If for the corporations that contract their services the economic reason for EPZs is competitiveness (8.6), from the point of view of the factories themselves and the developing countries that allow them, it is the promise of industrialization. Since the 1970s, Third World countries have seen these zones of economic exception as a model for stimulating the economy by attracting foreign investment; a promise that has never come to fruition. According to Klein, the benefits that the developing countries offer to the big brands spoil this possibility. The processing zones are designed
as a fantasyland for foreign investors. Golf courses, executive clubs and private schools have been built on the outskirts of Rosario to ease the discomforts of Third World life. Rent for factories is dirt cheap: 11 pesos per square foot —less than a cent. For the first five years of their stay, corporations are treated to an all-expenses-paid “tax holiday” during which they pay no income tax and no property tax. It’s a good deal, no doubt, but it’s nothing compared to Sri Lanka, where EPZ investors stay for ten years before having to pay any tax.1
The reality is that given their nature of economic exceptions, these sweatshops engender a perpetual atmosphere of instability that sabotages the promise of industrialization and economic development. Their structures are transitory, made of temporary materials as if they were about vanish into thin air at any moment. Its workers live in a constant state of fear, intimidation and disillusionment. “Fear pervades the zones,” says Naomi Klein, “The governments are afraid of losing their foreign factories; the factories are afraid of losing their brand-name buyers; and the workers are afraid of losing their unstable jobs. These are factories built no on land but on air.”2 In fact, in legal terms, export processing zones are barely tied to the country where they reside and neither the municipal government nor the country’s police can enter their confines (for how can one enter a threshold?), which is why they all have their own private security forces. “If all this makes Cavite feel as if it’s in a different country, says Naomi Klein,
that’s because, in a way, it is. The zone is a tax-free economy, sealed off from the local government of both town and province—a miniature military state inside a democracy.3
It is with good reason that Agamben claims that a camp is what happens every time exception becomes the rule (7.26, 8.4, 8.6).
It is a rather cruel irony that developing countries think that EPZs can bring any kind of economic benefit when legally they are but tenuously linked to the local economy. They can generate employment, but unstable, poorly paid and unprotected employment. They can bring “industrialization” and “progress” but at a huge social cost. Such an realization makes it clear that the raison d'être of this model from the point of view of production is the possibility of enrichment outside the regulations of the local economy.
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