DB: You mentioned the GM plant moving to Mexico. There’s also Smith Corona in Cortland, New York, the last U.S.-based typewriter company. That, too, is moving to Mexico. There’s a whole maquiladora corridor along the border, with incredible levels of lead in the water, high levels of pollution and toxic waste, and workers working for five dollars a day.
Actually, the case that I mentioned was GM moving to Eastern Europe, which is in a way more interesting. It tells you what the Cold War was all about. But you’re right about Mexico. One of the major issues before the country right now, right through the whole electoral period, is NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It’s quite interesting to see how that’s been handled. You learn a lot about the country and the future from looking closely at that. There is no doubt that NAFTA is going to have a very large scale effect on the life of Americans, and Mexicans, too. You can debate what the effect will be, but nobody doubts that it will be significant. Quite likely the effect will be to accelerate just what you’ve been describing, the flow of productive labor to Mexico, which is a totalitarian dictatorship, very brutal and repressive. Therefore you can guarantee low wages. During what’s been called the “Mexican economic miracle” of the last decade, wages have dropped sixty percent. Union organizers get killed. If the Ford Motor Company wants to toss out its work force and hire slave labor, they just do it. Nobody stops them. Pollution goes on unregulated. It’s a great place for investors. One might think that NAFTA, which includes sending productive labor down to Mexico, might improve their real wages, maybe level the two countries. But that’s most unlikely. One reason is the repression, which prevents organization that could lead to raising wages. Another consequence of NAFTA will be flooding Mexico with capital-intensive agricultural products from the United States, all based ultimately on big public subsidies, which will undercut Mexican agriculture. So they will be flooded with American crops, which will drive millions of people off the land to urban areas or into the maquiladora areas. This means another major factor driving down wages. It’s not at all clear that NAFTA will lead to raising wages. It will almost certainly be a big bonanza for investors in the United States and for the wealthy sectors in Mexico which are their counterparts, the ones applauding the agreement, and the professional classes who work for them. It will very likely be quite harmful for American workers. The overall effect on jobs is uncertain, but it’s very likely that wages and work conditions will suffer. Hispanic and black workers are the ones who are going to be hurt most.
branch: ethics.
approach: universalism.
La transparencia del mal
Jean Baudrillard
No cabe duda que la nuestra, es una sociedad individualista. Hemos llegado a un punto en que nos hemos habituado al mundo tal cual y como se nos ha presentado; nuestras acciones del día a día son realizadas en automático y no creemos –o ni siquiera pensamos– que éstas puedan tener aunque sea un mínimo impacto en la vida de otros. Sobresale una cultura de la apariencia, un ritmo de vida acelerado, con excesos pero a la vez ‘light’, superficial, indiferente, de doble moral, con sobreabundancia en muchos aspectos, en especial, en el consumo. Nuestra época es, en palabras de Lipovetsky, la ‘era del vacío’. La relevancia de reflexionar sobre el tema es que, como mercadóloga, soy consciente de que todas esas características de nuestro tiempo se relacionan directamente con las elecciones habituales que tomamos en torno a nuestros patrones de consumo. Son aquéllas acciones las que dan forma a nuestra existencia, de tal manera que, en conjunto, dan forma también al estado de nuestra sociedad. No es de sorprenderse entonces que en el mundo prevalezca una cultura de hiperconsumo, donde la contaminación ambiental, la obesidad y una contrastante desnutrición, la pobreza, la crisis económica, entre otros, sean noticia de todos los días.
