EL SALVADOR-LABOUR: New Deeal for Maquila Workers

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 3 1997 (IPS) - The independent monitoring group that is examining labour conditions in a leading clothing factory in El Salvador has made major advances in the push for workers’ rights, according to labour activists.

Nearly two years after it was set up in an agreement between U.S. labour groups and the apparel firm The Gap, the independent monitoring group – called ‘Centra’ – has helped to mediate conflicts between workers and management at the the Mandarin factory in El Salvador.

“The work of the monitoring commission has been excellent,” said , said Marina Rios, who coordinates the maquila (‘sweatshop’) and human rights project at the Melida Anaya Montes Women’s Movement (or MAM).

“The commission is actually functioning, and there is stability in the factory… Workers are really being treated differently.”

In a country where roughly 40,000 women assemble clothes for the U.S. market for a pay of around 56 cents an hour, the positive follow-up at Mandarin, after brief U.S. consumer-led campaign against The Gap two years ago, has been heralded as a breakthrough.

Benjamin Cuellar, director of the Human Rights Department at the University of Central America and one of the Centra monitors, agrees that his team has made advances in establishing workers’ rights at Mandarin.

“This maquila monster…we’re already inside it, monitoring workers’ conditions, ensuring respect for rights,” he said earlier this year. “We’re almost becoming agents of the Mandarin company,” noting the irony that the factory – which makes apparel for the American-based Liz Claiborne and Gap firms – relies on Centra to mediate major worker disputes.

Nevertheless, there are limits to what the independent monitors have been able to achieve over the past year. When the Gap agreed with the New York-based National Labour Committee to set up the monitors to ensure that its code of conduct was being observed at Mandarin, Rios noted, it promised that its subcontractor would respect human rights and the right to organise in factories.

The Gap also agreed to prod Mandarin to rehire all the workers who had been fired in 1995 for trying to form a union. Yet, she added, most of the fired workers have never rejoined work at Mandarin.

“The head of Mandarin said that, because of the (temporary) pullout by Liz Claiborne and The Gap (after U.S. consumers objected to labour conditions there), and the decrease in orders from them, there aren’t enough jobs,” Rios said. “So they were only able to rehire 70 workers,” she added — well short of the roughly 400 mainly female garment workers who were fired for trying to unionise.

Nor has Centra had as much ability to monitor Salvadoran maquilas, or even Mandarin, as much as it would like. One U.S. analyst argued that the subcontractor has not allowed the Centra monitors to visit all the Mandarin shop floors – only those where clothes are made for export to The Gap. Nor has Centra been able to branch out into other sweatshops where workers want outside oversight, limiting the group’s functions considerably, the analyst added.

Despite the odds against them, the monitors have made a difference, particularly helping to mobilise interest in workers’ rights both among Salvadorans and among U.S. consumers, Rios argued. She has been organising and teaching women workers about their rights for the past year, and over that time has learned one lesson about the maquilas: “In all of them, there is discrimination and abuse of workers’ rights and of human rights.”

In the free trade zones (or ‘zonas francas’), where most of El Salvador’s goods for export are made, some 80 percent of workers are women, of which another 48 percent are the heads of their households, Rios estimated. Despite their need to provide for their families, she argued, they do not earn a living wage, since the minimum wage of 1,150 colones (about 135 U.S. dollars) a month is much less than the 500 dollars/month needed to maintain a family.

The socialist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which has a third of the seats in the legislative assembly, has pressured maquila owners “because they do not provide enough wages to buy a market basket of goods,” argued David Hernandez, an FMLN deputy who represents the party at the assembly’s labour commission.

“We’re going to keep on pressing against companies which violate workers’ rights,” Hernandez said of the FMLN, the largest single party in the legislature.

The U.S. government has made similar, if more vague, promises as concern over sweatshops has grown here. This April, the White House assembled a task force on sweatshops, which included Liz Claiborne and The Gap, that agreed to set limits on child labour, working hours and minimum pay in assembly plants overseas. But the recommendations were flawed because the task force would allow corporations to monitor how they are honoured, Rios said, although local and independent monitoring firms are better suited to the job.

Rios added that a study by the Salvadoran Textile Industry Association said that 16 U.S. firms worked with subcontractors in El Salvador. Ultimately, she argued, if violations continue among those subcontractors, “it is legitimate to call for a boycott, but only as a last resort.”