Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Bank Muñoz, Carolina

Title Transnational tortillas : race, gender, and shop-floor politics in Mexico and the United States / Carolina Bank Muñoz
Published Ithaca : ILR Press, 2008

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xi, 202 pages) : illustrations
Contents The tortilla behemoth and global production -- The political economy of corn and tortillas -- A tale of two countries : immigration policy and globalization in the United States and Mexico -- Hacienda CA : immigration regime -- Hacienda BC : gender regime -- Fighting back? resistance in the age of neoliberalism -- Shop-floor politics in the twenty-first century
Summary This book looks at the flip side of globalization: How does a company from the Global South behave differently when it also produces in the Global North? A Mexican tortilla company, "Tortimundo," has two production facilities within a hundred miles of each other, but on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The workers at the two factories produce the same product with the same technology, but have significantly different work realities. This "global factory" gives Carolina Bank Muñoz an ideal opportunity to reveal how management regimes and company policy on each side of the border apply different strategies to exploit their respective workforces' vulnerabilities. The author's in-depth ethnographic fieldwork shows that the U.S. factory is characterized by an "immigration regime" and the Mexican factory by a "gender regime." In the California factory, managers use state policy and laws related to immigration status to pit documented and undocumented workers against each other. Undocumented workers are subject to harsher punishment, night-shift work, and lower pay. In the Baja California factory, managers sexually harass women-who make up most of the workforce-and create divisions between light- and dark-skinned women, forcing them to compete for managerial attention, which they understand equates with job security. In describing and analyzing the differences in working conditions between the two plants, Bank Muñoz provides important new insights into how, in a globalized economy, managerial strategies for labor control are determined by the interaction of state policies and labor market conditions with race, gender, and class at the point of production
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-193) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Tortilla industry -- Mexico -- Baja California (Peninsula)
Tortilla industry -- California
Factory system -- Mexico -- Baja California (Peninsula)
Factory system -- California
Industrial relations -- Mexico -- Baja California (Peninsula)
Industrial relations -- California
Women -- Employment -- Mexico -- Baja California (Peninsula)
Foreign workers, Mexican -- California
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Labor & Industrial Relations.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Industries -- General.
Factory system
Foreign workers, Mexican
Industrial relations
Tortilla industry
Women -- Employment
California
Mexico -- Baja California (Peninsula)
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2008011611
ISBN 9780801460425
0801460425
9780801462139
0801462134