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Fighting for Safer Jobs on the Mexican
Border
An Interview with Maquiladora worker Omar Gil
Story by David Bacon
 My
parents came from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo (across the border from
Laredo, Texas) looking for a way to subsist.
I’ve been in these factories since I was 19 years old, and now I’m
26. I’ve gotten more and more worried because I don’t have time
for a personal life. I leave work so tired that on the weekends I don’t
want to even leave the house to go anywhere. I just want to rest. All
my personal development has been put on hold so that I can just rest,
just so I’ll be able to work. I feel like my youth has passed me
by.
Back in 1993 I got my first job in a maquiladora, at Delphi.
They paid 360 pesos a week (about $40). There was a lot
of pressure from the foremen on the assembly lines to work hard and produce
and a lot of accidents happened because of the bad design of the lines.
The company didn’t give us adequate protective equipment to deal
with the chemicals.
We didn’t really have any idea of the dangers, or how
we should protect ourselves. The (government-affiliated) union there did
nothing to protect us.
From Delphi I went to another company, National Auto Parts.
In that plant we made car radiators for Cadillacs and Camaros, and there
was a lot of sickness and accidents there, too. I worked in an area with
metal presses. There were no ventilators to take the fumes out of the
plant, and they didn’t give us any gloves. We had to handle the parts
with our bare hands, and people got cut up a lot.
I worked in an area with a lot of lead. If you work with
lead, you’re supposed to have special clothing, and your clothes
should be washed separately. But the company didn’t give us any of
that. We had to work in our street clothes.
 For
all that, they paid 400 pesos a week (about $43). We had no union, and
there was the same pressure for production from the foremen and the group
leaders as I saw at Delphi.
Now I work at TRW.
There’s really no difference in the conditions in any
of these plants. If anything, my situation now is even worse. You could
say it’s forced labor, considering how the foremen talk to the workers,
and how much psychological pressure they put on people.
We work an average of 14-15 hours a day. There’s no
transportation service to and from work, and we get off shift at 4 o’clock
in the morning.
Usually we have to wait until 7 a.m. before we can catch
a public bus. And when a bus does come, getting home costs 20 pesos. That’s
a very big dent in your take-home pay.
My job is bending steel cables for seatbelts for GM, Ford,
and some European cars. The cable is about a centimeter thick, and I bend
about 3,500 a day. Because of what’s passing through my hands every
day, I can hardly sleep at night as the pain is so bad. Then I have to
get up in the morning to do it again.
In the future, I know that I can get carpal tunnel problems,
which is very scary. I’ve asked to change to another position, but
no one wants to change because whoever works in this job gets a lot of
pain in their wrists.
I feel that in three or four years my hands are going to
be useless. I’ve been thinking that I’ll have to get another
job. What else can I do?
They say work in the maquiladoras is the best paid work
here.
But there’s not much difference from one factory to
another. I’m leaving my whole life in the factory. Because of the
time and money pressure, I have no ability to develop myself as a worker,
much less as a human being.
After I had been working in Delphi for a year, I was invited
to join a group that was trying to learn about workers’ rights. People
in this group (led by the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras) said
that things needed to be changed, that we needed better protections, but
that the companies didn’t want to do it.
At first I was undecided because I thought I could get into
a lot of trouble if I got involved. I thought I would get fired or other
bad things would happen to me.
But a couple of years later, when I was invited to join
one of the groups again, I went. They invited me to a health and safety
workshop on the problems you could suffer because of repetitive motion.
I realized that it was ridiculous to believe that it was
bad to show workers the dangers in their jobs. The companies and the newspapers
say we’re putting the maquiladoras in danger, but we’re just
showing workers what’s wrong with the way the work is organized.
When I understood that, I decided to become a voluntary
organizer, and we’ve been working together ever since. Everything
I learn I try to pass on, so that it will help everyone else.
Every movement starts with just a small group, but they
evolve and get bigger and bigger. Lots of people say you’re just
wasting your time because you’ll never be able to change anything.
But I say no. Nothing will ever change if we just sit on our hands. You
have to keep trying and trying. And the little that we’re able to
achieve will grow, step by step.
Editor’s note: Since Gil first volunteered to organize
his fellow workers, the UAW Health and Safety Dept. has joined with the
Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras to provide ergonomics training
workshops in Nuevo Laredo and other Mexican communities on the U.S. border.
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