TIJUANA, MEXICO-Margarita Avalos wasn’t even aware she had a union – until she and her fellow factory workers asked for the pay they were owed.

Suddenly, she says, a union appeared. And they proposed a solution: lock the troublemaking employees in a room without food or water until they agreed to take three months’ unpaid leave.

Last year, men and women like Avalos churned out billions of dollars worth of goods shipped to Canada, with almost 80 per cent destined for Ontario – a trade relationship that has ballooned by more than 700 per cent since the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in 1994.

That agreement pledges to “enhance and enforce basic workers’ rights.” And on paper, Mexican workers are beneficiaries of some of the continent’s strongest labour laws. In the gritty border city of Tijuana, most belong to a union.

They just don’t know it.

These are Mexico’s “ghost” unions, organizations that live in the shadows of Mexican industry. Their purpose, critics say, is not to fight for fair pay or enforce labour standards, but ensure they are ignored.

Like many, Avalos moved to Tijuana at 18 from central Mexico. The factories along the jagged, corrugated wall separating the city from its northern neighbour offered the promise of a better life for those with little education and few options.

Avalos says she often worked back-to-back eight-hour shifts to meet production quotas at a foreign-owned clothing factory. The wages, she says, barely made ends meet. The chemicals from the dyes, she says, made her skin peel and her nails turn black.

To stay awake and dull the pain of grinding manual labour, she says she and her colleagues mixed coffee grounds and aspirin into bottles of Coke.

“That was when I asked myself whether the factory was the beautiful place I thought it was,” she said.

As Mexico’s population has surged, so too has the country’s poverty. There are an estimated 14.3 million more Mexicans living in poverty than when NAFTA was first signed. It is now the most unequal country in the OECD, a grouping of 34 relatively high-income democracies.

As Ontario’s manufacturing sector struggles, Mexico’s is booming. It has become one of the cheapest places on the planet to make things – even cheaper than China, according to a 2013 Bank of America study. The country’s so-called maquiladora program, which thrives along the U.S.-Mexico border, lures foreign companies with the promise of duty-free manufacturing.

In many of those factories – producing everything from Barbies to big-screen TVs – the organizations meant to protect workers are little more than phantoms.

“The only time (the unions) appear is when the workers want to organize themselves,” said Avalos, 34, who now leads the Tijuana-based independent workers’ rights group Ollin Calli – a role she says has led to multiple threats, including being physically attacked by an unknown assailant.

Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson, a former lawyer for the American Indian Movement who now works with Ollin Calli, says the first thing foreign companies do when relocating to Mexico is find a union and “hire a lawyer to be the president.”

Since unions are very difficult to displace under Mexican labour law, DeWeese-Parkinson says signing up a “ghost” union essentially serves as a protection contract for factories – ensuring that workers will never be able to independently organize.

Last month, Hassan Yussuff, head of the Canadian Labour Congress, penned a letter to the world’s largest trade union confederation, the International Trade Union Confederation, expressing “deep concerns” about the practice and its devastating impact on ordinary workers in Mexico.

“(Foreign companies) are there because there’s a competitive advantage,” he added in an interview with the Star. “This is unfair for Canadian workers who saw the loss of jobs – only to realize that this advantage comes because the Mexican government is in collusion with employers and unions to ensure the practice of protective contracts.”

From a sparse, dimly lit Tijuana office, the head of the Mexican Workers Federation of Industrial Unions, José de Jesus Pantoja, told the Star his organization is “invited” to represent factory workers by foreign companies’ corporate executives.

“Mexican workers don’t have the capacity to elect good leaders,” he said.

“If we left (union organizing) open, it would attract people who aren’t recommended, and who aren’t trustworthy. It’s a risk for the factory,” he added.

Businessman Gabriel Merino describes this as a “very good relationship.”

“I have never yet as a manager of a factory had any strike in my plant,” he said. “We like the unions.”

Tijuana’s industrial district is perched on top of a scrubby hill, overlooking the city’s working-class neighbourhoods. While some factories are immaculately neat, boasting manicured gardens, others are austere and drab. On lunch break, workers often slip out to the edge of the slope, where a vast concrete soccer pitch encases 21,000 tonnes of contaminated waste left behind by a now-defunct battery recycling facility.

This city alone is home to about 600 maquiladoras, or foreign-owned plants that are exempt from paying duties or tariffs on machinery, equipment and materials. If you have a TV, there is a good chance it was Tijuana-made, since companies like Samsung and Panasonic run major operations here.

Tijuana boasts of a “5:1” ratio: five Mexican workers for the price of every American one. Its business community says wages are fair and come with benefits, and that “friendly” labour relations are an attractive feature of setting up here.

“Low wages is compared to the U.S. only,” said Luis M. Hernandez, president of Index Tijuana, which represents the maquiladora sector. “Because if you compare China and Mexico, pretty much that is the standard.”

It is extremely difficult to independently verify working conditions inside Tijuana’s maquiladoras, which are protected by private security companies and often sit behind high fences fringed with barbed wire.

After several attempts, the Star gained access to one maquiladora on the pretence of looking for a job, slipping in through an unmarked door that did not name the company. The warehouse, where workers were slicing plywood, was hot and airless even on a cool, wet day. Workers wore cheap earphones to protect against the grating rasp of electric saws. The wages on offer were between 1,000 to 1,200 pesos for a 48-hour week – less than $2 an hour.

In a country with a daily minimum wage of 73 pesos, or about $5, that rate is still far more lucrative than many alternatives. But even with a weekly salary of 1,250 pesos, Alejandra Bartolomé, 26, cannot afford more than the home she and her family illegally cobbled together on the side of a four-lane Tijuana highway – part of an informal settlement where old garage doors and factory refuse substitute for bricks and mortar.

Bartolomé, who puts together sprinklers for export, says her wages are mostly eaten up by food and transport.

“I’ve worked in maquilas that are unbearably hot, or get freezing cold. They really pressure you. This one is a lot better because, compared to the other ones, they don’t treat you in an ugly way and scream at you.”

Pantoja says 95 per cent of Tijuana’s maquiladoras are unionized and that his organization supports workers while maintaining a “good image” with government and foreign companies. The Star interviewed five workers currently employed by maquiladoras. None of them, including Bartolomé, had ever heard of a union. One said she made as little as $1.25 an hour.

Without genuine union protection, critics say, workers are almost completely disenfranchised. In total, there have been 17 complaints of large-scale Mexican labour violations made under NAFTA; three are currently under review, but the body set up under the agreement to oversee labour standards has not issued a ruling for over 10 years.

“There has yet to be a single sanction imposed on Mexico,” Yussuff said. “The new (Trudeau) government certainly has the ability to start raising some effort on Mexico to say, ‘This is beyond the pale now.'”

In the meantime, the lack of basic workers’ rights in maquiladoras is Mexico’s yawning inequality, according to Marlene Solis, a professor at Tijuana’s Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

“I think there is a lot of violence – economic violence. When you have to fight day to day to feed your family, there is very little space to learn how to fight for your rights,” she said.

“It’s a problem of exercising your human rights. Workers don’t have that. The promise of progress is not working here in Mexico.”

“The factories say if they go, we’ll have nothing to eat, so we should be grateful,” Avalos added. “I’m not against factories. I’m in favour of dignified conditions.”

This story was made possible through a fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation

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