By David Bacon
TIJUANA — Garrett Brown calls the working conditions at the Han Young plant "a catastrophe waiting to happen". In his day job, Brown is a health and safety inspector for the California Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
For the last four years of his private life, this soft-spoken industrial hygienist has travelled the border from Tijuana to Brownsville, teaching maquiladora workers how to recognise health and safety dangers and building an alliance of activists, the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network.
As industrial turmoil at Han Young boiled over last fall, Brown and his colleagues began surveying conditions in the plant, through interviews with dozens of its workers. That survey became the basis of the first health-and-safety complaint under NAFTA's labour side agreement.
When two dozen Han Young workers testified in San Diego in February in support of the complaint, they described a scene of horrifying and grotesque working conditions.
- Overhead cranes carry truck chassis weighing a ton or more through the plant. Their controls repeatedly malfunction.
- Pools of water 2.5-5 cm deep covered the floor in some departments during torrential rains. Heavy cables carrying 480 volts, some with frayed insulation, snake through the water.
- There is no ventilation in the plant, and some workers suffer from "metal fume fever", a condition caused by breathing welding fumes.
- An inspection report described the bathrooms as in "bad condition and very dirty".
Inspectors from the Mexican government's Secretariat for Labour and Social Benefits (STPS) repeatedly compiled long lists of illegal conditions. Last July, for instance, an inspection detailed 44 violations. Han Young was given 20 days to remedy half of them. STPS waited until September to send inspectors back in. They found that most of the conditions hadn't been fixed at all. The company got more time.
After that inspection, the three workers elected to the factory's health and safety committee were fired. But no-one came back from STPS until workers struck again in January.
Once again, inspectors found that the company had failed to remedy the most serious conditions. They included no ventilation, leaking roofs, poor maintenance on the cranes, a malfunctioning crane and no written health and safety program.
No fine was ever assessed against Han Young until the day after the San Diego hearing, when the secretary of the STPS fined the company US$9000.
Brown believes that efforts by the Mexican government to encourage foreign investment, and maintain an economic austerity policy to please the International Monetary Fund, "undermine its political will to enforce regulations against transnational corporations, which generate the hard currency needed to pay off foreign bankers".
"There are 3800 maquiladoras in Mexico, employing a million workers", Brown says. "Han Young is far from an exception."