Governing PRI Party Exploits Refugees and Migrants in Its T-Shirt Factory Tamara Pearson - Green Left Weekly
go to original May 8, 2017

At the same time as President Enrique Pena Nieto deports undocumented migrants trying to enter or pass through Mexico, his own party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is under-paying migrants and refugees in its T-shirt factory.

Political parties in Mexico will often hand out T-shirts, caps and other paraphernalia with their logos for political campaigns. In one case last year, during a football match, fans threw back the PRI T-shirts they had been given, yelling “Out, out!”.

“We were paid less than the Mexicans,” Honduran migrant Olvin Lopez Castillo told us — activists supporting migrants through a shelter called Tochan.

Lopez had been working at a series of PRI printing factories. “One night they only gave us [migrants and refugees] a quarter of what we were owed. We were taken from one of the factories to another, where we were to put logos on umbrellas.

“Then they told us there wasn’t enough work and we should go back to the T-shirt factory. It was midnight though, and the metro was already closed … In the end, the three Mexicans who were with us were paid the full night's shift, 200 pesos [US$11], and we were only paid 80 pesos.”

“It's racism,” Lopez said.

According to official data, 143,226 Central Americans were deported from Mexico last year. Only 6.7% of Central American migrants were allowed to stay in the country.

Some of these migrants would have been heading to the United States. However, many prefer to stay in Mexico, where wages, though low, are higher than in their own countries. And while some leave their families and homelands due to high unemployment and poverty rates, many of the undocumented migrants are refugees, fleeing rampant gang violence in countries such as Honduras and El Salvador.

The PRI is far from the only organisation or company behind workplace exploitation and discrimination against undocumented migrants.

Read the rest at Green Left Weekly

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