
decided that it was far more lucrative to distance himself from Mexico and his
factories and to continue with his business practices from there. Of course, there is also a warrant out for
his arrest, so that might have something to do with it. There is a sense of his having sold out his
own, which is a missed opportunity to bring beneficial change to a depressed
economy.
I thought it was
wonderful that this group of women could be empowered and informed enough to
fight for themselves in a bureaucracy and life system that is so clearly geared
against them. Not only is their labor
very much replaceable, but they are women in an overwhelmingly patriarchal
system. It is worth noting, though, that
they did have to find a man to represent them as a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s because there is a
lack of women who are trained in that regard or because having a man involved
helped their case implicitly. It was
especially affirming because they were hired and expected to be cheap and
docile expendable labor. Women fill 80%
of the jobs in this industry because they are expected to be agreeable and
their hands are a slightly more helpful size.
Under globalization, a woman factory worker is simply another commodity. Women overcoming these disadvantages and
coming out victorious is a remarkable feat.
I do not believe
that companies should be rewarded for being able to evade mandates set out by
the United States. The United States
doesn’t even necessarily do enough to protect worker’s rights within the
country’s borders, so seeing what practices go on beyond them is extremely
concerning. I’m sure there are some
places that do benefit from the economic boost, but in this case the people of
Tijuana have just been trapped in a system that offers nothing in their
favor. It is no wonder that the quality
of products has plummeted to such an extent that everything is designed to be
replaced within a few months, a few years at most. If workers are only completing a small piece
in a large chain of work, they can be replaced easily. If they are being denied water, bathroom
breaks, and their health, they are not likely to work at their highest level of
productivity. American consumer culture
has infiltrated in a way that is very disturbing to me here. This movie left me depressed and worried
about a future in which this business model becomes more and more
prominent.
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