Mexico's Maquiladora Research Articles

JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANIZATION COMMITMENT: A COMPARISON OF UNITED STATES AND MEXICO EMPLOYEES

This study compares the nature of job satisfaction and organization commitment of employees in a United States manufacturing plant to employees in a Mexico maquiladora manufacturing plant. Demographic and job related variables were measured and used in a regression analysis to explain job satisfaction and organization commitment in both plants. Results indicate that significant differences exist. The regression models for the constructs, job satisfaction, and organization commitment in both countries are presented.

Foreign direct investment and relative wages: Evidence from Mexico's maquiladoras

In this paper, we examine the increase in relative wages for skilled workers in Mexico during the 1980s. Rising wage inequality in Mexico is linked to foreign capital inflows. We study the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the skilled labor share of wages in Mexico over 1975–1988. We measure FDI using regional data on foreign assembly plants. Growth in FDI is positively correlated with the relative demand for skilled labor. In regions where FDI has concentrated, growth in FDI can account for over 50 percent of the increase in the skilled labor wage share that occurred in the late 1980s. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.

The shadow price of labour in export processing zones. A discussion of the social value of employing women in export processing in Mexico and China

Researchers have recently begun to address methods of doing social cost-benefit analyses of export processing zones. This paper examines the issue of the appropriate shadow price of labour to apply in making a social evaluation of a zone. Conditions in Mexico and China are contrasted to illustrate the problem in current methods, which would lower the social benefits of the maquiladoras in Mexico simply because they have hired women. The paper argues that the absolute level of employment in both countries is an accurate measure of a key benefit of the zones, and that the appropriate shadow price of the labour involved is at or below the market wage regardless of whether the worker is male or female.

Manufacturing poverty: the maquiladorization of Mexico.

Based on interviews with social workers, attorneys, feminists, union activists, and factory workers, the author argues that the maquiladora free trade zone of Northern Mexico portends developments under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Today some 500,000 Mexican workers labor in 2,000 factories for $4.50 a day in Mexico's maquiladoras. Two-thirds of the workers are women, many single women who head their households. These women work in the new, modern manufacturing plants in industrial parks, but live in squalid shantytowns without adequate water, sewage, or electricity. On the job, workers face exposures to toxic chemicals and dangerous work processes. The Mexican government does not have the political will, the trained personnel, or the equipment to monitor these occupational health problems. While Mexico's Constitution and labor laws guarantee workers the right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike, in practice the state controls the unions and opposes worker activism. In the face of employer and state repression workers are forced to organize secretly to fight for higher wages and safer conditions.

Purchasing Characteristics and Supplier Performance in Maquiladora Operations

In their efforts to meet intense competition from low‐cost global manufacturers, many U.S. firms have sought to reduce their manufacturing costs by rationalizing their production activities. Rationalization consists essentially of the shifting of the firm's productive activities and resources to the regions of the world where greatest competitive advantage can be gained. Thus, rationalization allows firms to better use comparative advantage to build a competitive advantage. Many opportunities for the rationalization of production activities exist; however, the shifting of labor intensive activities to Mexico's maquiladora industry has become increasingly popular. Today, more than 75 percent of the 500 largest U.S. firms operate maquiladoras. Many leading firms in the Pacific Basin and Europe have also established maquiladoras. Because maquiladoras are established to add as much value to the firm's product as possible, understanding how the various value‐adding activities such as purchasing impact the success of these operations is essential. This article explores the characteristics and performance of purchasing activities in the maquiladora production sharing setting.

Strategic management of worker health, safety, and environmental issues in Mexico's Maquiladora industry

AbstractConflict arising from differences in business practices, standards, values, and norms guiding behavior are inherent in international business. These conflicts are evident in Mexico's maquiladora industry, particularly relating to issues of worker health, safety, and environment. This article extends a model of conflict management; illustrates the model's dimensions with case study examples; discusses strategic human resource management implications of the model's various outcomes; offers recommendations for managing worker health, safety, and environment issues; and identifies directions for future research. © 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Mexico's Maquiladora trade and the industrial flight hypothesis

The negotiating and ratification process of the North American Free Trade Agreement has brought new attention to the environmental problems of the U.S.-Mexico border. Particularly, much of the discussion has centered on whether the maquiladoras have had a large impact in creating the environmental problems along the border. The Integrated Environmental Border Plan under the Bush Administration and the parallel negotiations under the Clinton Administration are evidence of the political importance of the border environmental problems. The possible impacts of NAFTA on the border environment is an issue widely discussed among scholars (Gilbreath 1992, Mumme 1993, Trevino and Fernandez 1992). The purpose to the present work is to look back at the precursor of the NAFTA, the maquila industry. We will show that pollution abatement avoidance in the U.S. has contributed to the growth of the maquila industry. Industrial flight to Mexico occurs as pollution abatement costs rise in the U.S. In addition, our results indicate that firms may move to Mexico to increase their capital intensity. This result appears to contradict the conventional wisdom that firms move to Mexico to take advantage of inexpensive labor. The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, brief reviews of the industrial flight and the pollution haven hypotheses in the maquiladora industry are presented. In Section III we present a model to test the industrial flight hypothesis. Section IV presents a description of the data and test results. The final section contains some conclusions and suggestions for additional research.

Previendo el futuro: ¿Qué repercusiones tendrá el estilo de la administración Clinton en México?

That was implemented the Free Trade Agreement, control of workers from Mexico may become hard and made more flexible, industrial policy will seek to settle in promoting strategic sectors, relativizing the regulations of the invisible hand, as was they can provide renewed functions triangulation between EU, Mexico and Cuba. The interior maquiladoras in Mexico developed so far only products competitively offer the countries of Southeast Asia

Mexico's maquiladora industry: Where strategic human resource management makes a difference

Mexico's maquiladora industry: Where strategic human resource management makes a difference

Do maquiladoras take American jobs? Some tentative econometric results

Mexico's maquiladora industry has been subject to many controversies over the years, but one controversy has dominated. Opponents of the U.S. legal provisions that facilitate maquiladora profitability argue that the maquiladoras take jobs from U.S. workers. That is, Mexican workers compete with U.S. workers for manufacturing jobs. Advocates of the maquiladoras argue that these jobs would have gone abroad, in any case, and that Mexican workers' real competition is the work forces of other third-world countries. Even though the two sides of this controversy have argued for much more than a score of years, no one has developed a statistical testing procedure to address the dispute econometrically. The reason is that standard hypothesis-testing techniques cannot be used to treat this issue. The most obvious variables to use in testing the two competing hypotheses are so multicollinear that any conventional model using them always generates highly suspect results. In this article, I present a testing method that mitigates some of the problems of multicollinearity and allows one to examine the two competing hypotheses about maquiladoras and U.S. jobs. The test is indirect, since it measures the responses of maquiladora employment to changes in Mexico-U.S. and Mexico-Asian third world wage differentials, and does not directly measure losses in U.S. jobs or directly resulting increases in Mexican or Asian employment. Moreover, the results of the testing procedure are highly tenuous, because very few observations with clean data are available. Accordingly, it is hard to know much about the intertemporal stability of the relationships implied by the procedures I use. Nevertheless, the results up to now are striking. They suggest that both sides of the controversy are about equally correct.

The maquiladora option in Mexico

AbstractIf a U.S. firm can manage around the problems of labor turnover and poor infrastructure, Mexico's maquiladora sector will offer considerable cost savings, with reasonable operational risks, well into the 1990s.