By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 2002 (IPS)

Despite strong anti-discrimination laws, women and girls face persistent and widespread abuse when they work in Guatemala’s booming apparel assembly plants or in private homes as live-in domestic workers, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday.

The maquila and domestic labour sectors together employ tens of thousands of women in Guatemala, many of them Mayan Indians with little or no education.

Although the nation’s labour laws offer them equal protection, they are only rarely enforced the more than 250 apparel maquilas in Guatemala and not at all in domestic service, HRW said in a 147- page report, ‘From the Household to the Factory: Sex Discrimination in the Guatemalan Labor Force.’

“Women workers are getting a very raw deal in Guatemala,” according to LaShawn Jefferson, director of HRW’s Women’s Rights Division. “The country’s labour law has some major gaps, and in many cases it’s not being enforced anyway.”

She called on the Guatemalan government to boost its enforcement of women’s labour rights and anti-discrimination laws and urged maquila associations to do a better job of policies its members’ practices.

Women’s participation in Guatemala’s work force has increased significantly over the past decade to about 35 percent of the economically active population in 1999. This increase, however, has occurred primarily in the economy’s least-protected sectors, including the informal sector where they are believed to constitute about 55 percent of the workforce and in paid domestic work, where their percentage is nearly 100 percent.

Many domestic workers actually begin working around 14 years of age, according to the report, which said there were no reliable estimates of the total number of domestic workers in Guatemala.

The labour code effectively excludes domestic employees from basic labour rights, including the right to an eight-hour workday and a 48-hour workweek. Similarly, they are by and large denied the right to employee healthcare and the minimum wage.

Mayan girls and women in domestic work are even more vulnerable “due to pervasive racist sentiment among non-indigenous, or ladino, Guatemalans,” according to the report. A number of Mayan domestic workers interviewed by HRW noted that they received significant levels of verbal and emotional abuse and that children were sometimes particularly abusive.

“It’s there, in the family, when the racist training and education begins, with the maid,” one social psychologist told HRW.

Domestic workers must normally toil for 14 hours per day or more, rarely enjoy a full day’s rest on Sunday, have a hard time gaining access to health care, and receive no maternity protections under Guatemalan law.

Moreover, many suffer high levels of sexual harassment, and even sexual assault. Of the 29 domestic workers interviewed by HRW for the report, one third said they had suffered sexual harassment in their work.

In the formal sector, the increase in women’s participation has taken place virtually only in the offshore apparel assembly industry, which has grown by leaps and bounds since the late 1980s after the United States approved the Caribbean Basin Initiative to boost labour-intensive, non-traditional industries in Central America.

With the expansion of the export-processing sector in Guatemala, tens of thousands of women who might otherwise continue in domestic work have been given new opportunities. Approximately 80 percent of the estimated 80,000 maquila workers in Guatemala are women and girls.

While sexual harassment is less common in this sector, sex discrimination on the basis of reproductive status is rampant, according to the report.

Maquilas often require women to reveal whether they are pregnant as a condition of employment, either through direct questions in job applications or interviews, or through actual physical examination.

Such practices are not only illegal under Guatemala’s labour code, but are also banned by the codes of conduct of U.S.-based clothing manufacturers and retailers, including Target, The Limited, Wal- Mart, GEAR for Sports, Liz Claiborne and Lee Jeans – all of which have contracts with Guatemalan maquilas, according to the report.

“We need to globalize rights, not discrimination,” said Jefferson, who noted that corporate codes of conduct are generally “a welcome development if properly implemented and independently monitored.” But they “can never serve as a substitute for government enforcement of national and international law,” according to the report.

In addition to inquiries about pregnancy and physical exams, maquilas often deny full maternity benefits to those women who become pregnant after being hired and routinely make it more difficult for workers to gain access to the national employee health-care system, either by not enrolling them, or, if the worker is enrolled, denying her the time-off to visit a health facility.

“The maquilas offer much-needed jobs to thousands of women,” according to Jefferson, “but the price of a job should never be working women’s rights to equality.”

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