Brining Fantasies to Life: Panoptimex By Leslie Salzinger Presented By Erica Creswell

What is Panoptimex? Panoptimex is one of the factories the author looks at throughout this book This article is actually a continuation of the previous article I presented Panoptimex is a sort of case study of the ideas the author presented in the previous article

Puzzlement Author sees the workers inside the factory and is puzzled because the image they present is so different from what is really going on outside the factory. Asks two questions Where have all these icons of paradigmatic femininity come from? If no one else has been able to find them in the Juarez streets, how have the Panoptimex managers done so?

Ansewers Answer lies in reformulating the question “These paragons have not been found, they have been made. As Panoptimex workers respond to managerial descriptions of how they always were, they come to incarnate these images in the here and now.”

Why Panoptimex? Out of all the factories the author looks at, Panoptimex best represents the expectations embedded in the stereotype of the preconstituted, passive, nimble-fingered assembly worker If we can expose the process through which feminine productivity is created here, we are well on our way to being able to take apart the mechanisms through which production produces, rather than relies on, the (in)famously docile and dexterous third-world woman.

Characteristics of Panoptimex Part of what the author calls Electroworld-an enormous electronics transnational Remarkably successful at producing televisions Rivals competition as far as the US “This success is directly, if unintentionally, related to the extreme feminization of the plant's basic production tasks and the concomitant sexual objectification of its workforce.”

Visually Oriented Managers Everything is designed to produce the “right look” Designed a machine that evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of production Shop floor is filled with beautiful, high-heeled women surrounded by critical, attentive male supervisors whose eyes invite both performance and self-vigilance “Through obsessive watching, managers create a shop floor of voyeurs and their objects, and labor control operates through the sexualized, gendered subjectivities which emerge in this lopsided interaction.” The rare male worker is a third wheel here, consigned to irrelevance by his inability to look. “Neither labor control processes which make no reference to gender nor the imported docility of feminine workers can account for the quiescence of workers in this plant. To the contrary, it is through addressing workers' gendered subjectivities that managers fulfill their own desires, building TVs among them”

Attitudes of Managers Focus on cost and profit and impressing headquarters The “picture” is the frame within which everything is understood and evaluated Workers are seen as children that need to conditioned rather than intelligible adults Focus on the “look” of the factory leads to a highly gendered and sexualized pattern of hiring and labor control

Attitudes Toward the Author Met with Dave Jones, Electroworld regional personnel manager He immeadiatly launches into a critique of her “radical ideas” Allows her to observe the factory workers to show how good work conditions "really are" in the maquilas “Unlike his counterparts in other plants, however, he refuses to allow me to work on the line, even for a day. In explaining this decision, he emphasizes that he is concerned neither for the quality of the TVs I might produce nor for my personal safety. He is concerned instead that, in a context where watching is power, a worker might "look back," see me, and report me to the Mexican department of labor.”

Appearance is Everything Appearances are as much the currency as dollars Concerned more with making the budget than with making a profit More subject to managers at coporate than to external competition Tendency to make headquarters approval a primary goal is particularly seen at Panoptimex

Eyes are Everywhere Managers watch workers from glass windows high above factory Cameras in the walls and ceiling to catch people stealing Color coated clothes make it easy to see who is in what position and what job they are supposed to be doing

Be Seen and Not Heard Top Managers speak very little spanish, if any, and can not communicate with workers Refers to the “Mexican-mind” when workers or supervisors make a complaint “The actual inability of most top managers to communicate with their employees, combined with a venerable U.S. tradition of assuming Mexican cultural and racial inferiority, adds a final element to the labor control logic in which listening to workers makes no "sense" and watching them thereby becomes imperative.”

Hiring for Looks Percent of female workers is usually around 70% and has rarely been under 75% Average age of women workers is under 20 “Irene Perez, the head of personnel in the plant, details criteria for most line jobs, beginning with being female and young and continuing with being slim and having thin hands and short nails. The criteria also include not being pregnant, using birth control, and being childless, or, if absolutely necessary, having credible childcare arrangements.” The most basic of these requirements is being female, and as a result, on hiring days guards admit all the women applicants who come to the maquila gates, but only a previously specified number of men. The few men hired for what are known as the line "heavy" jobs are not subject to the bodily strictures required of their female counterparts, but in their place are a substantially more demanding set of social requirements. Unlike their female coworkers, they must have someone in the plant vouch for them, and they must present a certificate of high school graduation.

Hiring Women at All Cost In the late 1980s when there was a huge shortage in female workers, while other plants reluctantly hired men, Panoptimex went to a village an hour away, wined and dined the people who lived there and offered to pay the transportation costs if the women would come to work in the factory Four years later these women still work there and management still pays the transportation cost "In Panoptimex they don't look for workers, they look for models-short skirts, heels, beauties." “Not that Panoptimex workers are more beautiful than young women in other maquilas-at least not to my eye. However, Panoptimex workers are hired as "models” hired to look the way managers expect workers to look.”

Hierarchy of Seeing Managers watch supervisors who watch workers who watch themselves Men watching men watching women Male managers watch Male supervisors who watch Female workers and ignore the few male workers “The women are central objects of supervisory attention, whereas the men are peripheral objects of supervisory disregard”

Hierarchy of Supervision “The Americans”-top managers Supervisors-all mexican men Group Leaders-all women who have been promoted All other women workers

Competition is Huge Charts above each women’s head represent the quality of her work…gold stars for perfection, red dots for trouble and green dots for errors “A woman whose chart is full of green and red dots comments, "I feel ashamed. It's all just competition. You look at the girl next to you and you want to do better than she does even though it shouldn't matter." Lines pick up speed at 3:00, an hour before shift end because no one wants to be on a line that “doesn’t make it” “When I ask a woman generally notable for her jaundiced attitude what's going on, she shrugs: "When they start congratulating the other lines for having finished and we haven't, you feel bad. Competition makes you work harder.”

Conclusions “In an arena peopled primarily by male supervisors and female workers, this objectifying modality of control constitutes a highly sexualized, and productive, set of gendered subjectivities. For both supervisors and women workers, laboring and sexual identities merge on the shop floor. Supervisors revel in their location. Young women workers take pleasure in the experience of being desirable and in their use of this delicious if limited power. For the few men on the line, however, it is a different story. Their inability to watch makes it impossible for them to assert a legitimate local masculinity, and their attempts to assert an alternate masculinity only make them vulnerable to the managerial capacity to undercut these assertions. & a result of these processes, the gendered and sexual subjectivities of everyone on the shop floor are at stake in production. Thus, Panoptimex owes its success to a set of meaning-imbued labor control practices in which workers are constituted and incorporated into production primarily as women and men and only within that framework as workers. Workers are literally engendered--they come into being as workers in the same moment in which they come into being as "women" or "men" within the shop floor's terms.”