With so much research already directed toward “the global assembly line,” what could another book on Mexico’s maquilas say that would yield new insights into this global form of production that has transformed many female workers in Asia and Latin America into the relatively new, highly exploited labor force of today’s multinationals? Leslie Salzinger’s book focuses almost exclusively on managerial control and shop-floor practices, “making workers” (as the subtitle states). She criticizes previous analyses for stopping at the shop-floor gate and essentializing women into the icon of the docile and dexterous workers made popular through Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Women in the Global Factory (Institute for New Communications, 1983).

In her careful ethnographic analysis of four plants located in or near Ciudad Juárez, Salzinger makes a compelling case for the importance of managerial control and shop-floor practices. Control ranges from patriarchal, repressive shop-floor strategies that “feminize” and antagonize a largely male labor force to creative techniques for “masculinizing” a mixed labor force, in which experience and skill are valued and paying a family wage is accepted as the norm. Workers respond very differently, some with resistance (often taken out by male workers on their female counterparts), others with the docility expected of this unseasoned and highly vulnerable labor force. I have difficulty with Salzinger’s insistence that workers’ different responses are entirely the product of managerial initiatives. My own research on export processing in the Caribbean (The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean, Westview Press, 1995) points to other factors, particularly the different demographics of each plant. Two of the Juárez plants employ both men and women, whereas the other two are predominantly female. Most workers are predominantly young, but almost no data exist on these workers’ families, whether they are single, married, or heads of household, their ages and educational levels, and other factors that I have found to be important in shaping workers’ attitudes.

The book’s principal value lies in its analysis of the shift toward male workers in maquila production, not only its effects on female workers, but also on managers and on the community at large. Male employment has risen to 45 percent of the Mexican maquila labor force. Salzinger explains this shift primarily in terms of the tight labor market brought on by the boom in maquila production after several dramatic peso devaluations in 1982 and thereafter. This shift happened not only in Mexico but also in the Dominican Republic (where I worked) and globally as maquila production tried to upgrade away from light garment production to more diverse sectors, such as auto parts or trouser production, which employ more men. Not only product diversification but also deterioration of male employment induces young men, who initially disdained maquila work, to redefine certain sectors as appropriate for men.

Another factor in the increased hiring of men may be the anxiety provoked in the local community by the initial change from a male labor force (as in the earlier Mexican Bracero program) to female workers in maquilas. Salzinger discusses how this change is thought to have provoked the growth of crime, delinquency, and single motherhood along the border. It was also devastating to male workers, who were thus robbed of the basis of male hegemony. Animosity toward the young, assertive women working in Mexican maquilas has reached the point at which it may be considered one of the factors behind the mass murders of maquila women in Juárez, a point Salzinger does not mention.

By focusing on the shop floor, Salzinger leaves out much of the political economy of the border region and the way in which it shaped the drive for cheap labor. After male labor had been sufficiently cheapened by the lack of suitable alternatives, men could again be considered for maquila employment. Her analysis also glosses over the low wages, long hours, and brutal discipline maquila workers face, perhaps because she thinks these have been overemphasized in previous analyses. But in looking only at managerial strategies for worker control, she robs the workers of agency, which they clearly have not lost.

Salzinger’s book should be read by those interested in maquila production, because of her keen analysis of shop-floor practices and managerial strategies, but I wish she had given readers a fuller picture of the lives of female and male workers along the border.