by Kent Paterson
El Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral (CEREAL)
For more than four years, Margarita Estrada assembled and tested computers at a Foxconn factory in the central Mexican city of Guadalajara. Preparing 120 CPUs an hour for shipping was a “stressful” job, the young woman says. Part of Estrada’s duties involved training the large numbers of new workers. Despite dire employment opportunities in Mexico, many new employees never return after a day or two. “People didn’t last,” Estrada recalls. In her stint at the Taiwanese-owned plant, Estrada’s wages went up from slightly more than $8 to about $10 a day, plus hard-to-attain production bonuses, the former worker says.
Yet even after years at Foxconn, Estrada never became a formal employee of the electronics industry giant. Instead, Spyga, a temporary employment agency, employed her and most of her co-workers on the shop floor. “There were few people working directly for Foxconn, about five of them.” Estrada says. “That’s all.”
In 2007, Estrada was laid off and offered $300 in severance pay. Suspecting the amount fell below Mexican legal standards, she knocked on the doors of Cereal, a Jesuit-founded labor advocacy and watchdog group. After some back and forth with two sets of employers, she eventually walked away with nearly $2,000 in severance pay.
In Guadalajara and the Mexican electronics industry in general, Foxconn’s employment set-up is the norm. Nearly 70 temporary employment agencies operate in Guadalajara alone, says Jorge Barajas, Cereal’s local coordinator, and seven pages of the bulging Guadalajara phone book are filled with the private firms.
According to the veteran labor activist, temporary job agencies in Guadalajara boomed when the local electronics industry expanded in the mid-1990s. Transnational companies including Manpower and Adecco now dominate the electronics industry labor market.
A 2007 Cereal study found that approximately 60 percent of the 400,000 workers in Mexico’s electronics industry work for temporary agencies, with some companies employing as much as 90 percent of their workforce through sub-contractors.
In 2008 and 2009, more than 4,000 workers turned to Cereal for help, and 95 percent of inquiries in Guadalajara involved the temp firms, Barajas says.
“Though fewer in number, [foreign-owned companies] are the ones that accumulate the majority of workers’ complaints,” says Barajas.
Common complaints include inadequate severance pay, skimping on benefits, low pay, and the seemingly never-ending temporary contracts that go from month-to-month or even fifteen days stretches.
Meager Wages
Three hours from Guadalajara, the city of Aguascalientes hosts plants run by Flextronics and Sensata, formerly Texas Instruments. A Sensata worker, who declined to be identified for fear of losing her job, echoed similar complaints. Before the economic crash, making the leap from a temp to a permanent job with Sensata required months of perfect attendance and near-spotless performance, she maintains. Most workers are single mothers, divorcées and widows juggling domestic responsibilities and trying to raise families on low factory wages.
After almost a decade at the plant, she pulls in less than $50 for a 45-hour week. “For all we do, it is not a fair salary,” she contends.
Aureliano Rosa, who has five years’ experience in the Guadalajara high-tech industry, recounts a similar tale. The agencies, he says, under-compensate workers’ skills and unnecessarily skim off wages and benefits such as Christmas bonuses that would be higher if the workers were employed directly by the companies.
Workers barely “survive,” Rosa said. “If I were married with a family, there would be no way to survive on those wages.” Before he was let go from his latest job earlier this year, he earned about $70 per week for job responsibilities that included helping design computer work stations.
Struggling under poor conditions
Nationwide, other problems documented by Cereal include sexual harassment, chemical exposures, accidents, union suppression and undignified treatment, such requiring U.S. high school-like passes for bathroom breaks. A Cereal investigation found Manpower and other employers routinely asked prospective employees about pregnancies, sexual histories, tattoos and union affiliations. In many cases, new hires could expect medical exams and drug tests, according to the labor rights group.
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