Worker Resistance in the Formation of the Maquiladora Enclave in Honduras

Neoliberal Policy in the Consolidation of the Maquila Export Enclave

Over the past 40 years Honduras has experienced an enormous economic transformation stemming from the changes fostered by the global crisis of capitalism that began in the 1970s. In this new phase of the global economy, commonly called globalization (what Osorio [2004] has called mundialización), the Honduran economy discontinued its incipient industrialization in favor of import substitution in the 1950s. Under the influence of neoliberalism, the world economy was reorganized on the basis of exports that revived the old dependency and underdevelopment organized around an enclave economy. The predominant activity was now the maquiladora industry (Crossa, 2016; Pérez, 1998). Starting in 1980, a new export pattern was forged under the imperialist impetus formalized in the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the economic policies of “Reaganomics for Honduras” (Hernández, 1985), which turned the country into the U.S. geopolitical base for halting the advance of the popular and armed movement spreading throughout Central America and made Honduras the laboratory for the launch of neoliberal economic policies that deregulated the national market and promoted the country’s economic opening to international trade. Ronald Reagan told the U.S. Congress, “We can show the world that we conquer fear with faith, we overcome poverty with growth, and we counter violence with opportunity and freedom. And now we're making good on our promise. I'm proud to stand with you for this celebration of the long-awaited first stage of implementation of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act” (Reagan, 1983).

“Reaganomics for Honduras” proposed that the developmentalist state end its “benefactor” role, relinquish the incipient national industrial project, and organize a new form of social reproduction that responded to the conditions of capitalist globalization. To do so, it was to shift the incentives under the industrial investment laws to benefit production destined for the world market and gradually reduce the incentives for national industries. What followed during the 1980s and 1990s was a cascade of structural adjustment policies that put an end to the national industrial project promoted by the state, dismantled the organized working class, and placed export activities at the center of Honduran economic planning. ¹ According to the analysis of neoliberalism in Honduras developed by the Honduran economist Alcides Hernández (1983: 60),

The program of structural adjustment must be understood as a strategy to counteract the drop in the profit rate of big capital and as a mechanism to rearrange the economies of the periphery mired in bureaucracy that hinders the development of commercial relations. In the name of this rearrangement and economic efficiency, an increase in the unemployment rate is legitimized, as are the decline in real wages, the deterioration of social services in the public sector, and the transformation of the state into a subsidiary of private export capital, perhaps the most important emerging sources of accumulation in the current economic crisis.

Between 1984 and 1998 several constitutional decrees converted Honduran territory into a free-trade zone so that foreign and Honduran transnational capital could operate under the duty-free exemption. In December 1984, with Decree 35, the temporary import regime was authorized to take advantage of the supposed benefits of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and exemption from the payment of tariffs, fees, taxes on sales, and any other tax on imports of goods necessary to produce merchandise for export beyond Central America (Moncada, 1995). Shortly thereafter, in 1987, by Decree 37-87, the creation of zonas industriales de procesamiento (industrial processing zones—ZIP) extended the exemption from taxes to other municipalities in the area of Puerto Cortés. Under this new regulation, the state was no longer in charge of the industrial parks formerly controlled by the National Ports Company (Kennedy, 1998:19).

Economic restructuring increased in the 1990s following the approval of a much broader program of neoliberal economic policies. A month after becoming president in 1990, Rafael Leonard Callejas announced that the Honduran economy was bankrupt. As a solution, he obtained approval in March 1990 for a mega-package called the Structural Organization of the Economy Act (Executive Decree 18-90), designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The program had two main objectives: to create the conditions for Honduras to pay its foreign debt and to generate profitable areas for the operation of transnational companies (Arancibia, 2013). Toward the end of the 1990s, the duty-free exemption was extended nationwide with the enactment in 1998 of Decree 131-98, the Free Zones Law. The exemption from payment of tariffs, consular fees, and domestic taxes and levies was extended to all companies with a direct or indirect relation to the import or export customs operations. This law paved the way for increased opening to trade.

The first maquiladora industrial zones established under this new neoliberal architecture were ZIP Choloma and ZIP Inhdelva in northern Cortés in the 1990s. ZIP Choloma is owned by the Canahuati family’s Lovable Group. Lovable was launched in 1964 in the framework of the Central American Common Market. With the failure of this project and the beginning of the structural crisis of global capitalism in the 1970s, Lovable directed its efforts to the U.S. market through Elcatex while concentrating extraordinary profits from rentierism with the creation of ZIP Choloma and later ZIP Buena Vista. In addition, this powerful oligarchical family participated in other sectors. Its head, Juan M. Canahuati, was vice president of a national commercial bank called Banco del País, an adviser to the Honduran Private Enterprise Council, a founder of the Honduran Maquila Association, the director of the Foundation for the Development of Investments and Exports, and the president of the Honduran Tourism Investment Fund.

ZIP Inhdelva belongs to the Kattán family, which began its business ventures in Central America as a clothing manufacturer for the regional market during the Central American Common Market. However, with the global economic crisis and restructuring of the international division of labor, the Kattán Group quickly fell in line with the new export pattern and encountered greater profitability coordinating with transnational capital through the management of the industrial parks of the maquiladora industry. In other words, originally an industrial business group, it redesigned itself in the new international division of labor as rentier capital, leasing infrastructure services to large transnational corporations. Currently it is part of the Honduran big bourgeoisie, a member of the governing power bloc with a strong influence on economic policy.

These two business groups, along with others such as Continental Group of the Rosenthal family and the Karim Group, also large owners of industrial parks, show that the new export pattern organized around the maquiladora industry was not forced solely by pressure from foreign capital. The Honduran oligarchies, allied with transnational capital, have been historic actors in the development of Honduras’s dependent capitalism and today participate in the country’s economic and political life as groups that supervise and create the necessary conditions for the control of a neoliberal agenda directed toward the U.S. market. Therefore it is no coincidence that Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America, with the average multimillionaire receiving an annual income 16,460 times greater than the average member of the poorest 20 percent of the population (Cañete, 2015: 11).

The Honduran oligarchy is part of a powerful corporate elite that Leslie Sklair (1992) called the transnational capitalist class, whose consolidation fosters the export model and benefits from the considerable precarization, decomposition, and fragmentation of the national market. As the historian Marvin Barahona (2018: 37) explains, neoliberal economic policies facilitated the consolidation of an oligarchic elite with economic and political power tied to U.S. control that has taken on “the role of economic enclave, rooted in the most modern export sector, but whose areas of accumulation do not imply actual incorporation into the economy or diversification that stimulates the nation’s productive apparatus. . . . Thus, we can conclude that this oligarchical matrix is the original source of the country’s fundamental problems.” This elite has rapaciously driven the continuity of neoliberalism in Honduras. In 2009, engulfed in the world economic crisis and threatened by social policies promoted during Manuel Zelaya’s administration, the AHM, along with financial groups, hired Washington lobbying firms to obtain U.S. government support for a coup d’état. Its devastating effects caused a political and social crisis (Frank, 2018). These same business groups, linked to the maquila industry leadership, drove the constitutional approval in 2013 of the so-called zonas de empleo y desarrollo económico (employment and economic development zones), whose platforms were intended to step up the transfer of the national territory to foreign hands to benefit transnational capital (Geglia, 2016). The maquiladora business groups were also the most fervent proponents of the Honduras 20/20 Economic Development Program, which began in 2016 as “the largest economic growth initiative in the history of Honduras” and whose goal was to convert the Honduran economy’s export sectors, particularly the textile sector, into the guarantors of job creation and economic growth. Lastly, in conjunction with the U.S. government, it was these Honduras big business leaders, together with the Trump administration and the International Monetary Fund, who legitimated the electoral fraud that handed Juan Orlando Hernández a second presidential term in November 2017. This presidential term only produced an escalation of state violence against the various popular organizations and movements that erupted in accusations against this dictatorship (Sosa and Pino, 2019). Currently, with the new democratically elected President Xiomara Castro, the possibilities of shifting economic policy are extensive, and although the employment and economic development zones have been declared unconstitutional—which deserves to be celebrated—there is still a long way to go before we can announce that social correlation of forces has changed and transnational corporate power and Honduran oligarchs have lost (at least some) political and economic power in this Central American country.

These events in Honduran political life illustrate that, despite the crisis touching every sphere of social life, the dominant classes have continued to generate the conditions to perpetuate this Central American export maquila enclave. These business groups, along with financial institutions such as the IDB, the IMF, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, celebrate the trade opening and present the export model as an engine for eradicating economic backwardness and the precarity of the labor market. Nevertheless, the intoxicating praise for exports reiterated daily by the chambers of commerce and the business media conceals the fact that these maquiladora exports recreate an enclave economy based on the precarization of the working class and the majority of the Honduran people.

Transformation of the Workforce: Dispossession, Migration, and Urban Precarity

The maquiladora industry would not be as predominant without a neoliberal policy of state neglect of agricultural production and plundering of campesino lands on a national level (Hernández, 2007: 136). The agrarian reform enacted in 1974, representing the largest initiative for promoting the national development of the domestic market, was revoked in 1992 with the adoption of the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector Law (or Norton Law, for its USAID drafter). This new legislation allowed collective lands to be sold to private owners and paved the way for the privatization of the few credit services and the provision of training and marketing advice by the government without charge. Import tariffs on agricultural products were eliminated, with the result that between 1994 and 2010 the proportion of corn imports increased by 24 percent while national production came to a standstill (Suazo, 2010: 100). These measures continue to affect campesinos who benefited from the agrarian reform and promote the concentration of land, to the point that the agribusiness oligarchic entrepreneurs, who generally produce monoculture crops, own two-thirds of the land that had been distributed in the reform (León, 2017: 153). Cultivation of basic grains was discontinued and nontraditional export crops such as African palm were favored (Prunier, 2021; Ríos, 2010).

Abandonment of the countryside and campesino land dispossession are seemingly not linked to the development of the maquiladora, but from a labor perspective they are crucial issues because the workforce in the maquiladora industry has basically become a migrant labor force driven to the cities because of the offensive launched by the Honduran state against the campesino world. Internal migration to the northern border, especially in the Valle de Sula, is primarily because of the maquiladora industry (Amaya, 2007). The epitome of urbanization in the maquiladora model is the growth of the municipality of Choloma.

Choloma is of great significance to the maquiladora industry for its strategic location, which provides quick access to air and sea ports. The first industrial processing zone was created there on January 20, 1990, and it is not surprising that perhaps the country’s four most important industrial parks operate there: ZIP Choloma, Inhdelva, Zoli Honduras Industrial Park, and Zona Libre América. Once an agricultural town tied to agro-export activities, Choloma has become an industrial maquiladora city. In 1988 the population of the municipality was 63,921, and by 2018 it had reached 243,000, growing at an average annual rate of 10 percent as opposed to the national average of 4.9 percent (UNFPA, 2009). According to Noemí, a campesina who had migrated as an adolescent to become a maquiladora worker (interview, Choloma, 2014),

A huge number of people from all over started coming to Choloma, and people from here took us in because, at first, there were no rooming houses, no apartments. Everything here was pastures with ponds. There weren’t many people living in Choloma, and when we started arriving, there was no place to stay. Many people slept in the churches so they could go to work, because there was nowhere to stay. It was a small town and was not set up to hold so many people.

The concentration of people in Choloma has created serious housing problems. Living quarters for workers are makeshift rooming houses (cuarterías) that are overcrowded and unsanitary. Migrants are forced to live there despite the high cost of the accommodations provided. The city has limited basic services to offer its inhabitants. Problems with running water, electricity, communications, sewerage, garbage collection, etc., are the norm (Barahona, 1997). Similar conditions can be found in other northern regions in the country, such as Villanueva; with an annual population growth of 6.8 percent, its population increased from 56,000 in 1990 to 158,000 in 2016. These urban concentrations are the direct result of the abandonment of the countryside through economic policies of land seizures and the dismantling of agricultural activities for the domestic market in favor of agro-export pursuits (Flores, 2010:159).

Despite its importance in the country’s economic structure, the maquiladora cannot be considered a component of social welfare that contains the country’s diaspora. Although industrial cities have grown, the nation’s international migration has also skyrocketed, with the number of Hondurans registered in other countries increasing from 3 percent of the population in 1990 to 8 percent in 2017 (from 156,000 to 778,000) (Expansión, 2017). This exponential increase in emigrants, which has currently become an exodus, shows that the maquiladora export pattern is a far cry from generating a labor market that creates well-being for the Honduran population. On the contrary, the maquiladora has developed and reproduced in the midst of this massive expulsion of inhabitants, indicating that, despite being central to macroeconomic reproduction, it does not come close to resolving the problems of employment and underemployment but rather has taken advantage of them to perpetuate hardship.

Wage Discrimination against Women and a Low-Skilled Workforce

In the early years of the growth of the maquiladora industry, particularly during the 1990s, 80 percent of the export industry workforce were women (Kennedy, 1998). However, the makeup of the working class in this industry has gradually changed, and today the difference is less, with 45 percent men and 55 percent women (CDM, 2017: 31). This indicates that there has been a reconfiguration of the social organization of labor but does not mean that gender equality has developed in the labor market or on the production lines. The change in the composition of the workforce has occurred because the workday has been expanded and flexibilized, with capital seeking male labor because men can work any shift while women, often single mothers, need time outside the factory for housework and child care (IRSTD, 2007). Instead of ensuring labor security and stability, which includes providing day care and the benefits necessary to care for their children, companies relegate women and hire men in order to hold down or, better, reduce labor costs. This confirms that the maquiladora continues to reproduce itself in a context of unequal division of labor between men and women that Beneria (1973: 73) called “gender discrimination and reinforcement of patriarchal forms.” Some business owners have even stated publicly that female labor is more expensive because they pay maternity benefits and must allow time for breastfeeding and sick time for women and their children (IRSTD, 2007). Accordingly, despite the fact that it has been more than 30 years since the maquiladora industry began in Honduras, the centrality of what Melissa Wright (2006) called “the myth of the disposable woman” persists. Activists and labor rights defenders recently provided evidence of this, in their assessment of working conditions for women in the Honduran export industry, asserting that discrimination against women is outstanding when women apply for jobs. Female workers are always judged in terms of whether they are pregnant, have children in their care, or have some type of disability (EMIH, 2018: 66).

The gender discrimination that occurs in the maquiladoras is a reflection of the pervasive violence against women that currently abounds in the country’s social life. María, a maquiladora worker, said, “The maquilas mirror the society. In the maquilas the owners use the same violence that exists outside but in a different way” (interview, Choloma, 2014). Therefore, despite all the brokering between the social relations of production within the maquiladoras and daily life outside them, there is no doubt that in a city like San Pedro Sula, which has the highest femicide rates in the country, the maquiladora mirrors the violence against women that occurs in this industrial city and around the country (Pine, 2009: 64).

Along with gender discrimination, another central element that must be emphasized in order to demystify the hegemonic discourse that considers the maquiladora an engine of development and growth is its model of a low-skilled workforce. Even though the dominant corporate discourse reiterates the significance of its highly skilled workers, proclaiming (as on the AHM website) that “the skilled workforce in Honduras is the magnet that attracts large corporations,” this rhetoric merely conceals the complete lack of interest of business and the state in creating a public policy for the education sector that endeavors to refrain from offering cheap labor as Honduras’s sole competitive advantage in the global market. Instead, a policy is needed that lays the foundation for a national system of scientific and technological research to eliminate the absolute technological dependency under which the Honduran economy operates. The type of production carried out in the maquiladoras in Honduras is strong on the use of the labor force and weak in the generation of value added. Consequently, capital does not need to incorporate skilled labor or promote technical education. As Gladys indicated, workers on the factory floor learn “from hard knocks on the job” (interview, Villanueva, 2014).

In other words, the only thing clothing industry workers need to learn is to get used to the high production levels and the intensive work pace. Research undertaken by the Equipo de Monitoreo Independiente de Honduras (Independent Monitoring Team of Honduras—EMIH) shows that 62 percent of the maquiladora workers surveyed had received no training in machine operation and only 9 percent had received sewing classes (IRSTD, 2007: 247). Many of the workers had finished elementary and high school but had not had technical training that prepared them for this occupation (RSMH and EMIH, 2012). Thus, returning to Adrienne Pine’s (2009: 71) analysis of the disciplining of the workforce in the maquiladoras of Honduras, we can state that “in factory production, a female worker can sew the same piece of a T-shirt hundreds of times a day; however, she is learning a task but not a trade.” The words of Vilma, a Fruit of the Loom worker, confirm this fact: “It was a little hard at the beginning, because when I came in, I had never touched a machine before. So getting started was very awkward. . . . First you thread the machine. You have someone demanding that you do it quickly, and if you don’t learn within a month, you’re out of a job” (interview, Villanueva, 2014). The low level of skills and education predominant in the maquiladora workforce means that the maquiladora model hardly incentivizes a process of industrial growth that might propel educational development in the country. This became evident with the 2019 popular demonstrations against the privatization of public education led by the Platform in Defense of Health and Education, where it was revealed that the Honduran state, far from expanding social expenditures in the education sector to contribute to the formation of a national and sovereign system of research and development, has instead curtailed this investment with the intention of deepening neoliberal adjustment in the country. This indicates that the maquiladora-export model predominant in the country does not need an education policy that fosters public investment in this sector. The dramatic decrease in social expenditures on education only demonstrates the dominance of a maquiladora-export enclave economy that has been built by ignoring the rights of Hondurans (Sosa and Pino, 2019).

Superexploitation and Worker Attrition

According to official data from the Department of Labor and Social Security of Honduras, in 2021 there were 11 categories of minimum wage in the country, with financial services workers at the highest level, with a monthly minimum wage of 13,300 lempiras (US$540), and workers in companies covered under the Free Zones Law (maquiladoras) at the lowest, with 8,843 lempiras (US$370), just slightly above wages in the agriculture sector (8,440 lempiras). Except for the 10 percent who are unionized and receive wages slightly higher than the minimum, maquiladora workers receive this official minimum wage, which does not even cover the basic food basket —much less if basic services were included (EIL and RSM, 2021:14) Previous research carried out by independent organizations shows that the minimum wage in the maquiladoras covers only 32 percent of the expanded basic food basket (RSM, 2013: 21). According to the maquiladora worker Gladys Rojas, speaking on Radio Progreso, “With the wages in the maquilas, we can’t even scrape the basic food basket.”

Although maquiladora workers usually receive more than the minimum wage, this low minimum wage is used by the maquiladoras to control and intensify the work. Normally, workers are hired at the minimum wage and receive extra income from production bonuses and punctuality, which on average make up 25 percent of the total. As a result, workers must meet production goals on a daily basis to minimally increase their consumption. This is how Karen, a worker from Gildan (interview, Progreso, 2014), described it:

If they ask for 40, I deliver 80 bundles. That’s it. I do twice the work in order to have a more or less decent wage—not that it’s decent. Here if they raise your salary a little bit, they increase . . . if it’s 1 lempira added to the wage, 10 goes to the basic food basket or 20 . . . to transportation. . . . So that makes all of us push ourselves more on the job, work more, because if we don’t, we don’t have transportation or food. So that makes us grab onto . . . trying to meet our needs, and that’s why we kill ourselves more.

This leads you to a kind of “self- pressuring,” because you yourself put the pressure on, and also since on the job they are pressuring that they want the goals, because, believe me, if you drop in output, they write it down, to give you what they call “maintenance.”

This wage despotism is one of the major contributing factors to the violation of labor rights in the maquiladoras, since workers cannot meet their production goals in a regular shift. They often come in earlier, stay later than stipulated in their contract, or give up all or part of their break and lunch times to meet the goals. According to Vilma (interview, Villanueva, 2014), “Our workmates, in order to meet the goals they want, because they are too high, sacrifice in the morning and come in at 6:50 a.m. And sometimes they donate 25 minutes to the company, and at lunch time they only take 15 minutes, so they’re donating more than an hour to the company.”

An important mechanism that the maquiladora owners have utilized to increase the intensity of work on the production lines is organizing the work into teams, cells, or modules. The objective is to establish production goals for a group of workers who must work at the same pace in order to meet the same goal (Crossa, 2020). The bonuses or extra pay are given to the group that registered high production, and the monitoring of good performance is done by the workers themselves in pressuring themselves to fulfill the production levels demanded by the company. The workers, instead of meeting individual goals, become subject to a mechanism of great pressure among the members of the team and between teams. This translates into pressure on the workers who must increase and intensify their work at all costs. If they do not succeed, “it will affect the salaries of the others.” Gladys, who works in the Gildan plant at ZIP Progreso, noted (interview, San Pedro Sula, 2014),

In the factory they would motivate us. To the best team they gave away T-shirts, they would buy them cakes, they would take them out to eat, they let them choose the music they will play during the day, they’d buy pizza for the best team, they gave different-colored smocks to those who did more and to those who did less, so we were on display for that in the factory. Subtly, the companies have everything all figured out. They even tell the workers that they are partners in the company. But when someone gets sick, they forget that it was the best team and forget everything.

Group work is a reconfiguration of the social organization of labor that is promoted by the companies to save on labor costs. The number of workers in the groups has been reduced without reducing the production goals. Team work transfers to the workers responsibilities previously assigned to the supervisor and heightens tension among the members of the group. According to a study conducted by the EMIH, “The workers said that the entire team lost income when someone got sick, was pregnant, and/or performed more slowly than the others” (RSM, 2013). This model, centered on a policy that seeks to lengthen and intensify workdays, has generated structural health problems in the working population never seen before. According to a study prepared in 2012 by the Colectiva de Mujeres Hondureñas (Honduran Women’s Collective—CODEMUH), which over many years has documented and systematically addressed the occupational health problems in the maquiladoras, 62 of every 100 maquiladora workers suffer from muscular-skeletal disorders, 46 of every 100 from anxiety and distress, and 44 of every 100 from depression (Pérez and Martínez, 2012: 43). Worker attrition and serious health problems are becoming ever more frequent in the maquiladora worker population (EMIH, 2018: 68). Thousands of workers in the maquiladoras are experiencing health problems that may make it impossible for them to continue working. Sandra, a worker in one of the Fruit of the Loom plants, said (interview, Choloma, 2014),

They detected fibromyalgia and three hernias in my disks, in the LC1, LC3, and LC5, and then my shoulder became very swollen. When that developed, I begged the production manager to let me go. He said, “No, since you don’t have a medical opinion, until you get one, I can’t let you go.” As soon as I left work, I cried at home because I felt the horrible pain of not being able to do anything about it.

Just as health issues are an ever more common topic in the maquiladora industry, so is medical attention. The majority of the maquiladora workers are covered under the Instituto Hondureño de Seguridad Social (Honduran Institute of Social Security—IHSS), and there are agreements between this institution and the business owners to have private clinics in the industrial parks called the “company medical system.” Under this system, the companies pay the doctors and the IHSS supplies the clinics with medicine and medical personnel (RSMH and EMIH, 2012). According to Lourdes (interview, Choloma, 2014),

There is a problem occurring: that the social security board, which decides whether it is an occupational illness or a common illness, is saying that it is a common illness. The sick leave reported by the doctor appears as a common illness. They do not see that the girls were healthy when hired. They admit that repetitive movements cause damage, that being in this production position harms them, but when issuing a medical opinion, they do not say that it is due to occupational illness.

By diagnosing occupational illnesses as common illnesses, the owners evade their responsibility to assume the costs of recovery for workers affected by the working conditions and even to pay the corresponding severance established by law. ²

The problem of occupational illness in the maquiladoras should be understood as part of a national context characterized by a prolonged process of neglecting public investment in this sector and increasing privatization since the 2009 coup d’état. The rapacity of the neoliberal policies set in motion since that event is reflected in the glaring reduction of the government budget for the health sector, which dropped from 14.3 percent of social expenditures to 9.7 percent in 2019 (Sosa and Pino, 2019). While the average per capita outlay on public health in Latin America was US4$392 in 2016, in Honduras it was only US$101, making Honduras the Latin American nation registering the lowest rates of public expenditure on health in the region (Carmenate-Milián, Herrera-Ramos, and Ramos-Cáceres, 2016: 3). This situation explains the basic motives for the popular upheavals led by the Platform for the Defense of Health and Public Education, which mobilized to halt the neoliberal adjustment that the administration of Juan Orlando Hernández sought to impose on this sector and on public education (Sosa and Pino, 2019).

The Maquiladora Workers’ Struggle

If we accept that the maquiladora in Honduras cannot be considered isolated from the rest of the national economy, then the struggle of the workers in this export activity challenges the model of the maquiladora enclave economy as a whole. This means that when a group of maquiladora workers raises its voice to denounce violations of its labor rights as has occurred in the past 30 years of this industry’s existence, it is not only going beyond the many coercive mechanisms that the companies employ against it day after day but resisting a nationwide productive social order based on the superexploitation of labor. As a result, there is a rich history of worker mobilization against poor wages and unemployment within and outside the factories and in solidarity with other unions and other social struggles.

The first large strike that erupted in the maquiladora industry took place in 1993 in the El Paraiso company in Choloma, which produced garments for Walmart and K-Mart. According to a report of the Comisión para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras (Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras—CODEH), some 600 workers occupied the factory facilities decrying the mistreatment, terminations due to pregnancy, lack of overtime pay, and lack of social security (El Tiempo, October 6, 1993). This strike lasted 20 days and was emblematic in that it not only received international coverage, which would become an organizing weapon of paramount importance, but also shed light on an extremely violent and deeply antiunion business policy toward worker organization. The women workers in struggle in the El Paraiso plant were violently repressed, detained by the army, and imprisoned, and the unionized workers were fired, accused of “high treason,” “kidnapping,” and “terrorism” (EMIH, 2017a).

This strike set a precedent that exposed the maquiladora workers’ mobilizing power, marking the beginning of a wave of worker demonstrations that erupted in the 1990s. For example, in 1994 the watershed denunciation of child labor occurred in the case of Lesly Rodríguez, who was 15 years old and worked for Galaxy Industries, which made clothing for the Liz Claiborne brand. Later, in 1995, strikes broke out in the Feniz, Aventón, Orión, Cosmos, and Galaxy plants, all located in Choloma. Ultimately, in 1996 it was brought to light that the clothing brand named in honor of the princess of morning television, Kathie Lee Gifford, was made by 13-year-old girls in the maquiladoras of Honduras. Through this case it was revealed that clothing manufacturing for the international market was done with child labor. All of these cases were the genesis of the workers’ movement in the maquiladoras, sowing the seeds for the social movement of some years later.

A decade later, another great worker flare-up occurred in the Star, S.A., factory in ZIP El Porvenir in Progreso. In 2007 the factory belonged to the U.S. company Anvil and had approximately 2,000 workers producing T-shirts for the Anvil and Nike brands. In November of that year, 60 workers from that plant formed a union in response to the squalid and hostile working conditions. A few days later, the company fired them all, in violation of the labor laws. The next day, Sunday, November 11, those who had been terminated organized a protest at the factory gates joined by 500 more workers that blocked the entrance to the industrial park. Local organizations (Federación Unitaria de Trabajadores de Honduras, Común) joined the protests. The management called the police and the army, who used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators and make arrests. The gates were forced open by the state’s repressive apparatus. Once again the antiunion policies of the maquiladoras were preventing the independent organization of workers. Despite the aggression the workers suffered, this case was groundbreaking because they have since managed to establish the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Star (Star Workers’ Union), an exemplary case for the labor movement in the maquiladoras and around the country (EMIH, 2017b). ³

Another extremely significant case in the Honduran workers’ movement occurred in late 2008 in Jerzees de Honduras (Russell–Fruit of the Loom). In October, the company announced its decision to close the plant, allegedly because of reduced demand in its international markets. However, this was a unionized plant, and from the very start the union declared that the closure was an antiunion maneuver. Accordingly, it decided to launch an international solidarity effort to pressure the company not only in the realm of production but also in the area of distribution and consumption, and it was strongly supported by the Workers’ Rights Consortium and United Students against Sweatshops. A total of 100 universities in the United States and Canada suspended their contracts with Russell. In November 2009 the company committed to opening a new plant in Choloma and reinstating the workers who had been dismissed and to recognizing the Sindicato de Trabajadores Jerzees de Honduras as the exclusive representative of the workers in the new plant (Goldín, 2014).

The Star and Jerzees union victories became landmarks because the workers managed to resist the strong antiunion policy pursued by the Honduran state in the maquiladoras and nationally. In fact, Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America for union leaders (RSVA, 2019), and these two organizing experiences not only challenged the institutional violence but became important examples for workers in other plants. Since 2007, the groundbreaking Red de Sindicatos de la Maquila Hondureña (Network of Honduran Maquila Trade Unions—RSMH) has organized three union federations and 24 unions in various plants. An organization exists that challenges the widespread labor precarity and the antiunion policy of the Honduran state. These maquiladora worker organizations, along with the various labor rights and monitoring collectives that support them, such as the Centro de Derechos de Mujeres (Women’s Rights Center), the EMIH, the CODEMUH, and the Centro de Solidaridad (Solidarity Center) and the international organizations, are examples of unprecedented popular organizational advances in this industrial activity.

But the maquiladora workers’ organization is not limited to this sector. The organizing experience of the workers in this sector has given them tools to support and accompany other struggles in other union and political actions against exploitation and dispossession. A recent and important example is the support that organized maquiladora workers have provided to the struggle of the workers in the melon industry. These workers were able to form, make official, and earn respect for the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Agroindustria y Similares (Union of Agroindustrial and Related Service Workers) in this export activity, controlled by the Irish transnational company Fyffes, where conditions of superexploitation of labor prevailed.

The solidarity of organized maquiladora workers with those of the banana plantations has also been important, particularly during the nearly two-month occupation of the banana plantations of the Chiquita Brands in early 2018 to denounce violations of the collective-bargaining contract regarding the elimination of the health care services provided by the Hospital de Lima in the north of the country. In addition, bonds of support and solidarity have been established between the maquiladora organizations and domestic workers in claims of workplace violence against the women such as the demand for justice with regard to the femicide of the domestic worker Maribel Flores and the call for ratification of ILO Convention 189 regarding respect for human rights in domestic work.

The maquiladora organizations have also been important in the popular mobilizations carried out against the 2009 coup d’état, as well as several national demonstrations that took place against the neoliberal adjustment policy and against the violence and land grabs experienced by the Lenca and Garífuna indigenous peoples.

In other words, organizing by the maquiladora worker population is part of the cyclical mobilization that has shaken this country’s political life at every point. The extensive solidarity of the maquiladora workers with other popular sectors speaks of an organizational maturity that has developed and been fortified through the years and is today an essential labor and popular force in the national arena.

Conclusion

The maquiladora industry in Honduras has existed for over 30 years, and corporate’s need to expand labor exploitation and reproduce a precarious workforce persists. In this essay I have attempted to demonstrate that the maquiladoras in this Central American country have shown no inclination to establish themselves as an engine of development and national welfare. I have shown that the emergence of this productive activity was forged in the context of a brutal neoliberal transformation that subsumed the Honduran economy to the global market to the detriment of its domestic market and the majority of its working population. Notably, the Honduran oligarchy played a leading role in this transformation. Rather than representing a driver of well-being for the working population, the maquiladora industry has benefited from a context of social disaster marked by national and international migration that functioned as a mechanism for corporations to shrink wages in the labor market. The maquiladora reproduces itself in Honduras to perpetuate conditions of superexploitation in the world of labor through wage policies intended to squeeze the lives of workers to the very limit. As a result, the working population in this sector currently lives in a state of emergency marked by widespread and chronic occupational health problems. In this exceedingly adverse setting for labor organizing, emerging social demands have become a store of social experiences, and of a coordinated social force both within the sector and in solidarity with other sectors and political processes on a national scale. Any alternative for organization and national mobilization will have at its core the great history of struggle undertaken by the workers of the maquiladoras.