Abstract
This essay is based on an approach that addresses the relationship between work-related domination and the subjects who are submitted to it. This reflection arises from research undertaken in Nicaragua, among workers from the international textile factories known as maquiladoras (or maquilas). Men, but mostly young women, work and live here under particularly difficult conditions. The constraints of work and domination invade the recesses of their existence, and their power is such that it seems to annul any proper subjectivity. Although it may seem easy to locate the effects of work-related domination in the very intimacy of the subjects’ lives, it also appears as if part of themselves remains unsubdued. Dominated subjectivities can only rebel for failing to do it would be to condemn their beings to inexistence. What sense can be given to this gap in domination? Does it preserve the domination by preserving the subjects from the invasion in their own beings by this very domination? Is it only a resource of the submission? Those are, between domination and subjectivity, some of the aroused interrogations.
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Notes
G. Cuadra in El Observador Económico (2001–2002), “Las nuevas inversiones están en manos del sector privado,” n°119, diciembre-enero, p. 22–25.
cnzf.gob.ni (2002). CNZF is the governing body of the industrial free trade zones regime, of which it draws the policy. It is integrated by representatives of the public as well as the private sectors.
Information from the National Free Zone Commission internet site (CNZF) (http://www.cnzf.gob.ni, 2015).
These countries are actually followed by Nicaragua (25 companies but 3.7% of working posts) and Mexico (10 companies for 7.5% of working posts); Taiwan is now in fifth place after El Salvador.
With the Law of Free Industrial Zone, the six most relevant benefits for both “operating” and “users” companies of the Nicaraguan Free Zones were: 100% exemption of import taxes on the benefits; import taxes exemption on the goods, equipment, etc.; also for the creation or transformation of the firms; total exemption for the transmission of real state goods affected to free zone; total exemption for indirect taxes yield from sales; and total exemption for municipal taxes. All these exemptions were initially thought for a 15-year period. Later in 2001, with the agreement of the WTO, Nicaragua was allowed to offer, before 2008, an extended benefit of 15 years to another country’s request. See www.czf.gob.ni.
anitec.net (2004). In relation to the countries near Nicaragua, the average salary paid here is, clearly, the lowest. According to the report by the Nicaragua Central Bank issued in 2007, the minimum monthly salary in Central America countries was: Nicaragua: 98.6 U$; Costa Rica: 484.5 U$; Salvador: 174.3 U$; Guatemala: 202.7 U$; Honduras: n/d.; Dominican Republic: 198 U$. Banco Central de Nicaragua (2007), “Nicaragua en cifras,” www.bcn.gob.ni, p. 4. According to the CNZF (2015): “Nicaragua has a large qualified labor force ready to be employed by international investment companies willing to stablish in the country (…) The Labor Market Risk, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2014, places Nicaragua as the Central American country with the lowest investors’ risk, after Costa Rica. This report takes into account several issues as: Union’s power, work suits, salary restrictions’, contract restriction and workers dismissal (…) the comparison with the minimum salary for the free zone companies in Central America, Nicaragua is the most competitive country in the region. These conditions allow investors to establish operations with intensive labor and highly profitable.”
The first textile maquiladoras appeared in Nicaragua in the mid-1960s. On the eve of the Sandinist revolution (1979), they were about a dozen. Under the Sandinist government, they were no more than five and were nationalized. Not until the end of the revolution and the liberation of the economy will the sector stand out as a State policy.
They went from 1000 in 5 companies (1992) to 37,000 in 45 companies by 2001 (representing approximately a 32% of national industrial employment), which represents 37 times growth. This continued to grow in such a way that by 2006 there were 95 companies offering more than 80,000 jobs posts.
Violeta, for example, is a 27 years old worker. Mother of two children at the time of our interview, she tells (September 15, 2002): “When I met him—This was my second love experience, my daughter was then 2 years old. He is a very nice person and had given me his support, I think he also loved my daughter, but I said to myself: ‘I need a man’. (…) Some of my experiences have not been good for me. Now I’ve made a decision and hope God will help me: it is best for me to stay alone, to stay with my children, because with men…I didn’t have good experiences…I don’t want to get involved in a new relationship, I prefer to stay alone.” Giovana (September 22, 2002), who is 32 years old and mother of two children, also states “I’m on my own. I’m single. The three of us live together. Sometimes is not possible for me as a woman to find a relationship, to build a relationship with a man, mainly because of the respect I ow to my children, to my daughter, I can’t meet a man and start dating, so I chose to stay alone living with my children.”
In 1987, the sociologists Helena Hirata and Danièle Kergoat questioned the psychodynamics of work on the necessity to consider sexual division of labor (Hirata and Kergoat 1988). Pascale Molinier is the first psychologist to demonstrate the existence of female collective defenses (in health organizations) (Molinier 2006) and the structural importance of sexual division of labor.
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Borgeaud-Garciandía, N. The Sweatshop Workers of Nicaragua: Subjectivity, Labor, and Domination. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 10, 509–522 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-017-0199-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-017-0199-2