Ammm

Labor Discrimination to the women

Our Mexican government fails to protect women from pregnancy testing and other discriminatory treatment in export-processing factories along the UnitedStates.-Mexico border. In No Guarantees. Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector, released today, the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project finds that major United States.-based and othercorporations routinely subject prospective female employees to mandatory urine testing, invasive questions about their contraceptive use, menses schedule or sexual habits in order to screen out pregnantwomen and deny them jobs. Human Rights Watch also finds that some maquiladoras mistreat or force to resign women who became pregnant shortly after being hired.

Mexico's maquiladora sector is dominatedby United States corporations, which own at least 90 percent of the factories. Maquiladoras are a source of billions of dollars a year in export earnings for Mexico and employ over 500,000 workers,at least 50 percent of whom are women. Maquiladoras owned by major corporations, including General Motors, General Electric, Zenith, Panasonic, W.R. Grace, Sunbeam-Oster, Carlisle Plastics, Sanyo, andAT&T, were all found to require pregnancy exams as a condition of employment, thereby subjecting women applicants to a different hiring criteria than men. In response to a letter from Human RightsWatch, the Zenith Corporation noted, "[I]t is common practice among Mexican and maquiladora employers in Matamoros and Reynosa to inquire about pregnancy status as a pre-existing medical condition," andadmitted to screening out pregnant women from its applicant pools in order to avoid the costs of company-funded maternity benefits.

Based on interviews with women from more than forty maquiladorasin the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, and Tamaulipas, the report concludes that the majority of the companies investigated in the report conduct pregnancy testing using their own medical...