Paper Summary:

Maquiladoras are essentially offshore assembly plants that emerged along the United States-Mexican border in the 1960s. This paper examines how maquiladoras offer cheap labor to produce/assemble goods and how, since NAFTA, have expanded beyond border towns and have moved south into the heart of Mexico. It looks at how although maquiladoras do provide thousands of jobs throughout Mexico, upon closer inspection, they are often operated by tyrannical bosses under sweatshop conditions and are a nesting ground for cheap labor. It argues that for Mexicans, NAFTA is not an agreement based upon free trade but rather an exploitative tool used to extract cheap labor for foreign products.

From the Paper:

"While the profits of the maquiladora sector exploded after the passage of NAFTA, the wages and labor conditions of those working in the assembly plants have gotten worse. According to Mexican labor laws, the maximum hours a person can work a week is forty eight hours, the first nine hours of overtime is to be paid at double-time rates with anything exceeding nine hours overtime to be paid at three times the pay rate. (3). In spite of this, maquiladora workers report that "they were often not paid anything extra for overtime even if they worked from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. In some maquiladoras, workers do veladas- all-nighters- once or twice a week. "

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