Word: maquiladoras
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Along the Arizona border, there are about 200 maquiladora operations, the mostly U.S.-owned, light-assembly factories on the Mexican side ((ECONOMY & BUSINESS, June 1)). I have strongly supported this business in Congress as beneficial to the U.S. and Mexico because maquiladoras help U.S. companies remain competitive in today's global market, enabling them to retain jobs that might otherwise be lost to Asian competition. Maquiladoras create badly needed work for U.S. citizens in areas along the border, where unemployment is often double the national average. The economic reality is that skilled labor is cheaper in Mexico than...
...factories have stirred a heated controversy in the U.S. over the number of American jobs that may be going to Mexican workers. The maquiladoras, thunders Victor Munoz, president of the AFL-CIO's 12,000-member Central Labor Union in El Paso, are "a scam, a con game. All they're creating is more profits." In February union workers surrounded a maquiladora trade show in El Paso with a caravan of trucks. Last week a team of U.S. analysts began a study of the border region for a House subcommittee that is examining the impact of the factories...
Behind the maquiladora phenomenon are complementary Mexican and U.S. economic policies. American firms have long sent materials to Mexico duty free for use in assembly plants, then paid duty only on the value added abroad when the products were returned to the U.S. For nearly two decades, these exchanges fostered steady but unspectacular growth in border cities such as Juarez, Tijuana and Mexicali. But the trend accelerated dramatically in 1982, when the Mexican peso lost 82% of its value against the U.S. dollar. Mexican wages fell to irresistibly low levels for U.S. companies facing tough competition from Asia...
...least 850 maquiladoras employ 250,000 Mexicans at assembly work that was formerly done, by and large, by Americans. But U.S. businessmen insist that if the jobs did not go to Mexico, they would probably move across the Pacific. As it is, the U.S. has shared handsomely in the binational prosperity. A 1986 federal report said Mexican maquiladora workers spend about half their wages on the American side of the border. Local businessmen claim the industry is also supporting more than 800,000 jobs in factories, warehouses and other businesses...
...build so-called twin plants, one north of the border and the other south. A typical company manufactures its materials in the U.S. plant, sends them to the Mexican factory for assembly and then returns them to the U.S. for packaging. The Mexicans have given the plants the name maquiladoras, meaning golden mills, because of the economic benefit they bring. The biggest maquiladora is RCA's TV-chassis assembly plant in Ciudad Juárez, which employs 6,000. Says Armando León, a National Bank of Mexico official who helps finance the plants: "It is a classic...