On a recent Monday, hundreds of workers inside a Reynosa maquiladora moved in sync, manufacturing medical devices on a production line that runs 24 hours a day, nearly year-round.

A popular band sang love ballads in Spanish, blaring across the factory floor from a large speaker beneath a “Viva Mexico” sign made of red, white, and green helium balloons – a homage to their national heritage and in celebration of Mexico’s independence.

More than 130,000 people work in the maquiladora industry throughout Reynosa, just over the international bridge from the city of Hidalgo, one of the southernmost cities in Hidalgo County, Texas. 

Balloons were spread across the factory floor at workstations where specialists could be cutting, sewing, fastening, or inspecting materials and products in various stages of production, which eventually become medical devices used globally for patient monitoring, wound care, and compression therapy. 

Those products include spandex-like compression garments worn after surgery to promote healing, inflatable compression boots for patients with diabetes who have difficulty with circulation in their feet, and air-cushioned mattress pads to prevent patients from developing bedsores in hospital beds. Inside the company’s tightly sealed and locked high-tech clean room, workers manufacture reflective devices used during brain surgery. 

More than 1,000 of the medical device maquiladora workers are unionized, according to the company. Their employer – Tennessee-based Team Technologies, formerly iiMED Medical Manufacturing Solutions – says traditional performance indicators remain standard, but priorities now put employee satisfaction second only to safety on the factory floor.

“We operate 24/7, nonstop,” Norberto Alanís, the vice president of operations Team Technologies Reynosa and former director of operations for iiMED, said in Spanish. 

Sales at the business have steadily increased, and the company has also added workers in the past seven years, he said. The company’s predecessor, iiMED Medical Devices, opened its Reynosa operations in 2013.

Reducing employee turnover with surveys, culture change

“We are looking to prioritize the happiness of our employees as our second priority after safety. We conduct [worker feedback] surveys, measure turnover [and] absenteeism,” Alanís said. “I think it’s a school of thought that some of us love what we do, we don’t just work for a salary, and we want to have an authentic connection with our employees.” 

Alanís said the maquiladora industry keenly understands that workplace injuries, absenteeism, and job turnover hinder the factory’s ability to serve its clients. To train a single maquiladora operator on the job, it could take up to 16 weeks. About 800 operators work together on a single production line, for example, he said. Employee surveys have long improved the workplace, from the cafeteria to the availability and cleanliness of the restrooms. 

On the factory floor, workers stood at specialty stations, such as an air-filled bed cushion line, where employees like Iselda Dominguez Campos worked that day. 

Campos hails from the Mexican state of Veracruz, which sits along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, just south of Mexico City. She’s the mother of three children, two of whom are old enough to be married themselves. She’s been in the maquiladora industry for the past six years. 

“I like that I can switch to the other side [of the factory] and learn a little bit about everything,” Campos said in Spanish. 

Before joining a factory, Campos worked in a restaurant, which she described as more physically demanding, with lower overall compensation and more stress, but similar salaries. 

“Well, it was almost the same [salary] except here you have an advantage, right? Because they give me [employee] benefits, and over there all I got was Christmas bonuses and vacation days,” Campos said.

Officials say many of the workers in maquiladoras across Tamaulipas, from Reynosa to Matamoros, often hail from smaller communities that dot the interior regions of Mexico. They often travel to the border for higher wages, better economic upward mobility, and may even send back remittances to their families. 

Higher minimum wages along the U.S.-Mexico border for maquila workers

Mauricio Treviño Garza, Reynosa’s secretary of economic development and employment, oversees economic development efforts in the city. 

There’s a higher minimum wage in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, he said.

“Reynosa is in a special situation because along the entire border, year after year, for about four years in a row, the minimum wage has increased by 20 percent,” Garza said. “If you have a guaranteed income with this minimum wage of between 10,000 and 12,000 pesos per month for the worker, which is a very good salary, if you compare it to the 7,000 or 8,000 pesos in the interior of the country, it’s a very big difference.”

That means the minimum wage is about 419 pesos each day or $22, while the minimum wage for communities along the country’s interior is 278 pesos each day, or about $15. 

The minimum salary for maquiladora workers is expected to increase yet again this year by at least 10%, he said. Out of roughly 150,000 workers in the maquiladora industry, about 20,000 earn the minimum wage, whereas the remainder earn between 15,000 and 18,000 pesos each month, which is between $811 and $973 U.S. dollars.

Those who may be born in Tamaulipas are more likely to travel regularly as a commuter into the U.S. using a legal visa program. They can work anywhere from minimum wage jobs, earning U.S. dollars for $7.25 an hour, as opposed to pesos, or even work for higher wages in construction, trade, transportation, and logistics. 

The musical soundtrack from a snapshot inside that Reynosa maquiladora mirrored the journey of many workers in the industry. 

The singer was Sergio lizárraga, the frontman for Banda Sinaloense Mazatlán, Sinaloa – or Banda MS – referring to the Mexican state on the Pacific Ocean coast across the Gulf of California from Baja. 

Banda MS is scheduled to play at the Bert Ogden Arena in Edinburg in November. 

That’s only 21 miles from the Reynosa maquiladora. But the cost of resale tickets for the sold-out show is upwards of $100 a person, which would cost 1,848 pesos. That means if a maquiladora worker was earning the minimum wage per day in Reynosa, it would take four-and-a-half days to cover the cost of a concert ticket. That much of an expense would usually be outside the affordability of the average maquila worker.