The delicate balance between life and death: a child with hemophilia, a single mother and maquiladora worker in Ciudad Acuña.

by

Elvia R. Arriola, J.D., M.A., Executive Director, Women on the Border, Inc.

The Place: Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, October 13, 2007 (All names of persons met in Mexico are pseudonyms).

Amada, a maquiladora worker for one of the ALCOA factories in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, greeted the group of visitors from Austin, Texas with a big smile. We were late getting to her house for a scheduled visit arranged by volunteers of the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO). Our group had traveled by van from Austin to meet with the CFO volunteers who guide delegations of U.S. visitors to meet maquiladora workers and to hear about their struggles for justice against abusive employers. On this particular trip the arrangement between Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera and the CFO, two organizations that have forged an admirable cross-border solidarity relationship since 1999, chose Piedras Negras and Acuña for the fall 2007 delegation. I served as an interpreter along with our delegation leader, Howard H., a computer programmer for the Austin community college system.

Amada’s house was tiny. We were at least fifteen, including a CFO organizer who had already been in touch with Amada and may have asked if she was open to a visit by travelers from the U.S. on an educational trip. We stepped on a rocky path to the house built out of large grey concrete blocks. At the border, the grey block homes are a step up for the workers who come to the border looking for work, having left rural farmlands, and start out in “casas de carton” literally shacks built from foraged scrap wood and construction pallets, sheet metal and even hammered out soda pop and beer tins.

Amada’s rocky “front yard” was also a laundry area. We gathered inside the first of two large rooms, one designated as a large kitchen/dining area and living/bedroom area. Most of us stood, a few sat on the floor with their notepads and cameras. A little boy, with warm dark eyes and straight black hair scampered on to a bed against the wall. From the corner he peered out curiously, holding a toy in his hands, returning a shy smile to a stranger’s gaze.

At first Amada’s story about her work life at an ALCOA factory in Ciudad Acuña resembled that of many others we had met on previous trips to the border. We heard of the awful hours, limited bathroom breaks, exhaustion from repetitive tasks and merciless supervisors and their rigid enforcement of attendance rules. A single mother’s tardiness is met with spirit-crushing economic penalties as they struggle to do their very best to raise families on their own.

“I go in on the late shift so that my daughter can stay with my son when I leave for work. He needs constant attention because he has a very serious condition. He does not heal easily from cuts and bruises.” Amada went into more details about being a single mother of a boy with hemophilia and a maquiladora worker. Hemophilia can be fatal. Some of us remember stories in history books about European royalty and little boys afflicted with a once untreatable disease. Today hemophilia is manageable, somewhat like diabetes. It is sex-linked, i.e., only males manifest the inherited trait while females are asymptomatic carriers of the condition. Hemophiliacs do not produce in which Factor VIII, a blood clotting agent, so it must be acquired through intravenous supplementation.

“Why can’t you get the missing H factor at the Seguro Social here at the border?” asked one of the delegates, a registered nurse from Illinois. Amada obtained monthly supplies at the central hospital for the Seguro Social, clinic for workers, in Monterrey, which entailed a two-day journey. Amada’s daughter went to the refrigerator and brought out the small bottles designed for injection. “It’s just not as good. The medicine I get in Monterrey is not only better it is free to me as a worker. If I had an emergency I could probably get it across the border in Del Rio but it would be very expensive. Also the medical staff in Monterrey seem to do a better job of examining and treating him.”

Amada’s story was one of frustration as she pointed to her son’s knees to demonstrate some of the problems. One knee in fact looked swollen. “I can tell when he needs the medicine because he plays and runs into things and then he is swollen. I have to watch him carefully.” Of course such is the consequence of this disease in which a small cut will not heal, and the blood simply turns into a fatal drain of life from the body.

“I can never catch up at work. If I work hard and earn credits or bonuses, I just lose them because they penalize me for taking the time off to take him to the hospital. The supervisors know that I’m not just missing work, but I get docked anyway.” The delegates took in the description of a system of employment in which workers’ needs are never balanced against production demands. Like many global factories today, the bottom line for the corporate foreign investor is to lower the costs of labor. That’s it. This may entail making workers work extra long schedules, or using harsh methods of discipline to instill punctuality and attendance. In Ciudad Acuña, where unions are virtually non-existent, this employment system thrives on fear of being marked up for lateness, losing a work bonus or worse, losing a job for an accumulated bad attendance record.

“My biggest complaint about what I face as a worker is being docked for my pay for taking him to the doctors in Monterrey. I have to play mother and father. I have no one else who can help me.”

Maquiladora workers who are also single mothers seem to suffer the most under a system bent on turning the working class into cogs in the wheel of production. In the name of free trade the multinational corporation is glutting the market shelves with a dizzying variety of products to buy that were assembled or produced in an export processing zone. We know gender plays a critical role in the global economy. That is, women are still a higher percentage of the global factory workers, men are mainly the owners and supervisors, women’s pay is significantly inferior, and women experience high levels of sexual harassment, abuse and disregard for their needs as mothers and as women. The single mother/maquiladora worker has no choice but to find some kind of balance between being a responsible worker and a good parent. The mother with a chronically sick child is even more oppressed by the industry’s constant demand for efficient and steady production.

The group sat in silent shock after Amada’s story drove home the insensitivity of an employer who allows a supervisor to dock a mother’s pay for taking time off to get the medicine that will keep her child alive. In the U.S. employees who face similar medical leave problems, and who work for an employer with at least fifty employees, are entitled to the benefits of the Family Medical Leave Act. It is ironic that if Amada were working for ALCOA in the U.S. her situation would probably clearly be covered under the FMLA.

Yet sadly that’s the whole point of globalization in today’s economy. Many a multinational corporation started out as a U.S. domestic company that once paid its workers union wages, who retired after 20-30 years with a nice pension plan. But, those are now stories of the past. In the nineties, ALCOA, the Aluminum Company of America, like many other corporations, reorganized production and assembly under the privileges of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Jobs once in the American rust belt first left for Mexico, then India and today it is China, all with the goal of avoiding unions and remaining competitive in the global market economy with what activists refer to as the “race to the bottom of the wage scale.”

We end our visit and head out for a different kind of activity for this particular delegation. The CFO volunteers had suggested that we trek over to the international bridge and find the activists who had organized an historic demonstration against the building of a new and stronger border wall to separate Mexico and the U.S. As we walk I am pensive, and admiring of the activists who put together the protest. On my mind are also thoughts of the rhetoric of free trade and “liberation” of the investor who can avoid tariffs and has protections under NAFTA. I compare that privilege to the trials and tribulations of someone like Amada, whose life is not free. We approach the border and see the dancers on the bridge on the Mexico side, awaiting their American partners. We see their colorful banners describing the wall as “El Muro de Muerte,” literally a death wall.

How appropriate and ironic. In the same period in which foreign investors and wealthy Mexican businessmen opened up the border with NAFTA to intensify new forms of international trade, the border was also militarized with more guns, border cops, chain linked fences and night vision telescopes. Yes, free trade law and policy changed at the same time as immigration law and policy. As the stock market figures rose for the NAFTA investors so did the number of migrant deaths because of a more militarized border. The “free” in free trade is liberation for the investor, not the worker.

Many argue, what’s the big complaint? They have new jobs, better than begging on the street. If so, then why does the CFO chronicle a worsening of quality of life under NAFTA? Why do the labor activists complain of non-living wages, of toxic chemicals in the workplace, of work-related injuries for lack of safety equipment and training, of brutal work schedules and monotonous, repetitive tasks that injure the body mind and spirit? Yes, it may not be slavery, but can the life of a worker like Amada, who can’t easily take a day off to keep her child from dying, be described as free?

It is ironic that the promoters of free trade often speak of liberation from the tariffs and protectionism that stifle positive economic growth. Except that nowhere is the rhetoric of free trade ever concerned with the fairness of the deal to all of those who are involved in or affected by globalization of the economy, meaning not just the shareholder but also the workers whose labor is essential to the production, export, sales and consumption. You can’t call it slavery but you also can’t call it freedom to work in a maquiladora. The standard work schedule is long, the pay is bad, the penalties for lateness are harsh, there are horrible safety problems everywhere, supervisors harass workers, threaten them, and some pressure women for sexual favors in return for lenience. In Acuña, the town whose mayor promises foreign investors not to worry about unions, Amada’s survival wages are at best 500 pesos per week, fifty U.S. dollars. With the higher cost of living at the border it seems to be never enough.

I’m back now in Austin. I wonder as I write, was Amada forced to stay longer to meet a production deadline? Is her boy’s medicine running out? Is she being pressured by a supervisor not to miss again? Did he move too close to the edge of the brick wall? Did the sister not see him grab a sharp toy or instrument, or did he fall on a rock on the streets of Acuña? Did his mother manage to balance once again life or death while she produces one more day for a global employer and stretches out her pesos until the next week’s pay? Is this the world the promoters of free trade mean when they promise more freedom and global democracy through an expanding global economy crafted along the values of free trade? Ask the single mother maquiladora worker what life is like under NAFTA. If she is a single mother and a worker and has a child with a life-threatening illness, like hemophilia, don’t even bother to ask.