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Article
#2
Maquiladora Myths: Locational and Structural Change in Mexico’s Export Manufacturing Industry.
The article started out with a good introduction of what maquiladora actually meant. Right away in the beginning of the article the author tells us that maquiladora “ is a labor intensive manufacturing plant that assembles imported materials and components to produce goods for export, typically to the United States”(MacLachlan, I and Aguilar, G pp.315). It does not take the writers long to tell us the goal of their article was to evaluate different aspects of the maquiladora, to examine what is true about them and what is myth.
The next part of the article deals with the history of the maquiladora
and how they came about. Once the
United States stopped letting Mexican agricultural workers come across the
border in the Bracero program, there was a lot of unemployed workers with no
jobs. The estimates was about
200,000 workers were without work. The
maquiladoras were designed to “emulate the job creation record of Southeast
Asia in-bond assembly plants and build on success of the limited free port
status (Sklair 1993;Profitt III 1994).
The article then shifts its attention to the myths behind the maquiladora.
Some of the myths were that they were only found along the northern
border, work force dominated by female workers, wages are extremely low, plants
are foreign-owned. The plants use
to be found only along the border, but now they are found in the interior of
Mexico. The second myth of the
female workers being the dominant work force is also changing since the
percentage had gone down greatly in the last few years.
The wages are extremely low for American standard, but for Mexico it is
good paying money. The last one of being foreign-owned is actually divided
equally between foreign and Mexican owned.
There are many different views about the maquiladoras; it all depends on
where you talk about them at. The
next problem for the maquiladora is if it is a free trade zone or not.
This seems to be a big debate worldwide since so many people will be
affected by the outcome of it. Under
the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) they have decided to change the
way the maquiladoras function. For
a short-term period they can operate the way they are but they have to move to
free trade in the near future. This
means that they lose a lot of their freebies and will have to charged tariff’s
now when they import and export.
The article I thought was very informative, maybe even too informative.
The readability of the article was good, but it was hard following all
the statistics that they had in there about what percentages were shifting where
and what percentage was going down. I
guess the main problem with the article for me was that I had no background
information on this. This whole topic was new to me, I knew about the sweatshops I
just never knew them to be called maquiladoras.
The organizational logic of the article was great; I think that is the
only reason I could keep things straight on what was happening in the article.
It helped out a lot with the writers giving the introduction with what
maquiladoras actually are. The writers did not assume anything with the article; it was
definitely made for a wide range of people.
The strength of the argument was very convincing and it was
straightforward. No more than three
paragraphs into the article the goal was stated on what they were trying to
prove with the article. It is nice
when you read an article and the goal of the paper is right there and you
don’t have to keep flipping through pages trying to find it.
The article then went right on down the line of what they were trying to
provide and they gave great examples and a lot of figures to try and prove their
point.
Overall I thought the article was good and it was very informative. I would recommend the article to other people who are interested in this sort of thing, but I don’t think outside of that that anyone else would enjoy it like they would have enjoyed the previous article about Wal-Mart and Kmart.