On a typical Saturday morning in the United States, millions of people will be relaxing at home, watching television or perhaps surfing the Internet on their personal computers. In Tijuana, Mexico, however, it is just another workday. In this city of over a million people, located in the state of Baja California across the border from San Diego, California, thousands of employees who hold jobs in facilities known as maquiladoras report to work six days a week. They spend a good part of their weekend working in industrial parks such as “Samsung City,” located on the eastern edge of Tijuana, assembling the color picture tubes used in the television screens and computer monitors of their neighbors to the north.
These foreign-owned manufacturing and assembly plants are located along the Mexican border to take advantage of Mexico’s low wages and easy access to the United States, the world’s largest consumer market. Japanese and Korean companies operate many of the electronics facilities, but overall, U.S. companies own about half of the maquiladoras in Mexico. Maquila operations exploded in 1995, after the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in early 1994, the devaluation of the peso later that year, and the subsequent economic crisis. There are some 4,500 maquiladoras stretching from Matamoros to Tijuana, employing over a million workers and generating $10 billion a year in foreign exchange.[1] Roughly 15% are located in Tijuana.
The expansion of maquilas along the border has created a powerful magnet for people from the interior of Mexico seeking work. Each year, some 70,000 people move to Tijuana alone, and nearly five acres of land are developed each day to keep pace.[2] Today, there are some 700 maquiladoras employing 145,000 people in Tijuana—nearly half the city’s working population. This is a 50% increase from just five years ago, when 565 plants employed only 82,000 workers.[3] The environmental, economic and social impact of this rapid industrialization—and the population growth and urban sprawl that accompany it—are far reaching.
Newcomers face a tight, expensive housing market. Confronted by rents that require most of their monthly wages, many workers in Tijuana construct illegal, substandard squatter’s homes on the outskirts of existing neighborhoods that usually lack access to adequate public services, including potable water and sewerage.[4] Many residents rely on water trucked in by the city, which they store in 50-gallon drums or concrete storage tanks that are not always easy to keep clean. The result is an elevated rate of infant mortality, at 26.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Tijuana—compared to 7.1 in San Diego. In Mexican border states, nearly 40% of infant deaths are the result of intestinal infections.[5]
By contrast, maquiladoras like the Samsung assembly plant, which require very high quality water for their operations, are often given first priority for water delivery. The Samsung factory was intentionally built near Tijuana’s main potable water treatment plant to ensure a reliable water source of consistent quality.
Some planners believe that the undue burdens that maquilas impose on municipal water supplies in Tijuana and elsewhere along the border means that they should pay some of the costs not only of cleanup and water treatment, but of providing housing and access to clean water for their workers. Carlos Graisbord, director of Tijuana’s Department of Planning, is trying to convince maquila owners to help build affordable housing for their workers, but he is realistic about his chances for success. “Globalization means these industries are mobile,” he says, “and they don’t integrate economically into an area.”[6] The result, he concedes, is that most companies never invest in the city’s infrastructure or social needs.
In 1994, Guadalupe Osuna Milán was elected mayor of Tijuana based on a campaign promise to provide better water services to all city residents. Drawing on contacts he had developed as director of the State Commission for Public Services of Tijuana (CESPT), the local agency responsible for potable water delivery and wastewater treatment, by 1998 the new mayor had provided water connections to an estimated 94% of the city’s residents.[7] But new maquiladora plants continue to require significant amounts of water to operate, sometimes as much as one million gallons per day. Their operations continue to put tremendous pressure on public agencies to increase the city’s water supply, as well as its capacity to ensure clean water for a rapidly growing population. As Osuna Milán conceded in a recent interview, by straining the city’s capacity to provide clean water, “the maquiladora industry is the most important source of water pollution” in Tijuana.[8]
Organizations such as the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) in San Diego claim this situation is exacerbated by maquiladora operators who choose to operate in Mexico to avoid the burden of stricter environmental regulations in the United States. According to the EHC, “industries are rushing to take advantage of the cheap labor and lax enforcement of environmental regulations in the Mexican border region.”[9]
The EHC has created a Border Environmental Justice Campaign that organizes communities in San Diego and Tijuana to lobby for stricter enforcement of environmental laws. In June, EHC Executive Director Diane Takvorian traveled to Montreal to meet with members of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). The CEC, created as part of the environmental side agreements to the NAFTA, is responsible for ensuring that agencies in Mexico, Canada and the United States enforce their environmental laws. In this case, Takvorian and the EHC are asking them to take steps to determine if Mexico has failed to effectively enforce laws in regards to the cleanup of Metales y Derivados, an abandoned lead smelter in Tijuana.
The New Frontier Trading Corporation, a San Diego-based wholesale metals company, owns Metales y Derivados. They abandoned the Metales site in 1994 after authorities found them in violation of hazardous material management laws in both Mexico and the United States. Metales closed the facility in eastern Tijuana, but left an estimated 6,000 metric tons of lead wastes piled up in a field next to their plant, within a few hundred yards of homes and grazing dairy cattle. The EHC, working with community organizers in Tijuana, is petitioning for the clean-up of this abandoned maquiladora site. They claim to have identified several cases of infants born near the plant who have some form of serious health conditions, including babies born without the uvula (the soft tissue hanging down the middle of the soft palate above the back of the tongue which produces the vibration needed for speech), and babies born with hydroencephaly (a fatal congenital malformation where the brain cavity is continuously filled with fluid).[10]
While some U.S.-owned companies may have been able to evade the laws of their home country by moving to Mexico, their hazardous waste discharges still have an impact in the United States. In January of this year, a new binational wastewater treatment plant began operating in San Diego. It cost $240 million to construct, and was paid for primarily by federal taxpayers. It is designed to accept excess wastewater from Tijuana that is not being treated in Mexico. But the plant has been unable to meet acute toxicity permit limits, which are intended to ensure that the wastewater, which is discharged into the Pacific Ocean after treatment, is not harming marine life or endangering public health.
To date, the plant has failed every acute toxicity test conducted since preliminary operations began in April 1998. The plant’s operators, under contract to the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, believe these maquiladoras are at least partly related to the illegal discharge of industrial wastes from facilities in Tijuana. “Maquiladoras for years have been unable to document that they are handling their hazardous waste in accordance with the law,” notes one study. “Some portion of the wastes they dispose of have simply disappeared within the city.”[11]
The by-products of the manufacturing processes that create television screens and computer monitors often include acids, solvents, ammonia and surfactants, which are extremely harmful to the environment. On-site treatment plants can address many of the problems created by the manufacturing process, but left to their own devices, most maquiladoras will not build such plants unless forced to do so by the authorities. In Mexicali, for example, the city government required the Dae Woo picture-tube manufacturing facility to build an on-site wastewater treatment facility to deal with the high levels of sulfuric acid the factory churns out every day. This has helped to keep these wastes out of Mexicali’s overburdened municipal collection system. The cost of such on-site treatment facilities is minimal: The Dae Woo facility, which manufactures four million picture tubes each year, cost over $400 million to construct, but the on-site treatment plant, which can treat up to one million gallons of wastewater per day, cost only $4.3 million. Once the high acid levels are reduced, the wastewater is sent to the city’s collection system for additional treatment and disposal.
Conversely, in Tijuana, where on-site treatment is less common, traces of wastes such as heavy metals are turning up in the city’s wastewater system—and in the soils of the Tijuana River Valley in the United States. These wastes are the result of so-called “renegade flows” that have escaped from the city’s sewage collection system and entered the Tijuana River. Three-quarters of the river’s watershed is in Mexico, but it crosses the border and flows into an estuary in the United States, right across the border fence from Tijuana. The estuary is considered a nationally protected research reserve, but every year scientists detect more industrial wastes in the sediments.
Sewage treatment in San Diego, where the city enforces an effective industrial pretreatment program, offers another illustrative comparison. Wastewater in Tijuana contains ten times more chromium, eight times more nickel, and triple the average amount of copper than that of San Diego.[12] Efforts to manage wastes from the rapidly growing industrial facilities in Tijuana have been stymied as the city struggles to provide adequate wastewater treatment for the current population. Out of necessity, the focus has been on simply providing adequate sewage connections to the residents and businesses in this rapidly growing city. There is simply no money left over for monitoring or reducing industrial discharges.
This past May, the city of San Diego announced an initiative to assist Tijuana in combatting the illegal industrial discharges. Wastewater technicians from San Diego will be working with Baja California’s Department of Ecology to monitor the discharge of industrial waste from maquiladoras throughout Tijuana.[13] Alan Langworthy, Deputy Directory of the San Diego Metropolitan Wastewater division, is coordinating the project. For the past two years, his staff has translated documents and assisted with training state employees in Baja California. They teach technicians industrial discharge technology, enforcement and testing methods, and use laboratory facilities at the University of Baja California, Tijuana, to analyze the samples they collect.
At the same time, automated monitors have been installed in wastewater drains throughout Tijuana to detect high levels of acids or other hazardous wastes. If such materials are detected, inspections are made at nearby industrial sites to determine the source of the contamination. Some companies resist these inspections. In a few situations, Mexican authorities have arrived at the front door of a facility suspected of illegal dumping demanding to inspect the facilities. While the managers were distracted with the inspectors at the front, technicians have entered the plant from the back and begun sampling the water.
In August, one of these on-site inspections resulted in a maquiladora closure. North Safety Products, a manufacturer of latex gloves, was shut down and fined approximately $2,800 for discharging highly acidic wastes into the city’s collection system. This fine is based on the equivalent of 800 daily wages at roughly $3.50 per day. The plant will be allowed to resume operation after they add an on-site water treatment system to their production process.[14]
In addition to the poor environmental track records of many maquiladoras, their working conditions can also be abysmal. While some point to the positive effect of the jobs created by maquila growth and the fact that unemployment in Tijuana is the lowest in Mexico, the work can be arduous and at times hazardous. Attempts at unionization at some factories have met with serious government opposition.
Women face additional discrimination and harassment. Many maquiladora employers routinely require female applicants to take pregnancy tests, a practice that is illegal in the United States and Canada.[15] Even after they are hired, women workers report they have to periodically prove they are not pregnant. Maquiladora representatives insist this is not intended to discriminate, but rather to protect the women from doing work that could be harmful during pregnancy and to avoid problems with birth defects associated with certain chemicals.[16]
In Tijuana, a group of female maquiladora em- ployees have created an organization called Grupo Factor X to educate women about their rights and responsibilities as maquiladora workers. The group’s director, Beatríz Alfaro, explains that groups of women agree to participate in a 26-week training program. They meet one day each week to learn about the impact of globalization on the maquiladoras, and the impact this has on women working in the factories. They are taught how to deal with sexual harassment on the job and the impact of industrial pollution on their health. For these women, “the most important thing is knowledge and empowerment,” says Alfaro. “After completing the training, housework is done differently. Work in maquiladoras is done differently. The women learn how to find equity and justice at home and at work.”[17]
Martha Rocha, founder of Amas de Casas (a term for housewives) in Tijuana, has been directing a grassroots campaign of her own. For nearly 20 years she has educated residents about their rights, whether they work in a maquiladora or are affected by an industrial facility operating near their homes. In 1995, she helped organize a cross-border coalition of community and environmental groups that successfully shut down a hazardous-waste incinerator that was built near her neighborhood.
Members of Amas de Casas have also worked to develop better labor and environmental enforcement laws in Baja California. Rocha says that she became active after the Mexican government began to “dismantle laws and allow binational companies to operate more easily.”[18] In January 1998, her group issued a proposal to the Baja State Environmental Commission, which claimed it lacked the resources to enforce environmental-protection legislation. The way she saw it, the government’s action “was like a housewife saying, ‘I don’t have time to cook, so we don’t eat.’ “[19]
Thanks to activists such as Rocha and Alfaro, workers are more likely to question employers about unsafe working conditions and demand improvements. Obstacles to other efforts remain, however, especially when it comes to unionization. Maquiladora owners have found ways to skirt not only environmental legislation, but labor legislation as well.
In December 1998, for example, a Mexican court found that the independent October 6 Union for Industry and Commerce was entitled to call a strike for better working conditions at the Han Young factory, an auto-parts manufacturer in Tijuana. This was the first time in the history of the maquiladoras that a labor action called by an independent union was supported by law.
In the face of a legal shutdown, Han Young moved from western Tijuana to a site in the city’s eastern section to avoid complying with the court’s decision. State officials have backed Han Young, asserting that any ruling relating to the old site does not automatically apply to the new one. “Legally speaking,” said Carlos Martín Gutiérrez, head of the state’s labor office in Tijuana, “although the company has the same name, it is another workplace in a separate location.”[20]
Such corporate sleight of hand, along with official complicity in suppressing unions, is emblematic of the challenges facing workers in Tijuana’s maquiladoras. Despite investigations by the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Administrative Office (NAO), which oversees NAFTA’s supplemental labor accord, violations continue. Employees who complain about working conditions or insist on their rights to a safe workplace are often fired. Turnover in some plants has been as high as 50%, as employers find it easier to simply replace workers than to improve conditions.
As Mexico struggles to improve its economy, political support for the maquiladora industry remains strong, even in some unlikely places. In August, at a meeting at the University of California, San Diego, former Mexico City mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), stated that “maquiladoras are and should be welcome. They are helping us to improve our economies.” Cárdenas, a presidential candidate, went on to say that “in the interior of Mexico we haven’t been able to integrate maquiladoras into our domestic industry. This should be an effort between maquiladoras and government, to make local governments participate, to reduce immigration flows to the United States.”[21]
It is unclear whether such cooperative efforts would result in less migration to the United States. But as industries continue to expand along the border, it is certain that communities will face increasing problems with water shortages, inadequate housing, and air and water pollution. To date, it has been nongovernmental organizations such as Amas de Casas and the Environmental Health Coalition that are most effective at stopping illegal polluters and organizing workers to demand better conditions.
NAFTA supporters and maquiladora owners, on the other hand, have downplayed environmental and labor violations, resisting governmental efforts to address these problems. They argue that even at wages of $3.50 per day, maquiladora workers earn more than employees in other parts of Mexico, ignoring the more fundamental disadvantages of substandard housing along the border and dangerous working conditions in the factories.
The next few years may prove even more challenging for environmental and workers’ rights advocates, as Mexico begins assessing tariffs on products produced in the border zone. For years, to stimulate maquiladora growth, Mexico assessed no taxes on these companies. But under NAFTA, this arrangement will end in 2001. After that date, products that are imported into Mexico from non-NAFTA nations will be charged at a higher tariff rate if the same products are available from either the United States or Canada. Mexico is also negotiating trade agreements with the European community and, more significantly, Japan and other Asian countries. Mexico will most likely negotiate lower tariffs or even eliminate them on electronic products from Asia that make up the majority of these imports. To do otherwise would be to risk losing important maquila partners.
There may be an upside to this. As Japan makes more long-term commitments to industries along the Mexican border, some observers predict it will also invest in water delivery and wastewater-treatment infrastructure. One example is the Japanese Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (JOECF), a government-funded agency that provides low-interest loans to governments in developing nations and to private businesses. The JOECF is providing assistance to Tijuana to build four water-reclamation plants and may be willing to invest in potable water delivery systems to service the maquilas. As Japan comes to rely on the cheap labor market in the U.S.-Mexico border region, it is increasingly using the JOECF to invest in local infrastructure to provide Japanese businesses with a safe water supply which may have positive spillover effects for the poor residents of these cities.
But these are small gains in a region plagued by environmental abuse and lackluster cleanup efforts on the part of local and business officials. Tied to any improvements in water treatment and the border environment in general is the need to improve conditions for workers, both in the maquilas and in their local communities. Though some maquiladora owners may realize that improving local infrastructure is in their best interest, it is doubtful whether most will adopt a policy of enlightened self-interest regarding their workers and the regions in which they operate. Given the flexible labor “surplus” in maquila countries like Mexico, most maquila owners would rather put up with high turnover rates rather than change hiring practices and working conditions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lori Saldaña is a freelance writer, focusing on environmental issues affecting the U.S.-Mexico border. Earlier this year, she was appointed to the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission’s Advisory Council by President Clinton.
NOTES
1. Julie Light, “Engendering Change: The Long, Slow Road to Organizing Women Maquiladora Workers,” Corporate Watch, at: .
2. Author’s Interview, Planning Director Carlos Graisbord, August 1999.
3. Diane Lindquist, “Peso’s Loss, Plant’s Gain: Maquiladoras Up Profit Potential, While Workers’ Income Drops,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 14, 1995.
4. Author’s Interview, Planning Director Carlos Graisbord, August, 1999
5 Paul Ganster, “Discussion Papers on Sustainable Development in San Diego and Tijuana,” Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies, University of California, San Diego (1998), p. 31.
6. Author’s Interview, Planning Director Carlos Graisbord, August 1999.
7. Comisión Estatal de Servicos Públicos de Tijuana (CESPT), Memoria 1998 (1999).
8. Author’s Interview, Osuna Milan, August 1998.
9. From the Environmental Health Coalition Website at: .
10. From the Environmental Health Coalition Website at: .
11. Roberto Sánchez, “Discussion Papers on Sustainable Development: A View from San Diego,” Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies, University of California, San Diego (1998), p. 66.
12. City of San Diego, “Receiving Waters Monitoring Report/Ocean Monitoring Program” (1997).
13. El Mexicano (Tijuana), May 30, 1999.
14. El Mexicano (Tijuana), August 24, 1999.
15. Andrew Downie, “Bias in Hiring Cited at Maquiladoras,” and “Group Finds Women Are Forced to Take Pregnancy Tests,” Houston Chronicle, December 30, 1998.
16. Diane Lindquist, “Pregnancy Screenings in Mexico Criticized: Job Discrimination Complaints Verified by U.S. Officials,” San Diego Union-Tribune, January 13, 1998.
17. From a workshop at the “Annual Meeting on the Border Environment” (Tijuana), April 1999.
18. From a workshop at the “Annual Meeting on the Border Environment” (Tijuana), April 1999.
19. From a workshop at the “Annual Meeting on the Border Environment” (Tijuana), April 1999.
20. Sandra Dibble, “Strikers Shut South Korean-Owned Maquiladora,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 8, 1999.
21. From a speech at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, August 27, 1999.
