by Naomi Klein
Cavite is by no means exceptional in this regard. Union organizing is a source of great fear throughout the zones, where a successful drive can have dire consequences for both organizers and workers. That was the lesson learned in December 1998, when the American shirtmaker Phillips—Van Heusen closed down the only unionized export apparel factory in all of Guatemala, laying off five hundred workers. The Camisas Modernas plant was unionized in 1997, after a long and bitter organizing drive and significant pressure placed on the company by U.S. human-rights groups. With the union, wages went up from US$56 a week to $71 and the previously squalid factory was cleaned up. Jay Mazur, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) —America’s largest apparel union —called the contract “a beacon of hope for more than 80,000 maquiladora workers in Guate mala.”37 When the factory closed, however, the beacon of hope turned into a flashing red danger signal, reinforcing the familiar warning: no union, no strike.
Patriotism and national duty are bound up in the exploitation of the export zones, with young people — mostly women —sent off to sweatshop factories the way a previous generation of young men were sent off to war. No questioning of authority is expected or permitted. In some Central American and Asian EPZs, strikes are officially illegal; in Sri Lanka, it is illegal to do anything at all that might jeopardize the country’s export earnings, including publishing and distributing critical material.38 In 1993, a Sri Lankan zone worker by the name of Ranjith Mudiyanselage was killed for appearing to challenge this policy. After complaining about a faulty machine that had sliced off a co-worker’s finger, Mudiyanselage was abducted on his way out of an inquiry into the incident. His body was found beaten and burning on a pile of old tires outside a local church. The man’s legal adviser, who had accompanied him to the inquiry, was murdered in the same way.39
Despite the constant threat of retaliation, the Workers’ Assistance Center has made some modest attempts to organize unions inside the Cavite zone factories, with varying degrees of success. For instance, when a drive was undertaken at the All Asia garment factory, the organizers came up against a very challenging obstacle: worker exhaustion. The biggest complaint among the All Asia seamstresses who stitch clothes for Ellen Tracy and Sassoon is forced overtime. Regular shifts last from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., but on a few nights a week employees must work “late” —until 2 a.m. During peak periods, it is not uncommon to work two 2 a.m. shifts in a row, leaving many women only a couple of hours of sleep before they have to start their commute back to the factory. But that also means most All Asia workers spend their precious thirty-minute breaks at the factory napping, not talking about unions. “I have a hard time talking with the workers because the workers are always very sleepy,” a mother of four tells me, explaining why she has had no luck in her attempts to bring a union to the All Asia factory. She has been with the company for four years and still lacks basic job security and health insurance.
Work in the zone is characterized by this brutal combination of tremendous intensity and nonexistent job security. Everyone works six or seven days a week, and when a big order is due to be shipped out, employees work until it is done. Most workers want some overtime hours because they need the money, but the overnight shifts are widely considered a burden. Refusing to stay, however, is not an option. For instance, according to the official rule book of the Philips factory (a contractor that has filled orders for both Nike and Reebok), “Refusal to render overtime work when so required” is an offense “punishable with dismissal.” The same is true at all the factories I encountered, and there are many reports of workers asking to leave early —before 2 a.m., for instance —and being told not to return to work the next day.
Overtime horror stories pour out of the export processing zones, regardless of location: in China, there are documented cases of three-day shifts, when workers are forced to sleep under their machines. Contractors often face heavy financial penalties if they fail to deliver on time, no matter how unreasonable the deadline. In Honduras, when filling out a particularly large order on a tight deadline, factory managers have been reported injecting workers with amphetamines to keep them going on forty-eight-hour marathons.40
What Happened to Carmelita …
In Cavite, you can’t talk about overtime without the conversation turning to Carmelita Alonzo, who died, according to her co-workers, “of overwork.” Alonzo, I was told again and again —by groups of workers gathered at the Workers’ Assistance Center and by individual workers in one-on-one interviews —was a seamstress at the V.T. Fashions factory, stitching clothes for the Gap and Liz Claiborne, among many other labels. All of the workers I spoke with urgently wanted me to know how this tragedy happened so that I could explain it to “the people in Canada who buy these products.” Carmelita Alonzo’s death occurred following a long stretch of overnight shifts during a particularly heavy peak season. “There were a lot of products for ship-out and no one was allowed to go home,” recalls Josie, whose denim factory is owned by the same firm as Carmelita’s, and who also faced large orders at that time. “In February, the line leader had overnights almost every night for one week.” Not only had Alonzo been working those shifts, but she had a two-hour commute to get back to her family. Suffering from pneumonia —a common illness in factories that are suffocatingly hot during the day but fill with condensation at night —she asked her manager for time off to recover. She was denied. Alonzo was eventually admitted to hospital, where she died on March 8, 1997 —International Women’s Day.
I asked a group of workers gathered late one evening around the long table at the center how they felt about what happened to Carmelita. The answers were confused at first. “Feel? But Carmelita is us.” But then Salvador, a sweet-faced twenty-two-year-old from a toy factory, said something that made all of his co-workers nod in vigorous agreement. “Carmelita died because of working overtime. It is possible to happen to any one of us,” he explained, the words oddly incongruous with his pale blue Beverly Hills 90210 T-shirt.
Much of the overtime stress could be alleviated if the factories would just hire more workers and create two shorter shifts. But why should they? The government official appointed to oversee the zone isn’t interested in taking on the factory owners and managers about the overtime violations. Raymondo Nagrampa, the zone administrator, acknowledged that it would certainly be better if the factories hired more people for fewer hours, but, he told me, “I think I will leave that. I think this is more of a management decision.”
For their part, the factory owners are in no rush to expand the size of their workforce, because after a big order is filled there could be a dry spell and they don’t want to be stuck with more employees than work. Since following Philippine labor law is “a management decision,” most decide that it is more convenient for management to have one pool of workers who are simply forced to work more hours when there is more work and fewer when there is less of it. And this is the flip side of the overtime equation: when a factory is experiencing a lull in orders or a shipment of supplies has been delayed, workers are sent home without pay, sometimes for a week at a time. The group of workers gathered around the table at the Workers’ Assistance Center burst out laughing when I asked them about job security or a guaranteed number of working hours. “No work, no pay!” the young men and women exclaim in unison.
The “no work, no pay” rule applies to all workers, contract or “regular.” Contracts, when they exist, last only five months or less, after which time workers have to “recontract.” Many of the factory workers in Cavite are actually hired through an employment agency, inside the zone walls, that collects their checks and takes a cut — a temp agency for factory workers, in other words, and one more level in the multiple-level system that lives off their labor. Management uses a variety of tricks in the different zones to keep employees from achieving permanent status and collecting the accompanying rights and benefits. In the Central American maquiladoras, it is a common practice for fa
ctories to fire workers at the end of the year and rehire them a few weeks later so that they don’t have to grant them permanent status; in the Thai zones, the same practice is known as “hire and fire.”41 In China, many workers in the zones have no contracts at all, which leaves them without any rights or recourse whatsoever.42
It is in this casual new relationship to factory employment that the EPZ system breaks down completely. In principle, the zones are an ingenious mechanism for global wealth redistribution. Yes, they lure jobs from the North, but few fair-minded observers would deny the proposition that as industrialized nations shift to higher-tech economies, it is only a matter of global justice that the jobs upon which our middle classes were built should be shared with countries still enslaved by poverty. The problem is that the workers in Cavite, and in zones throughout Asia and Latin America, are not inheriting “our” jobs at all. Gerard Greenfield, former research director of the Asian Monitoring and Resource Centre in Hong Kong, says, “One of the myths of relocation is that those jobs that seemed to be transferred from the so-called North to the South are perceived as similar jobs to what was already being done before.” They are not. Just as company-owned manufacturing turned —somewhere over the Pacific Ocean —into “orders” to be placed with third-party contractors, so did full-time employment undergo a mid-flight transformation into “contracts.” “The biggest challenge to those in Asia,” says Greenfield, “is that the new employment created by Western and Asian multinationals investing in Asia is temporary and short-term employment.”43
In fact, zone workers in many parts of Asia, the Caribbean and Central America have more in common with office-temp workers in North America and Europe than they do with factory workers in those Northern countries. What is happening in the EPZs is a radical alteration in the very nature of factory work. That was the conclusion of a 1996 study conducted by the International Labor Organization, which stated that the dramatic relocation of production in the garment and shoe industries “has been accompanied by a parallel shift of production from the formal to the informal sector in many countries, with generally negative consequences on wage levels and conditions of work.” Employment in these sectors, the study went on, has shifted from “full-time in-plant jobs to part-time and temporary jobs and, especially in clothing and footwear, increasing resort to homework and small shops.”44
Indeed, this is not simply a job-flight story.
A Floating Workforce
On my last night in Cavite, I met a group of six teenage girls in the workers’ dormitories who shared a six-by-eight-foot concrete room: four slept on the makeshift bunk bed (two to a bed), the other two on mats spread on the floor. The girls who made Aztek, Apple and IBM CD-ROM drives shared the top bunk; the ones who sewed Gap clothing, the bottom. All were the children of farmers, away from their families for the first time.
Their jam-packed shoebox of a home had the air of an apocalyptic slumber party — part prison cell, part Sixteen Candles. It may have been a converted pigsty, but these were sixteen-year-old girls, and like teenage girls the world over they had covered the gray, stained walls with pictures: of fluffy animals, Filipino action-movie stars, and glossy magazine ads of women modeling lacy bras and underwear. After a little while, serious talk of working conditions erupted into fits of giggles and hiding under bedcovers. It seems that my questions reminded two of the girls of a crush they had on a labor organizer who had recently given a seminar at the Workers’ Assistance Center on the risks of infertility from working with hazardous chemicals.
Were they worried about infertility?
“Oh, yes. Very worried now.”
All through the Asian zones, the roads are lined with teenage girls in blue shirts, holding hands with their friends and carrying umbrellas to shield them from the sun. They look like students coming home from school. In Cavite, as elsewhere, the vast majority of workers are unmarried women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Like the girls in the dorms, roughly 80 percent of the workers have migrated from other provinces of the Philippines to work in the factories —a mere 5 percent are native to the town of Rosario. Like the swallow factories, they too are only tenuously connected to this place.
Raymondo Nagrampa, the zone administrator, says migrants are recruited for the zone to compensate for something innate in “the Cavite character,” something that makes local people unfit to work in the factories situated near their homes. “I don’t mean any offense to the Cavite personality,” he explained, in his spacious air-conditioned office. “But from what I gather, this particular character is not suited for the factory life —they’d rather go into something quickly. They do not have the patience to be right there in the factory line.” Nagrampa attributes this to the fact that Rosario is so close to Manila “and so we can say that the Cavitenians are not running scared with regard to getting some income for their daily subsistence….
“But in the case of those from the provinces, from the lower areas, they are not exposed to the big-city lifestyle. They feel more comfortable just working in the factory line, for, after all, this is a marked improvement from the farm work that they’ve been accustomed to, where they were exposed to the sun. To them, for the lowly province rural worker, working inside an enclosed factory is better off than being outside.”
I asked dozens of zone workers —all of them migrants from rural areas —about what Raymondo Nagrampa had said. Every one of them responded with outrage.
“It’s not human!” exclaimed Rosalie, a teenager whose job is installing the “backlights” in IBM computer screens. “Our rights are being trampled and Mr. Nagrampa says that because he has not experienced working in a factory and the conditions inside.”
Salvador, in his 90210 T-shirt, was beside himself: “Mr. Nagrampa earns a lot of money and he has an air-conditioned room and his own car, so of course he would say that we prefer this work —it is beneficial to him, but not to us…. Working on the farm is difficult, yes, but there we have our family and friends and instead of always eating dried fish, we have fresh food to eat.”
His words clearly struck a chord with a homesick Rosalie: “I want to be together with my family in the province,” she said quietly, looking even younger than her nineteen years. “It’s better there because when I get sick, my parents are there, but here there is no one to take care of me.”
Many other rural workers told me that they would have stayed home if they could, but the choice was made for them: most of their families had lost their farms, displaced by golf courses, botched land-reform laws and more export processing zones. Others said that the only reason they came to Cavite was that when the zone recruiters came to their villages, they promised that workers would earn enough in the factories to send money home to their impoverished families. The same inducement had been offered to other girls their age, they told me, to go to Manila to work in the sex trade.
Several more young women wanted to tell me about those promises, too. The problem, they said, is that no matter how long they work in the zone, there is never more than a few pesos left over to send home. “If we had land we would just stay there to cultivate the land for our needs,” Raquel, a teenage girl from one of the garment factories, told me. “But we are landless, so we have no choice but to work in the economic zone even though it is very hard and the situation here is very unfair. The recruiters said we would get a high income, but in my experience, instead of sending my parents money, I cannot maintain even my own expenses.”
So the workers in Cavite have lost on all counts: they are penniless and homeless. It’s a potent combination. In the dormitories, sleep deprivation, malnutrition and homesickness mingle to create an atmosphere of deep disorientation. “We are alien in the factories. We are also alien in the boarding-house because we all come from faraway provinces,” Liza, an electronics worker, told me. “We are strangers here.”
Cecille Tuico, one of the organizers at the Workers’ Assistance Center, was listening in on the conversation. Afte
r the workers left to make their way through Rosario’s dark streets and back to the dormitories, she pointed out that the alienation the workers so poignantly describe is precisely what the employers look for when they seek out migrants instead of locals to work in the zone. With the same muted, matter-of-fact anger I have come to recognize in so many Filipino human-rights activists, Tuico said that the factory managers prefer young women who are far from home and have not finished high school, because “they are scared and uneducated about their rights.”
The Zones’ Other Product: A New Kind of Factory Worker
Their naiveté and insecurity undoubtedly make discipline easier for factory managers, but younger workers are preferred for other reasons, too. Women are often fired from their zone jobs in their mid-twenties, told by supervisors that they are “too old,” and that their fingers are no longer sufficiently nimble. This practice is a highly effective way of minimizing the number of mothers on the company payroll.
In Cavite, the workers tell me stories about pregnant women forced to work until 2 a.m., even after pleading with the supervisor; of women who work in the ironing section giving birth to babies with burns on their skin; of women who mold the plastic for cordless phones giving birth to stillborn infants. The evidence I hear in Cavite is anecdotal, told to me quietly and urgently by women with the same terrified expression I saw when conversation turned to Carmelita Alonzo. Some of the stories are certainly apocryphal — fear-fueled zone legends — but the abuse of pregnant women in export processing zones is also well documented and the problem reaches far beyond Cavite.
Because most zone employers want to avoid paying benefits, assigning workers to a predictable schedule or offering any job security, motherhood has become the scourge of these pink-collar zones. A study by Human Rights Watch that has become the basis for a grievance under the NAFTA side agreement on labor found that women applying for jobs in the Mexican maquiladoras routinely had to undergo pregnancy tests. The study, which implicates such investors in the zones as Zenith, Panasonic, General Electric, General Motors and Fruit of the Loom, found that “pregnant women are denied hiring. Moreover, maquiladora employers sometimes mistreat and discharge pregnant employees.”45 The researchers uncovered mistreatment designed to encourage workers to resign: pregnant women were required to work the night shift, or to take on exceptionally long hours of unpaid overtime and physically strenuous tasks. They were also refused time off work to go to the doctor, a practice that has led to on-the-job miscarriages. “In this way,” the study reports, “a pregnant worker is forced to choose between having a healthy, full-term pregnancy and keeping her job.”46