April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.

Teen moved by visit to Mexico's poor


By KATE BLAIN- | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment

Emily Wistar can't stop telling her friends about the working conditions in Mexican factories. "They hear about it all the time," she admits.

Since she returned from a week-long trip to visit Maquiladora sweatshops in Mexico, sponsored by the International Project of the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, Miss Wistar has been trying to educate friends and family about the injustices that sweatshop workers face.

"They all see it as a good cause, but they're not necessarily aware of what's going on" in factories that make products often exported to America, said Miss Wistar, a 16-year-old Catholic who is a junior at Bethlehem Central High School.

South of the border

Active in her local chapter of Free the Children (an international organization promoting children's rights), Miss Wistar took the trip with 21 other delegates, nine of whom are youths. The group visited three villages in the Rio Bravo region, and delivered health and school supplies.

Each day, the delegates would meet with maquiladora workers and visit their homes. Miss Wistar said she was "blown away" by the level of poverty at which the workers lived.

"The people live in little, tiny shacks built out of whatever scrap materials they could find. It was just awful," she said. "We went to one community that was built on a garbage dump. The people would pick through the garbage to find something they could sell."

Working conditions

She was equally shocked to learn the severity of working conditions in the sweatshops: Workers earn minimum wage, which includes mandatory overtime; they work under physically dangerous conditions; they are penalized for taking time off. If a worker protested, she said, he could easily be fired, because there would always be an unemployed person clamoring to take his place.

She added that the group saw factories run by General Electric, Fruit of the Loom and a subsidiary of Nike.

"We have to realize it is our business that is allowing these standards down there," she declared. "It's our responsibility."

Union struggle

The group happened to be in Mexico during an election struggle in a factory that made paper products. Workers had to choose between a union that Miss Wistar described as a "puppet of the big business" or an independent union.

But when the workers arrived at the factory to vote, the student said, they had to walk through a line of thugs threatening their jobs and lives if they voted for the independent union.

She noted that thugs also threatened Martha Ojeda, a Mexican woman who was trying to organize the workers to form the independent union. In the end, the "puppet" union won 497 to 3.

New outlook

Seeing the living and working conditions "altered my perceptions of how I live versus how people in the rest of the world live," Miss Wistar noted.

After the trip, "absolutely nothing can be taken for granted. I find myself buying something and saying, `That's half the weekly salary of a worker in Mexico.'"

Still, she said, "It was more inspiring to do something than just feeling guilty, because the people didn't seem all that fazed. Despite everything, they were happy."

New friend

Miss Wistar told The Evangelist she even made a friend while in Mexico: a 13-year-old girl named Arely who had worked in the maquiladoras and whose mother was on strike from the factories.

"Her family makes $35 a week," the student observed. "When we came back, we decided we're going to try to raise enough money to send her to college. She wants to go to law school. She'll be a great labor leader."

Students in Miss Wistar's Guilderland chapter of Free the Children and in the larger Capital District chapter are planning a Brooks Barbeque, a "Battle of the Bands" and dances to raise the $16,000 for Arely's four-year college education.

"We've got a couple of years," Miss Wistar said confidently. "I think we can do it."

(Contact Sister Alethea Connolly, CSJ, adult mentor for the area Free the Children movement, at 783-3674, or email [email protected].)

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