Feature

Consuelo Moreno wasn't feeling well.

The 29-year-old mother of three had found work months earlier at a manufacturing plant in Rio Bravo, Mexico. Situated just south of the brackish Rio Grande, Rio Bravo is a humid border town where the summer temperature regularly creeps well past 100 degrees. The town square is green with palm trees and thick with little shops full of silver jewelry and panchos, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants that peddle tacos, fajitas, and tamales. By U.S. standards the 95,000 residents have little. Most of the jobs are in manufacturing plants, and the luckier workers live with large families crowded into two-room cinderblock or dilapidated wood houses with cement floors, running water, and electricity. The poorer ones are bused to the factories from the colonias, or shantytowns, clustered to the south of the city, where they live in makeshift shacks with dirt floors, holes in the walls, and leaky roofs. A mattress in a corner often doubles as a couch, and most families don't even have an outhouse. There, people cook meager meals over outdoor fires, and packs of mangy dogs roam the dirt roads.

Moreno toiled 10 hours or more each night shift for 320 pesos, roughly $30, a week. Each day, she glued handles onto at least 3,500 festive gift bags, many destined for retail stores in the United States that sell products by Hallmark Cards Inc. For each bag she produced, she received only a fraction of a penny, but American consumers gladly shell out $1.50 or more for one of the apple red, green plaid, or blue striped bags to save the hassle of wrapping their presents.

But Moreno didn't think much about the huge profit margin enjoyed by the plant's owner, Duro Bag Manufacturing Company, a Kentucky-based Hallmark supplier. (Duro's seven manufacturing plants make paper and plastic bags -- from grocery sacks to designer gift bags; the Rio Bravo plant is its only Mexican facility.) She didn't spend much time anguishing over the duty-free customs regime set up by the Mexican government in the 1960s that allowed foreign corporations to build maquiladoras-- manufacturing plants where they could take advantage of cheap Mexican labor -- along the border.

What bothered Moreno were the piercing headaches she would get each day, the dizziness, and the cough. She attributed the symptoms to fumes from the strong adhesive used to attach the bag handles, the ever-present nimbus of fine dust that hung in the air from the machines that cut the paper, and the lack of fans. Fed up, Moreno visited Alejandro De la Rosa, the human resources manager at the plant. De la Rosa, along with plant manager Conrado Hinojosa, an American, had a reputation for bullying workers and sexually harassing the women, so it took guts to step into his office and ask for help.

"He told me, 'There aren't any masks. There aren't any!'" Moreno says. "But that man never tried to get us any masks."

Workers also complained about sanitary conditions. "The bathrooms were aw-ful," Moreno remembers. "They were filthy, they stunk, and no one ever cleaned them."

That was when workers were permitted to use them at all. Sometimes when workers requested bathroom breaks, managers screamed at them and told them no. Mosquitoes swarmed inside the plant, and workers sometimes found rats and rat feces -- even snakes and scorpions -- when they picked up rolls of paper. The food that was served in the cafeteria -- rice with eggs and beans at almost every meal -- was sometimes crawling with worms, flies, and cockroaches.

Moreno's outrage grew as she watched co-workers who had it even worse than she did. The heavy machinery that cut and perforated the bags had no safety guards, so workers sometimes sliced their fingers on the equipment. Other workers -- some of them 13- or 14-year-old girls, some of them pregnant -- used strong solvents and alcohol to remove the glue drippings from the finished bags, and every now and then one of them would faint. A few pregnant women had miscarriages and began to hemorrhage at work, and there was no doctor on the premises.

Moreno went to the infirmary for her aches and pains. The company nurse gave her a little pill and shoved a paper cone of water into Moreno's hand. But something wasn't right.

"That pill -- they gave it to anyone -- for whatever was bothering you. If you say your arms hurt, your back hurts, whatever. And it makes you feel crazed, really agitated. You don't get tired, you don't get sleepy. Just crazy." Moreno didn't want to be drugged, so she stopped going to the infirmary.

Silvia Martinez, a 37-year-old worker who for four years made the twisted paper handles for the bags, avoided the place altogether, no matter how sick she was.

"I saw what was happening. Workers didn't get sent home. They just were drugged so they would keep working," Martinez says.

Moreno, Martinez, and a handful of other workers wanted to speak up for their rights, but the National Union of Workers in Paper, Cardboard, Wood, and Related Products (a branch of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, or CTM), which was supposed to represent them, was so entangled with the government and the companies' interests that the workers saw no results from the group.