from envio, september 1999:
The major source of employment nationwide, the maquila is said to have already created 110,000 jobs, with the possibility of more in the future. As in other countries, the majority of this labor force, approximately 85%, is female and between the ages of 13 and 34. In order to better understand this “world,” we spent time with young maquila workers (14-24 years old) from La Lima and El Progreso. Some of them live in the city and others in the countryside.
(...) [liberation thesis?] Many young people from both urban and rural settings dream of the day they will reach legal age and be able to work in a factory. Provoked by impatience, in many cases brought about by acute economic need, but also by a fascination—especially among young women—with the factory world, many of them find ways to get around the age requirements. There are 14-year-olds who work under false identities, for example. For these young women, the factory is the door to a whole new world. It offers them the opportunity for new experiences and adventures free of parental control—a novelty not permitted them within the family structure. “Female children are subject to stricter controls than male children. My father always says that women belong in the home, and men belong in the streets.”
(...) [internalizing stratification] The plants are organized either by modules or by classic assembly lines. Both systems strive for the highest productivity, which is measured by production targets. In the factory, a worker's value is determined by her or his capacity to produce. “Tell me how much you produce and I'll tell you what you're worth.” In the same vein, operators who reach or come closest to the production targets get better pay, in accordance with an incentive system. (...) Both organizational models create conflict and animosity among the workers, who unconsciously begin to internalize capitalist ideology: “What matters is production, not people.” A woman who doesn't keep up with the rhythm of her production line or module is often pressured by co-workers to leave the group, and in some cases, to leave the factory.
(...) [authority] Very few dare to contradict or answer back a boss, because, as at home, they are used to submitting to parental authority, and the boss is like a parent. The supervisor, on the other hand, plays a role more like that of a big sister. The women recognize that she has a certain amount of authority, but when all is said and done, she's just another “daughter,” so they have the right to question and even buck her. In other words, they experience the factory as a larger version of the home environment, where they are merely “daughters of the house” who have no choice but to accept parental controls unquestioningly. And just like at home, they have their ways of mocking authority and are punished when they get caught.
(...) A culture of fear permeates the maquila environment. Most workers are afraid to stand up to authority, and since the weight of authority is so strongly felt in the factory, they are afraid to seek the help they need to defend their rights. “Why make trouble with the bosses?” is a common response to problems in the workplace, as is “If they don't want to give me anything, just forget it, let them use it to buy altar candles.”
(...) For some of the women, the most important thing they get from working in the factory is economic independence. They are proud of no longer being a burden on their parents and happily acknowledge that the maquila has helped them remain single. “If we had stayed at home, we'd be married and have children by now,” explains one, “because young women who stay alone in the house all day have a lot of time for foolish thoughts.”
(...) The incorporation of youth—both male and female—into assembly plant work has also brought changes to the communities, especially in the countryside. The most noticeable change is the increase in rural-to-urban migration. Once young people leave the peasant world, they usually don't want to return, and even become magnets that attract other relatives and friends to the city. “I'll never go back to live in the country, because we're better off here. We can help our parents more by staying here, too, because every month we send them money. When our other sister is old enough, we're going to bring her here, and among the three of us we can help out more.”
(...) [a new consciousness?] If many of the young women are still short on a sense of nation, development and their place in all this as a class, they do seem to be developing a new sense of themselves in gender terms. The factory is a place where all kinds of women come together, where one finds a wide range of human, particularly female, experience. The convergence of this diversity combined with economic independence might just create the mold for a different model of womanhood in countries like ours. If this is so, it will take a form we cannot yet imagine, at least not here in Honduras, where themaquilaphenomenon is a couple of decades younger than, say, in Mexico, and where women have not had a revolution that began breaking old molds, as they have in neighboring Nicaragua. ... It's a tremendous paradox: at the end of the day, will the maquila’s greatest contribution to Honduras' development be the unfolding of a new gender consciousness among women?