Zona Franca is the Chureca of Nicaragua’s officially employed. The industrial section of Managua employs children and adults for fifteen hours a day, six days a week. Though the law stipulates that employees are entitled to fifteen days of vacation every six months, prevalent unemployment ensures that factories are never missing an employee. Privatization of electricity and other basic needs, and cyclical unemployment ensure that in the midst of nonexistent safety measures, sexual assault, and other human rights violations of factory employees, business is booming, and laborers don’t complain, even in the tobacco factories, where the use of plastic gloves is prohibited, despite the toxic chemicals employees handle for fifteen hours everyday.
At the tobacco factory, we saw a number of pregnant women standing up and preparing tobacco leaves for cigars. We asked what the protocol is if a pregnant woman becomes sick in this highly toxic environment. “She can just tell us if she is uncomfortable, and we will move her to another assembly line,” the manager said. He did not mention the thousands of Nicaraguans who are lined up to take a job if an employee complains about his or her working conditions, before changing the subject to the fine quality of their produce.
Eighty percent of factory workers are single mothers. Supervisors often exchange preference for overtime work, for sex. Beyond the few extra hours of underpaid labor these poor mothers gain from the exchange, being raped by your supervisor is a form of job insurance. When it comes time to lay off some employees, who would lay off those who they know they can rape the following day, and the day after, and the day after?
President Daniel Ortega, once hailed as the Sandinista leader (and still hailed as such on billboards across the country) was elected in 2006. Fearful of first-world companies re-outsourcing to other countries with even more appalling working conditions, he has facilitated the drop in the number of unions in Nicaragua from twenty-three a few years ago, to just three in 2008. Spies in factories have been helpful, since they report any potential union organizers so they can be fired before they give other employees any ideas.
Minimum age requirements have been relaxed under Ortega’s rule so that parents, who consider their children “chatel,” can force their children to work in factories if they sign a waiver. Counter intuitively, these children are the “lucky” ones, since their other options include living in the streets, or the capital city’s dump, La Chureca.
What are your consumption patterns? Who produces these materials?
Don’t boycott products you normally use – that just leads to job loss, and a greater population of scroungers living in La Chureca. Research the corporations you support, and write letters on behalf of their employees.
It might take a minute. But many of these working conditions are taking lives.
I’ll let you do the math.
