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| Sergio Dorantes for The New York Times | ||||
| Cindy Chan checks lingerie in Merida at the kind of plant that is being replaced by high-tech ones like PCC Airfoils. | ||||
MÉRIDA, Mexico — The numbers add up to doom for cheap labor, one of Mexico's most marketable commodities since World War II. In the last two years, some 280,000 jobs have vanished with the closure of more than 350 maquiladoras, the foreign-owned assembly plants that manufacture for export everything from blue jeans to blenders, televisions to toys.
So Mexico has embarked an effort to attract a new kind of maquiladora, one that requires more skilled workers and will, the government hopes, offer more satisfying, stable jobs.
The closing of so many maquiladoras reflects the harsh economics of globalization. Cheap as Mexico's labor is, it is not as cheap as that in Asia or Eastern Europe. They now attract the kind of manufacturing that sprang up here, first along the border with the United States and then farther south, in places like this balmy part of the Yucatán peninsula.
 The New York Times High-tech factories are opening in Merida and elsewhere in Yucatan. |
Now, this area displays flickering signs of an industrial evolution in which Mexico's maquiladora industry moves to multimillion-dollar high-tech factories that offer skills, and even decent salaries, to workers.
One such beacon of hope is the plant formally opened here in February by PCC Airfoils, a subsidiary of an Ohio-based company that produces airplane parts for General Electric.
Although workers like Dianela Súarez or Víctor Flores make more than double the $4 minimum daily wage in this region, a sum that counterparts in the United States would earn in less than an hour, they are acquiring technical skills, have risen quickly from factory floor worker to group leader and sound fulfilled.
"I have had many jobs," said Mrs. Suárez, a 35-year-old former secretary with a junior high school education who is studying company manuals for tests to become a licensed quality inspector. "My vision is to have a career."
Mr. Flores, 28, was educated at a technical high school, and worked five years as a refrigeration and air-conditioning technician before joining PCC Airfoils. The government paid more than half the cost to train him for an entry-level position at the factory.
"This is an experience that is different from most maquiladoras," he said. "I am learning things about technology and engineering that I can use all my life. This kind of experience is invaluable."
Government officials are hopeful that high-tech companies will take the place of the factories that rely on low-scale labor.
"We are not interested any more in these types of companies," said Patricio Patrón, governor of the state of Yucatán, where the number of maquiladoras grew from 16 to 131 in just one decade; most are clothing companies like Eddie Bauer and The Gap, which liked the proximity of a port with direct shipping to New Orleans and cheaper wages than on the United States border. "They are part of an era we are trying to overcome. We want to give opportunities to higher level factories — and some are beginning to come."
Nonbelievers say such sentiments are wishful thinking. They note that the number of high-tech factories that have opened is relatively small, and say Mexico's poor education system cannot fill a labor pool large enough for highly skilled jobs. But even skeptics acknowledge that Mexico has few strategic options.
"Mexico's going to have to graduate the way all other countries do," Sidney Weintraub, an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a recent radio interview. "It's inevitable that countries that earn their money through relatively cheap labor, as their situation improves and the labor costs go up, they just have to move up on the technology scale."
Indeed, almost as fast as they came, Yucatán's textile factories have begun to go, battered over the last two years by an economic decline and drop in consumer demand in the United States. Meanwhile, Mexican wages increased, supported by a superstrong peso.
"Our costs have gone up 10 percent a year for the last five years," said Fabio Atti, general manager of an Italian-owned swimsuit factory, Produce Mexico. "If that trend continues, it is going to be difficult for us to stay."
PCC Airfoils is one of two high-tech factories that have opened here in the last year. The other, Seal and Metal Products of Latin America, a subsidiary of Pennsylvania-based Stein Seal, also produces airplane parts for General Electric.
"T-shirt factories do not stimulate economic expansion," said Alberto Barrera, a Mexican who is the general manager of Seal and Metal. "But a maquiladora that invests in technology and in training its workers creates slow but stable growth."
So far, Mr. Barrera said, he has hired fewer than 20 workers. But each goes through months of training. "A textile plant can open and close in a week," he added. "It took half a year just to get this plant up and running."
His sentiments were echoed by Jean Freyre, general manager at PCC Airfoils.
"I'd like to think that in time we are going to offer the kinds of jobs that will keep people from leaving their hometowns and their country to make a decent living," he said, "the kinds of jobs that give people a sense of belonging, and a sense of stability."