Upon closer inspection, the EPZs’ catalog of infamies acquires an openly biopolitical tone:
In the Philippines some factories keep the bathrooms padlocked except for two daily fifteen-minute breaks when employees must sign a form to relieve themselves. Many workers resort to urinating in plastic bags under their workstations. According to Humans Right Watch, “women applying for jobs [under NAFTA] in the Mexican maquiladoras routinely had to undergo pregnancy tests.”1 In Honduras there have been rumors of employers forcing their female workers to have abortions or employees that have been injected with amphetamines to make them work 48-hour shifts. “At some Mexican maquiladoras, women are required to prove they are menstruating through such humiliating practices as monthly sanitary-pad checks. Employees are kept on twenty-eight days contracts—the length of the average menstrual cycle—making it easy, as soon as a pregnancy comes to light, for the worker to be dismissed. In a Sri Lankan zone, one worker was reported to be so terrified of losing her job after giving birth that she drowned her newborn baby in a toilet.”2 From this brief overview it can be deduced that the lives of these workers are being reduced to their barest biological conditions. They are corporate-managed zoē.
But it is not just threats, intimidation and verbal and physical abuse that haunt the zones like a specter. On March 8, 1997, a Cavite EPZ employee named Carmelita Alonzo died in a Rosario hospital. According to her co-workers, Alonzo had worked a full week of day and night shifts because of an order for an American clothing brand, after which she contracted pneumonia, a common illness in factories where it is suffocatingly hot during the day while at night the atmosphere becomes extremely humid. She asked her supervisor’s some time off to recover but he refused. When she arrived at the hospital it was too late, the stress of overwork had compromised her immune system and she died within a few days. It was International Women’s Day.
Sometimes the devastation of the areas is anything but “circumstantial” and reaches the point sadism. In 1993 Ranjith Mudiyanselage, an employee of an EPZ in Sri Lanka, complained about a faulty machine that had cut off a co-worker’s finger. A few days later, “his body was found beaten and burning on a pile of old tires outside a local church. The man’s legal adviser, who had accompanied him, was murdered in the same way.”3 Sri Lanka, Klein explains, is one of the countries with zero tolerance for strikes and unions within the processing zones. Although its EPZ is officially in a legal limbo between the port and its insular government, it is illegal “to do anything that might jeopardize the country’s export earning, including publishing and distributing critical material.”4
The reasons for the aversion of EPZs towards trade unions is self-explanatory. If competitiveness is a problem among first-world corporations that outsource their services, this is also the case from the point of view of production: “A factory that allowed its workers adequate rest and paid minimum wages would not be able to compete. The major brands demand such low prices that factories must violate international labor standards.”5
The power that these terrible places exert over their inhabitants, its gravitational pull, is unimaginable to most of us. The workers of Cavite, says Naomi Klein,
have lost on all counts: they are penniless and homeless. It’s a potent combination. In the dormitories, sleep deprivation, malnutrition and homesickness mingle to create an atmosphere of deep disorientation. “We are alien in the factories. We are also alien in the boarding-house because we all come from faraway provinces,” Liza, an electronics worker told me. “We are strangers here.”6
Processing zones are an uninhabitable threshold where one can and cannot dwell simultaneously (0.9, 0.12, 7.7). A twilight in which one is “dead” to the law and to life in community, dead to the world at large, and that nevertheless spawns the goods that we consume on a daily basis.
Leave a Reply