Huxley Maquiladora Essay

Imagine being crammed in a un-air conditioned room with hundreds of workers in the Mexico heat. Imagine sewing all day and developing sore wrists which can lead to tendonitis. Imagine after nine grueling hours of work not getting paid enough to purchase food and other necessities for your family. Maquiladoras are very well known among the Mexico and US border. They conduct under tariff free materials which are imported to the companies. The North American Free Trade Agreement has a huge advancement and have grown by employing tons of Mexican workers. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) promised to increase workplace efficiency, help corporations, and to improve the lives of many workers. In my opinion, NAFTA did not keep their promise. They definitely did not improve the lives of many workers and everything else they guaranteed. NAFTA has not kept its promises because they work in terrible conditions, they do not get paid enough, and they are giving up hope.

Huxley Manufacturing Company, a large firm in the defense industry, is considering a strategic move to shift production from its California plant to Mexico. Tariff reductions made possible by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up the potential to enjoy significant cost savings by shifting production south of the Mexican border.

"In 1994, both countries [Mexico and the United States] signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which has increased their mutual trade and foreign direct investment. Between 1994 And 2005, the US-Mexico foreign direct investment flows increased substantially from 16,968 billion to $71,423 billion. By 2007, the Mexican commercial relationship with the U.S. almost tripled from $297 billion to $930 billion." [2] This mutual increase in business inherently has had an attendant growth in "the number of foreign enterprises who have situated in each country." [2] With this increase in international business and trade comes cultural shifts and increased globalization and differences in managerial functions.

A maquiladora is a manufacturing plant based in Mexico where foreign companies import materials and equipment, on a duty free and tariff free basis, for the purposes of processing, manufacturing, or assembling goods which are then exported to other countries. The idea behind these maquiladoras promises a prosperous Mexican society. On paper, it really does seem like NAFTA is living up to expectations; creation of more jobs and a much less unemployment rate. On the surface, there seems to be nothing wrong with what’s going on in Mexico in terms of employment. Everyone has jobs and everyone is getting paid for these jobs, so what’s the issue? Despite all of this, the degrading and terrible working conditions imposed upon the maquiladora workers

Maquiladoras are assembly plants clustered mostly in northern Mexico, along the U.S. border. The factories employ 17 percent of the Mexican work force, this makes maquiladoras Mexico’s second largest source of jobs but some people would say that the negatives weight over the positives. Some negatives about this situation are that how the Mexican government does not have full control of the factories, how the employees have to work in harsh conditions and, the employees get paid a low wage. Maquiladoras have both a positive and negative effect on the Mexican economy because of the poor work conditions, however the large numbers of the population they employ cannot be ignored.

This means that people that were not able to afford the products can now buy them causing an increase of sales in The United States, Mexico and Canada. No tariffs allowed businesses to compete in the world marketplace to expand and deliver customer goods. Big manufacturing companies saw that the cheap labor was available in Mexico and moved their manufacturing companies. Many of these companies had unions and the unions were negotiating for higher wages. This could have caused a company to go bankrupt or invest in machines (robots) to replace people. This in turn led to manufacturing companies moving to Mexico in order to make profit and continue lower prices. As a business owner I would agree that just keeping a company afloat is not good business. Profits need to be met or company can go bankrupt and jobs will be lost. Many people lost their jobs due manufacturing companies moving to Mexico for profit. About 700,000 jobs were lost in the United States with 55,000 being in Texas. Pg 18. Texas Public Policy released a study that “El Paso is reported to be "hit" the hardest by NAFTA. About 10,000 workers have been effected by the loss of jobs, yet the El Paso region has an increase of exports creating 38,000 jobs since NAFTA”. Economic growth is seen in El Paso. El Paso is growing and seems to be under construction for the last 5 years. The transportation industry is booming as evident by new businesses being built such as motels and convenient stores near the main highways. Construction to accommodate the transportation industry creates new jobs which leads to economic growth. In the last five years of traveling to El Paso and back to Corpus Christi, no matter the time of day, the highways are busy with big truck/18 wheelers. Texas has

Maquiladoras are a manufacturing company which runs in Mexico. They manufacture and assemble goods and ship them. They started to be recognized in 1994 when NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was passed, NAFTA is an agreement signed by Canada, United States, and Mexico.Which is one of the world’s biggest trade zones right now. The maquiladoras are very popular because they are cheap in a way that they can assemble goods for a cheap price. You can save up to 75 %(http://www.madeinmexicoinc.com/faq/) if you import from the Maquiladoras. Maquiladoras can manufacture goods and ship them out for duty-free and tariff free goods. Large companies then take advantage of that by using the Mexican government 's laws. how? Well they use Mexico’s “less strict environmental laws” (http://umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/maquiladora.htm) Which means that the companies can send in unprocessed material and can get it assembled by paying the workers less money.

maquiladoras were required to locate within 20 miles of an international border or coastline, but to this day the regulation of the maquiladora industries have change a tremendous amount.. In 2000, 57% of the adult population lived in the capital region, in which Mexico City is located, or in surrounding central states. During the 1990s, the share of the population in the border region, in which most maquiladoras are located, rose slightly from 17% to 18%. This small increase in the border population is remarkable, given the dramatic growth in maquiladora employment and in the population of large cities, such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, that occurred in the region. Border employment has grown primarily through firms attracting workers from

than all of Mexico, but it came at a price. In Maquiladoras these factories are operated by

Being a neighbor to the maquiladoras industry for a very large portion of my life, never stopped to wonder what was the purpose of the maquiladoras? How do maquiladoras relate to cheap labor and low economic opportunities? Can the pros and cons of the maquiladora industry affect the global economies? Could our health be affected by the maquilas? Also, regarding the placement of these industries- does it affect the infrastructure of our border cities? Some of the reasons why I choose this topic was to let the reader have a general understanding of the maquiladora industry.

Before NAFTA, Canada and the United States were produced economies with solid customs of liberal political and financial arrangements, while Mexico had not one or the other. After World War II, Mexico occupied with protectionism and import-substitution, instead of fare headed development. Mexico 's approaches were proposed to make freedom from American authority and energize local industrialization through state and corporatist strategies. These strategies reverse discharges and by the 1980s Mexico had triple-digit expansion, retrogressive businesses, and broad universal obligation. In this environment, Mexico started to change in 1985 and tear down its protectionist approaches. Be that as it may, Mexican wages were still only one seventh of those in the United States only preceding NAFTA. This made noteworthy resistance to collaboration with Mexico in the United Sates, where American work and union gatherings dreaded huge employment misfortunes to Mexico. Ross Perot broadly reworded this dread among Americans with his "monster sucking sound" representation for employments going south of the US outskirt to Mexico. As far as it matters for Mexico, opening its economy as needed by NAFTA undermined political and financial pioneers who had controlled and appropriated state incomes without outer impedance. Much more diminutive contrasts existed between the US and Canadian monetary and political framework, which were both liberal vote based

individuals through technology and science, but overpowers the human spirit. More’s positive and straightforward writing highlights the advantages of harmony when he writes, “Desire must accord with nature” (More 62). By comparison, through exaggeration and sarcasm, Huxley writes about, “Mass production shifting the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness” (Huxley 228).

On January 1, 1994, the nations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico entered into a three-way partnership to supposedly lift trade barriers and improve production in all three countries. This is called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, the effect was generally ruinous for southern Mexico. Trans-national corporations from Europe, Asia, and especially North America invested heavily in closing down factories inside their nations (primarily for environmental and labor costs) and establishing new ones, almost all of which

Mexico is the top trading nation in Latin America and the ninth-largest economy in the world. No country has signed more free trade agreements – 33 in all, including the two biggest markets in the world, the US and the EU. Altogether these signatory countries make up a preferential market of over more than billion consumers. Much of the FDI in Mexico is attracted by the country’s strategic location within the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has positioned it as a springboard to the US and Canada. Other attractions are competitive production costs and a young, skilled workforce, together with political stability and an open economy.

It has been ten years since the signature of the NAFTA agreement among Canada, U.S., and Mexico. For Mexico, this was a decisive step away from a protectionism model toward a