05 Jun The reading for this week (Adler chapter 13
Question
The reading for this week (Adler chapter 13 to the end of the book) looks at the ultimate destination of Mollie’s job, and the resulting outcomes for the various workers involved (Mollie, workers at the Mississippi and Arkansas plants, and those at the Mexican “maquiladora” like Balbina Duque who end up holding the job.) Across the board, the results are not pretty.
The scene where Balbina Duque travels north for a job is reminiscent of Mollie’s similar trip north decades earlier. She is looking for the same thing: a more stable, secure existence anchored in a job that pays better. Yet, there are also differences from Mollie’s earlier situation: Mollie actually did improve her lot enormously, and the job helped her to achieve a reasonable living for decades. Balbina’s new job only allows her to live in a dirt floor shack shared with her sister and children; it does not put her on the path toward a sustainable future or a clearly rising standard of living wherein she shares in the fruits of her own labor. So, there is a bit of irony is her “similar” situation being so much different (and worse) than that of Mollie leaving home over 40 years earlier.
The reading provides some of the necessary context to understand the situation in Mexico, and the difficulty for workers when they attempt to better their condition. The largest Mexican labor federation, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico, or CTM (Mexican Workers Federation) for the most part does not act as an independent union federation dealing with employers and the government as an independent force. Instead, through its alliance with the primary political party all those years, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), it acts as an arm of the government which in turn behaves primarily as an agent of the employerscontrollingthe workers rather than representing them. (This is a bit of an overstatement that generalizes a bit too much, but it does capture the primary role that the CTM in general ended up playing in Mexico in the final decades of the 20th Century). As portrayed in the reading, note that a union leader in a CTM union who actuallydoesrepresent the workers in the union militantly is usually dealt with severely — Agapito Gonzlez Cavazos gets thrown in jail on charges that are probably trumped up, simply because he actually did try to fight for the interests of the members of his union (the SJOI). This context is important to understand why the workers in Mexico are paid so poorly — they often want to struggle for their interests, but lack any effective mechanisms through which to do so, and government policy aims to repress true independent unions in the country.
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