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Despair in Mexico

© Shawn Nicholls

On February 15th, the New York Times ran a front-page article discussing the troubling situation taking place in Mexico at the hands of US corporations. One of the focuses of the article was Alcoa, a corporation that boasts as being the world’s number one producer of aluminum. To their credit, they also graduated an executive officer in Paul O’Neill to a spot in President George W. Bush’s cabinet.

The importance of the article, however, doesn’t focus on how well Alcoa (and many other companies) sell their products, or where their executives accept jobs. In fact, the problem isn’t with anything they do. It is with what they don’t.

Each year, rich, prosperous companies within the US abuse NAFTA and migrate south of the border where they are greeted with a labor surplus and few regulations. I briefly touched on this point in my introductory article, but now I would like to provide you with the hard facts.

The central point of the article is the city of Acuna, where the Alcoa plant resides. A tour of the city finds people barely surviving. Most of the population is without housing, making do with abandoned buses or cardboard boxes. Many hold down jobs, but they can be hardly called that. Each day, the citizens are subjected to conditions no human being should be forced into. They lack protective gear and fair regulations, while companies even go as far as to limit the amount of toilet paper for each employee per day. Their workplace is a disaster, and many times workers end the day in the hospital, recovering from inhaled fumes or other accidents.

And their wages? Statistics provided by Alcoa gave the average worker $83 per 48 hour workweek. While the cost of living in Mexico is much lower than in the US, most of the citizens interviewed for the article ended the week without any money, after paying for food, housing, clothes for their children, and transportation to and from work. In fact, many stated that they go without food often, so that their growing children could eat instead.

Now that’s backwards. The people making the sacrifices are those without much to give up.

And those that could be making contributions to the society they are taking advantage of can’t be bothered. These companies that make use of labor in Mexico are not acting in a responsible manner. In addition to putting many deserving Americans out of work, they don’t oversee the foreign operations with the scrutiny they deserve. And the result is US corporations thriving in Third Word conditions.