What’s a “fair” wage in Juarez, Mexico?

We (LOH) have spent the last several months researching and debating with one another about what constitutes a “fair” wage in Juarez. It’s tricky, sensitive stuff – but must be determined if we’re to move forward with our Income Generation Program, which would pay cooperative members a living wage to produce socially conscious clothing (the proceeds of which would benefit their community).

This past weekend we headed back to Juarez to finally have this wage discussion with the women of the cooperative…Vero had suggested last month that we get together and, as group, participate in a cost-of-living workshop, the outcome of which would inform our discussion about wages.

At the handicraft center, Vero had us list out our goals for the workshop:
- determine the cost of living a decent, productive life in Juarez and in Phoenix
- compare income inequalities between our two cities
- determine a starting figure for the wage discussion

…Then we spent two intensive hours breaking down all of our living expenses, from food and shelter to education and beer — and figured out what our daily cost of living was. We did the same for our income, then we split into two groups (U.S. and Mexico) and averaged our daily incomes and expenses.

The way our different groups approached the exercise was interesting. We (the U.S. group) made incredibly detailed, itemized lists of everything we spend, including luxury items and recreation costs, and still came up spending slightly less than we make. The Mexico group, on the other hand, factored in just those things they would need to live a “decent” life: 3 meals a day, rent, utilities, transportation, healthcare, and education for their children – their cost of living did not reflect luxury items or recreation costs and, moreover, described what they need to live, rather than what they are actually currently capable of spending.

At the end, the U.S. group had determined that the average income between us ( a group of working college students who factor financial aid into our income) was $77.77 per day, while our cost of living was $68.20 per day…and our household size, for the most part was one.

Outcome of the cost of living workshop.

Written up on the white board, these numbers contrasted starkly with those of the women of the cooperative. We knew that many of them made between $5 and $7 per day working 10-12 hour days in the maquiladoras – which is still higher than the Mexican minimum wage of about $4 a day, but definitely not enough to get by on. After the workshop, we realized just how far this money goes (or rather, doesn’t), as the women’s cost of living was around $30 a day for households sized about 5 members, on average.

Get that? Income=$5, Living Cost=$30.

A cooperative member's pay stub

So how does that play out in reality? What gets cut when a family doesn’t have enough money to cover its basic expenses? Education, usually…healthcare, utilities, food…things a family shouldn’t have to give up when there people living just across a fabricated border who are spending three times that much money individually…

The co-op members’ determined cost of living, then, was the starting point for our discussion on wages. A fair wage, Vero offered, was one that allowed these women to live a decent life. In this local context, that wage had to be at or above the $30 per day that they need in order to give their families that decent life. By those standards, then, a “fair “ wage is a living wage.

We then determined that this wage that they were proposing (which came out to about $4 per hour) was about 750 percent higher than the Mexican minimum wage, and 98 percent higher than the non-poverty. Hmmm.

Given that, they were pretty happy to hear that, based on the research we had done (fair wage calculator, Economist Intelligence Unit country reports, El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation figures), we were prepared to offer $5 per hour as a starting point – a figure that comes out to be over 900 percent higher than the Mexican minimum wage, and about 150 percent higher than the non-poverty wage.

Happy solution, huh? Well, doesn’t really feel that way.

It’s easy to look at these numbers scrawled on a white board and feel provoked by the extent of the economic inequality there…but more is required of us than recognition followed by a short-term visceral response. We must ask ourselves, and each other, why it is this way? Easy, right? Because it’s the United States – the richest country in the word – and because it’s Mexico – even, still, a developing country.

But that’s not it. The United States and Mexico didn’t hatch from an egg with economic inequalities inherent and fully formed. People – individuals, organizations, institutions – are responsible for creating and then fostering that inequality. And people – individuals, organizations, institutions – are responsible for correcting it.

At the end of our meeting with the cooperative, a few of the members made some comments, expressing their gratitude…which we all appreciated, I’m sure, but which made me slightly uncomfortable. After all, we (LOH, I mean) didn’t choose to be born in the States, and didn’t earn the chance to go to college and make good money and get financial aid and write grant proposals. And Vero and Vera and Laura and everyone else from the cooperative didn’t choose to be born in Mexico, nor did they do anything to deserve the economic inequalities with which they were born. As my dad used to say, we owe everything to the accident of birth.

Here’s some interesting info….Something like 20 percent of the world’s population owns 90 percent of the world’s wealth; stated differently – 80 percent of the world’s population shares only 10 percent of the world’s wealth. Newsflash: There isn’t an infinite amount of money and resources in the world. Even if that 80 percent of our population worked round the clock in an effort to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps (undoubtedly most do this anyway), they still wouldn’t get anywhere as long as that top 20 percent kept hoarding the money it already had.

So…does that mean that retaining wealth- or the very act of being wealthy – is immoral, because that privilege unjustly deprives others of opportunity? Uh…YEAH.

The crux of the matter is this: wealth redistribution whether on a large scale or on the small scale that we’re doing it on, ought to be the norm. We have a responsibility to correct these structural inequalities that we were socialized to believe were natural – if for no other reason than the ignoble recognition that Fortune could have dealt our cards differently; that we could have been born in poverty while others enjoyed our current luxuries.

Summer Sound Bites Benefiting LOH and WBB’s Juarez Projects!

Community, Privilege, and other things we forget

We spent the past weekend in Juarez visiting with the women’s co-op with which Las Otras Hermanas (LOH) has partnered.

[For those of you who don't know, LOH is the fair trade non-profit we're starting in an effort to foster economic and community development. In Juarez, we're working with ALDEA, a small community organization  that has created a handicraft center for the women in the community.]

We planned to spend Saturday and Sunday with ALDEA, while we reserved Friday night for tweaking our business plan, but things went slightly off course when a huge division within the group nearly dissolved the organization.

Evidently, two of the four people comprising our managing committee had some serious concerns with the organization, mostly rooted in a lack of trust in other members, and communication difficulties.  It seems that one member of the organization was convinced that we had lost sight of our goal, and had interpreted our decision to spend the last few weeks solely on our business plan as a sign of our lack of commitment to ALDEA. Another member felt undervalued. One person thought another had too much personal ambition, another person thought someone lacked commitment, and everyone seemed very upset about the fact that, during meetings, I militantly refuse to deviate from the agenda.  Everyone felt disillusioned. So we ALL came out with our problems, and reservations and worries and spent six hours hashing out our differences in an effort to try and find a common ground (and convince one member not to leave the organization).

But while we walked away from that meeting feeling a little bit better, and having created some communication guidelines that should help us keep the peace, I nevertheless felt like something was still seriously wrong, something was still missing.

Why were we having all of these problems within LOH when we all worked together so well within Women Beyond Borders? LOH was born from WBB; they can’t be that different, I thought.

The next day we trudged into rainy Juarez, which we found terribly flooded – so much so, in fact, that Vero (our contact from Mexico Solidarity Network) wasn’t able to pick us up at the border as planned because she couldn’t leave her house. Consequently, we spent the morning wandering around the city, wading through streets, until the waters lowered enough to allow Vero to pick us up.

Cassie, Andrea, Vero, Me, and Charis at a restaurant in Pronaf, where Vero picked us up after the rain.

Flooded streets. This was *after* the water had gone down!

On the way to the handicraft center, Vero gave us another tour of the industrial parks, intermittently cursing the flooded streets which nearly stalled our van. Along the sides of the roads, rows of stalled cars were abandoned or being pushed through the water, while some young people took to boogey-boarding in between them. You see, these floods are one consequence of the city’s lack of infrastructure, Vero said.

At the handicraft center, we were delighted to find that a bright mural now covered one side of the building. It had been painted by some neighborhood kids, we learned, who were starting a community art project: they’re painting walls in the neighborhood in an effort to preserve and express their culture, and themselves – using the color and design scheme of the mural we painted last March!

As we sat outside of the handicraft center, someone suggested starting the meeting by going around in a circle and listing one thing each of us likes about ALDEA and one thing each of us likes about LOH. Though a lot of wonderful things were said, I only remember two – because upon hearing them, I immediately realized what we (LOH) had forgotten.

Antonio, one of the founding members of ALDEA, an incredible person.

Vero, Laura and her children sitting outside of the handicraft center before the meeting.

Antonio said, “I like ALDEA because, as myself, I can do nothing. But as a community, we can do everything.” Then Vera added, “This organization is about families, and because it’s about families, we’ve become a family.”

And I realized that LOH’s problem wasn’t about a failure to prioritize ALDEA or solely about poor communication, but about our failure to create and foster a sense of community within LOH.

That night at the motel, I told our group what I thought: that the pressure to not fail, to be professional, to fit in with the excessively corporate tone of Edson and Skysong - combined with the added stress of our petty squabbles and personality differences had a created standard at LOH that dictated the complete division of the personal from the professional. When conflicts arose, for example, our mantra became “Just let it go; You don’t have to be friends to work together.”

Shameful.

Maybe if we were a different kind of organization – one that only cared about the bottom line – we could succeed with that line of thinking. But how could be honestly claim to advocate for ALDEA, commit to their vision, and prioritize their needs, if we don’t espouse the same values that they do?

It wasn’t always that way. In Women Beyond Borders, one-third of our mission is about fostering sisterhood and supporting each other just as much as we strive to support women elsewhere. We appointed a Wellness Chair to maintain the general well-being of members by recognizing milestones, remembering birthdays, and planning social events to alleviate stress and reduce activist burnout. We co-wrote Principles of Unity, for crying out loud! But, somehow, those commitments and values had not carried over into LOH.

So I told the girls that I don’t believe LOH can succeed unless we change that tone and change our strategy and that, instead of committing to LOH or solely committing to ALDEA, we *have* to commit to each other. We should be a family, like Women Beyond Borders is a family, and like ALDEA is a family. And you don’t walk away from your family.

LOH may fail for many reasons – maybe our business plan won’t work, or maybe we won’t be able to market the products successfully enough – but if it fails, it can’t fail because we couldn’t get along or because we didn’t try.

Edson gave us $20,000 of “learning money.” The program knows we may fail, and probably expects many of us to – it’s the learning that’s important, they think. While the members of the cooperative were unanimously deciding to give up forty percent of their already meager earnings to help develop their community, we were getting $20,000 of learning money. That’s privilege. We didn’t earn that, and we don’t deserve that. But we got that. The women of the co-op earn the money they make, and they deserve a lot more than they get.

The four of us often play around about how oppressed we are, but we are excessively privileged. Not only because of the money, but because we (even for a second) felt entitled to entertain the idea of quitting, simply because we didn’t get along. Because at the end of the day, we leave Juarez’s flooded streets for a dry motel 6 in El Paso. Because at the end of the weekend, we come back to Phoenix, go back to our on-campus jobs, open our macbooks, and write blog entries about privilege. We are so privileged.

So we decided to change things. To start caring more about and committing to each other, committing to building a community within LOH that ALDEA wouldn’t be ashamed to partner with.

Beyond Surface Immigration Issues

Published in the State Press on November 28, 2005.

With President Bush in town to discuss his plan to curb illegal immigration, perhaps the time is right to press him on border issues of a different kind — like how the U.S. is responsible for fueling the illegal immigration it’s working so hard to control.

While Bush reclines at the Biltmore for a day, pondering an issue lawmakers can’t agree on, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans will end shifts in border sweatshops owned by Fortune 500 companies (according to Amnesty and Corpwatch), with a few dollars pay to show for it.

One might expect that the corporations controlling America would bring some progress to Mexico. But instead, they bring, at best, countless underpaid jobs and, at worst, a dangerous atmosphere of hostility against women.

In Juarez, Mexico, for example, over 300 young women and girls have been raped, tortured and murdered on their way to and from work at these factories. Although theories abound, no one really knows who is responsible for these crimes, which remain largely uninvestigated despite pleas and protests from grieving families.

The 80 Fortune 500 companies that run factories in Juarez are not directly responsible for raping and mutilating these hundreds of women. But they are responsible for creating an environment that fosters such vicious crimes.

Their practice of hiring female workers who can be paid less than men has redefined masculinity in Juarez. It’s a city where men, traditionally the breadwinners, are largely unemployed. When a teenage girl is suddenly responsible for supporting her family in an intensely patriarchal society, she risks garnering the hostility of men in her community. Her femininity and sexuality come into question.

Though this is a byproduct of industrialization and not exclusively the fault of American-run factories, these businesses still have a responsibility to protect their female workers.

Instead, most of these factories run 24 hours a day, meaning that women who don’t earn enough to take a cab must walk or hitchhike to work in the dark. Only Alcoa, a company that produces aluminum, provides monitored transportation for its workers, according to Amnesty International.

Apparently, most of these companies don’t feel the need to protect their workers in the same way. The president of Electrocomponentes de Mexico, which produces parts for General Electric, even told Mexican Labor News and Analysis that they “have been consistent with the other plants in our area as far as offering competitive wages and benefits, we offer sports teams and that sort of thing. We feel we treat our employees very well.”

But not well enough to ensure safe transportation for Irma Rosales, a 13-year-old employee who was raped and suffocated with a plastic bag on her way home from work.

Under such conditions, who wouldn’t want to cross the border to safely make $5.15 an hour instead of risking one’s life to earn $4 a day?

Although Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox, has done little to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice, it isn’t beyond the scope of President Bush or local lawmakers. In fact, California Rep. Hilda Solis and New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman introduced a House and Senate concurrent resolution expressing congressional concern and proposing a set of actions to deal with the feminicide.

With the president in town and bringing national attention to local border issues, it is the perfect time to write to local congressional representatives urging them to cosponsor the resolution.

And if you attend any of the numerous protests staged today, speak against the giant corporations who breed the causes of illegal immigration: poverty, poor quality of life and unsafe communities.