- With Terrazas’s help, though, the workers seem aware that this kind of generational poverty does not have to continue. One of the earliest deciding battles of the Mexican Revolution began in Ciudad Juarez, Terrazas said. This could be the beginning of another radical campaign of change.
If globalization has made it possible for factories to locate across borders, after all, it has also made it possible for workers to unite across borders. The workers in Mexico join those in the U.S. in contesting the status quo, in which those at the bottom have so much less than those at the top.
“The main cause of all the revolutions in the world, historically, is when the people are hungry,” Terrazas said. “And the people are hungry now.”
Very interesting. Very similar to the situation in China actually - you have a burgeoning labor movement that is more-or-less on the top of the list of the CCP's concerns because it is innately destabilizing to their state while at the same time rather difficult to permanently crush.
It's crazy that I learned about this issue during my class over the winter. It's insane how these factories actually work. I'm gonna try to find the video we watched on this topic, but in it you see a lot of the damage these factories do both economically and environmentally. They target women to work in the factories, they fire anyone that unionizes, and the federal government provides little to no protection because of corruption. Stuff like this also makes you realize how much you feed into these systems (while I type this up on my samsung galaxy phone). Mass consumption of these goods just reinforces this,but many ofthese products have ingrained themselves in society and culture.