Mexican Seafood Workers Battle Inhumane Treatment

by James Parks, Mar 12, 2009

Workers who process seafood in the maquilas in Santa Rosalia, Mexico, along the California border, are determined to improve their lives by joining a union. But in an all-too-familiar scenario, the workers face virulently anti-union multinational employers who fire workers for speaking up.

The mostly female workers, some of them as young as 12 years old, work 14-to-16-hour days, six or seven days a week for mainly Korean, Chinese and U.S.-based multinational corporations that sell to markets in Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, the United States and elsewhere.

Many of the workers in Santa Rosalia are forced to live in company dormitories attached to two of the larger plants. They sleep on the floor or on plastic boxes. The rooms are nine feet by 13 feet for a family of four or a group of six to eight.

The seafood companies swept in to Mexico after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, taking advantage of the pressure that comes with such deals to privatize national industries. They eventually displaced the fishermen cooperatives that had sustained the community for some 50 years.

Korean-based Hanjin, the largest employer in Santa Rosalia, fired 96 workers in 2002 after they tried to organize fellow workers to fight for better conditions and wages. The Hanjin workers then joined with other workers across the industry to try and form a union with the help of SINTTIM, the independent union of maquila workers, and Enlace, a strategic alliance of low-wage worker centers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico. The 96 fired Hanjin workers filed charges against the company. The first hearing before the Mexican labor board is scheduled for October.

Earlier this year, Rosa Ceseña Ramirez, secretary general of SINTTIM, toured California, telling the workers’ story at schools, colleges, universities, labor councils, local unions, worker centers and at press conferences. During the tour, Ramirez and representatives of Enlace met with the management of eight large Korean groceries in California and gained their pledge to stop buying Hanjin products.

Ramirez told of workers forced to live and work in horrid conditions. (See video.):

• Work-related health issues include painful joint deterioration in wrists, elbows, shoulders and backs; skin ailments that result from a caustic substance in the squid; cuts; infections; and heat-related illness that results in death.
• In one of the plants, the workers are forced to go without meals if they miss a shift for illness or any other reason.
• The workers told the union and Enlace that the women are sometimes beaten or raped by supervisors.

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