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Science as Culture
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Fordism in Mexico: Globalization vs ethnoscience


Don Parson
a a

645 Pueblo Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA, 91362, USA E-mail: Published online: 23 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Don Parson (1998) Fordism in Mexico: Globalization vs ethnoscience, Science as Culture, 7:3, 413-417, DOI: 10.1080/09505439809526515 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505439809526515

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Science as Culture, Volume 7, Number 3, 1998

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FORDISM IN MEXICO: Globalization vs Ethnoscience


DON PARSON*
The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on
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the U.S.-Mexico Border by Devon G. Pea, CMAS Books: Austin, Texas, 1997, 460 pp. Assembling a wide variety of commoditieselectronics, clothing, toys, wood products, etc.mainly for US consumers, the maquiladoras on the US-Mexico border are factories that are officially seen as integral to Mexico's modernization. Organized on the Fordist principles of the assembly line, the fixed wage, and the social malleability of workers, the maquiladoras are conveyors of a repetitive, tedious, and non-thinking work which was summarized by a chapter title from Henry Ford's autobiography: 'the terror of the machine'. If Ford had gone to Mexico, Pena points out, he probably would have built a maquiladora. But the organization of industrial production promoted by Henry Ford reaches far beyond the assembly line, 'rapidly transforming the ecological, economic, and political landscapes of Mexico's northern border' (p. 6). Pefla's book is not just a travelogue of Henry's economic legacy south of the border. Neither does it chronicle the imposition of the Fordist factory from the managerial perspective of offering salvation to the natives through wages, hard work, and a respect for authority. He examines, instead, the effects of the maquiladoras from the perspective of assembly-line workers. Far from being mindless automatons or mere labor-power, the working class continually asserts its own autonomy and, in so doing, questions and agitates around issues of politics, of daily life, and of the environmentin other words, the whole process of modernization. The equation of dominance and knowledge has long been the formula to regulate labor-power: from Blake's satanic mills through Marx's analysis of the length of the working day; through Taylor's time-and-motion studies; through Ford's mechanical despotism of
* Address correspondence to: Don Parson, 645 Pueblo Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA 91362, USA, E-mail Drparson@aol.com 0950-5431/98/030413-05 1998 Process Press

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the assembly line; to recognizing and dealing with informal work groups. Despite the exaggerated reports of the death of Fordism, e.g. C post-Fordism', the assembly line is alive and well in the Third Worldparticularly so in the maquiladoras. In fact, we are seeing an internationalization of the assembly line, as part of global capital accumulation. And as capital goes global, so does the persistent managerial problem of worker control. The technological control of workers is embedded in the layout of the maquila. The pace of the assembly line regulates the pace of work and tasks along the line are specialized and monotonous. Managerial and technological control strategies are combined to include: divisions in the internal labor market based on skill, gender, wages, ethnicity, etc., i.e. the classic 'divide and conquer' strategy; the imposition of hourly standards and quotas to regulate the rate of exploitation; management of the distribution of workers on the line; the organization of supervision, and control methods to counter worker resistance; and the pursuit of informal social regulation human relationsboth inside and outside the factory. Such managerial strategies are never completely successful in terms of worker control, argues Pefla, because they cannot comprehend the workers' subaltern factory organization, 'underestimating the knowledge, vitality, and creative potential of workers ...' (p. 100). Subaltern organization on the shop floor is manifest in tortuguismo (the slow-down), sabotage, and wildcat strikes. Autonomous from the established trade union bureaucracy, such informal associations often rely on networksof friendship, socialization, and community lifethat are sustained outside of the maquiladora. In so doing, interpersonal relationships often evolve into political alliances, and struggles can be circulated beyond the workplace. COMO (Centra de Orientacion de la Mujer Obrera) is an example. Founded as an organization promoting mutual self-assistance for female Maquila workers in 1968, COMO has evolved to address 'the double mirror of exploitation for women'at both home and the paid workplace by challenging established ideologies, attitudes, and relations of power. Utilizing a Freirean methodology of self-education, COMO promotes a workplace democracy and sustainable development along the border through worker owned and managed cooperatives. Through this autonomous self-development, says Peiia, COMO is outlining the blueprints of the future society.

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A marginal and deskilled workforce, cogs in the machine, unthinking labor powerthese are the images (or perhaps the capitalist ideal) of workers on the Fordist assembly line. Taylorism tells us that this is the way of the world: workers work and managers think. Yet for workers it is a political division, not a neutral standard of scientific criteria. Maquila workers can either deploy or withdraw their own intimate production line expertise (often to the consternation of management) depending on their own self-interest. This shared knowledge is the foundation of an ethnoscience (discussed below). There are parallels with the 'marginality' of unskilled Maquila workers and that of the pepenadores (dump workers), the displaced peasantry who scavaged the Garbage dump at Ciudad Juarez, for long hours and little pay. With the assistance of COMO, the pepenadores organized themselves in 1975 as Sociedad Cooperativa de Seleccionadores de Materiales (SOCOSEMA), a cooperative society of garbage sorters and recyclers. SOCOSEMA was concerned not just with work, but also with housing, health care, education, fooda sustainable community development. The pepenadores struggle to define their own autonomous space, carving out free time and rejecting modernization defined by Fordism. Their marginality is not an objective social problem but constitutes a subjective political definition. By refusing to be the passive victims of capitalist marginality, the pepenadores have 'redefined their place in the political economy of the Mexican border...' (p. 214). Since his field research in the 1980s, Pena indicates directions in which the maquilas have been evolving to counter workers' struggles (like those described above). These include a technological restructuring of the flow line, a restructuring of worker demography, and the introduction of Japanese-style management. Like the maquilas, workers' struggles are also evolving. Tortuguismo and subaltern factory organization appear to be alive and wellchanging in form in response to capital's restructuring in the politically charged process of plan and counter-plan. The much-touted corporate paternalism of Japanese-style management is merely a variation of Fordism which often has less success than its US counterpart. There are, in fact, slightly more work stoppages at Japanese-owned maquilas than at US-owned plants (p. 272)!

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With NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), the proliferation of maquiladoras are being greatly accelerated, as is the environmental damage that is a consequence of global capitalism. This is manifest in the degradation of the region's aquifers and watersheds; the impact of infrastructure (housing, roads, factories, etc.) on the region's fragile eco-system; the threat of cybernetic technology (as with the lethal release of poisonous gas in Bhopal, India). An environmental justice movement, appearing on both sides of the border, has opposed NAFTA's maquiladorization. In place of NAFTA, argues Pena, the environmental justice movement seeks a sustainable, diversified, and participatory development, driven not by the singular behemoth of western science, but informed by shared learned experiencesa myriad of ethnosciences. Pena's conception of 'ethnoscience' is a means to go beyond a mere inventory of the evils of capitalist development that exist on the border and throughout the world. The pepenadores, as an example, have developed tools and a technology based on empirical observations undertaken through years of shared experiencepart of what one of Pena's informants calls 'making our own science'. The foundations of this ethnoscience are infused with social ethics: objectivity is not forced on humanity. 'We don't have to stop being good to each other because of it' (p. 232). Instead of serving to dominate, colonize, and homogenize diverse cultures and ecologies. Western science might be made less monolithic, more diverse, and much more receptive to the structure, form, and sources of knowledge. (Pena uses as an example the attempt to preserve ethnoscientific medicinal knowledge by some sectors of the scientific community.) This book should be of interest not only to those concerned with events on the US-Mexico border, but to those seeking a theoretical perspective on capitalist globalization as a whole. Indeed, I am very impressed with the scope and content of this work. Beginning with relations at the point of production, Pena logically extends his arguments from the factory, to the communities and the environment of the borderlands, to an indictment of global capitalism and its theoretical underpinnings. The maquiladoras are thus 'part and parcel of a globe-trotting, land-devouring machine run amok' (p. 295). Most importantly, the author expounds a working-class

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perspective of capitalism where one can actually see new societies emerging from the shell of the old.

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