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Recent Events:
Comparing Panama City, Panama and the Mexican Border
2007 Women and Fair Trade
WHO WE ARE:
Women on the Border is a nonprofit organization whose mission it to advance awareness about the conditions for workers in the maquiladoras at the Mexican border and to support the empowerment of working women. A maquiladora is also known as a “sweatshop” or factory that has a reputation for exploiting workers with extremely low pay, toxicity in the workplace, systematic abuse like sexual harassment and mandatory pregnancy testing and/or arbitrary methods of disciplining workers. Sweatshops have been playing a critical role to the expanding wealth of multinational corporations who have benefited from free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA to employ hundreds of thousands of women, men and children in poor countries to produce a range of cheap products for consumers in wealthier nations. (Header photo credit: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution).
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The women of the Fair Trade factory "Dignidad y Justicia" (Dignity and Justice, Inc.) in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, earn a decent pay for a reasonable work schedule and offer for sale canvas bags, T-shirts, aprons and custom orders. Contact D&J Factory.
Photo by WOB, Inc. (2007).
Women
on the Border focuses on women because of the critical role played by the
woman in the home and factory affected by globalization. At the Mexican
border she is earning $40-50 per week for a 50 to 60 hour week. In Bangladesh
she is earning 13 to 15 cents for every shirt she stitches for companies
like Disney and Wal-Mart. The goods she makes may end up being purchased
by an American female consumer who is lured by the cheap price of a label
that doesn’t tell her the person who assembled that good works from
12 to 19 hours per day, often goes home to a place without electricity
or running water or even exposes herself or her children to the dangers
of disappearance like the young murdered women who worked in the maquiladoras
of Ciudad Juárez.
WOMEN
ON THE BORDER wants to support the interest, research and activism
of those American consumers who are opposed to buying household, personal and entertainment
products that were made in export processing zones and under unfair labor conditions.
If multinational corporations can erase the national borders to make more money by enjoying the privileges created for them by free trade law and policy, then American consumers can also join in solidarity with workers in other parts of the world to produce a more just globalized economy. Differences based on race, class, gender, age, culture or religion do not necessarily prevent a female consumer in a richer country from becoming an ally to the working woman who stitched or assembled the good she bought and now enjoys. She can support that woman's empowerment to voice the just demand for a living wage, for freedom from discrimination, for safety in the workplace, and for respect and decent humane treatment from her employer and supervisors.
OUR EDUCATIONAL FOCUS: 
(delegates tour the women owned factory "Dignidad y Justicia" in Piedras Negras, Coahuila -- October 2007).
WOMEN
ON THE BORDER facilitates greater awareness of the impact of the global
economy not only in Mexico but in other parts of the world through its
archived articles and news links, through delegations to meet with Mexican
workers who are successfully using the law and community action to protect
themselves from abusive employers, and through participation at any conference,
workshop or public venue where people want to meet and learn about globalization.
We welcome new article contributions on these topics. For further information
contact us at wobinfo@womenontheborder.org .
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