The end of the Maquila era.

• Author: Landau, Saul

Two years ago, when I last visited Juarez, most of the maquiladoras, Mexico's export factories, boasted "help wanted" signs and ran three shifts a day. Employment neared 100 percent. An unhappy worker in factory A could quit and find work at Factory B across the street where the wages were five centavos an hour more or had better cafeteria food. That workplace mobility has ended. The once-buzzing factories have transmogrified into misshapen tombstones; industrial parks have turned into industrial cemeteries. Over the last eighteen months, some 250,000 factory workers have lost their jobs in Mexico. Ironically, some of the very factories that moved from the United States to Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s now find the same compelling reasons--lower wages and regulations--to shift operations to Asia.

Creeping weeds and blowing plastic and paper litter now cover what used to be a packed parking lot in front of Quality Industrial Services. A lone security guard shares the space with a scruffy cat and an elusive bird. "It's difficult," the guard told me, "to see maquilas shutting down, moving to China." The man blamed last year's U.S. economic downturn for putting Mexicans out of work.

On the surface, says Chihuahua sociologist Victor Quintana, "the job losses come from the U.S. recession and the post 9/11 shocks, but in reality that's a smokescreen for deeper causes. The U.S. recession was hardly a cold, while we in Mexico developed full pneumonia." The maquila model, Quintana predicts, has exhausted its potential. "Mexico cannot compete with China. But the model has done its damage." Two years ago, he says, "Chihuahua led Mexico in high employment. Today, Chihuahua leads in unemployment." Thanks to layoffs from factory shutdowns or reductions of shifts, Chihuahua has lost more than 100,000 jobs.

According to a June 20 Washington Post story, over the last two years more than 500 mostly U.S.-owned assembly-line factories in Mexico moved to China. Corporate executives have concluded that the wage differential between the two Third World countries more than covers the increased costs of shipping and the inconveniences of distance. In Juarez, a beginning machine operator earns less than $8 a day, whereas her counterpart in China makes only a quarter of that pathetic wage.

For Mexico, the maquilas have been the equivalent of the industrial revolution. Instead of reading about Manchester or Leeds in the 1840s, you could visit Tijuana or Juarez today...