Omar Gil has been a worker in several industrial plants on the U.S.-Mexico border since he was 19. A life of mind-numbing work under unhealthy and dangerous conditions eventually convinced him that he must work to change things. He tells his story to PNS associate editor David Bacon who translated it from the Spanish.

"I come from Mexico City.

My father had a business there, a small bookstore. Then, because of the devaluation of the peso, his store went broke. I was 11 years old. My parents looked for work in Mexico City, but they couldn't find any, so they came here to the border, to Nuevo Laredo.

So I went to school on the border. My plan was to go back to Mexico City, to the university, to study physics and mathematics or law, but we didn't have the money so I had to go to work.

At first I began taking classes in air-conditioning to get training for a better job. I didn't intend to work full time, but to study and work.

But working in the maquiladoras, it's not really possible to go to school, mainly because of time. Also, the pay is low, and my job is very insecure. I haven't lost hope yet, but I'm not 100 percent sure anymore. Now there are other factors as well. I don't have any time to rest, and I'm getting physically exhausted.

I've been in these factories since I was 19. Now I'm 26. I don't have time for any kind of personal life -- I leave work so tired that on the weekend I don't want to go anywhere. All my personal development has been put on hold so that I can just rest. I feel like my youth has passed me by.

I got my first job in a maquiladora back in 1993, at Delphi Auto Parts. They paid 360 pesos a week (about $40). There was a lot of pressure from the foremen to work hard and produce, and a lot of accidents because of the bad design of the lines. The company didn't give us adequate protective equipment to deal with the chemicals, and the union there did nothing to protect us.

From Delphi I went to National Auto Parts where we made car radiators for Cadillacs and Camaros. There was a lot of sickness and accidents there too. There were no ventilators to take fumes out of the plant, and they didn't give us any gloves so people got cut up a lot.

I worked in an area with a lot of lead. If you work with lead, you're supposed to have special clothing and your clothes should be washed separately. But we had to work in our street clothes.

For that they paid 400 pesos a week (about $43). We had no union, and there was the same pressure for production as at Delphi.

Now I've been at TRW for about a month and a half. There's really no difference in the conditions--if anything, my situation now is even worse. You could say it's forced labor, considering how the foremen talk to the workers, and how much psychological pressure they put on people.

We work an average of 14-15 hours a day. There's no transport service, and we get off at 4 in the morning. Usually we have to wait until 7 AM before we can catch a public bus. And getting home costs 20 pesos. That makes a very big dent in your take-home pay.

My job is bending steel cables for seatbelts for GM, Ford and some European car models. The cable is about a centimeter thick, and I have to bend about 3,500 pieces a day. The pain in my hands is so bad I can hardly sleep at night--then I have to get up in the morning to do it again. I've asked to change to another position, but no one wants to change because whoever works in this job gets a lot of pain in their wrists.

I feel that in three or four years my hands are going to be useless. I've been thinking that I'll have to get another job. What else can I do?

They say work in the maquiladoras is the best-paid work here in the city. But there's not much difference from one factory to another.

After I had been working in Delphi for a year, I was invited to join a group to learn about workers' rights. People in this group said that things needed to be changed. At first I was undecided, because I thought that I could get into a lot of trouble -- I would get fired, or other bad things would happen to me.

I heard about the movement in 1994, when Martha Ojeda [currently director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras] and others tried to democratize the union at Sony, to make it one which represented the workers and fought for their rights. For many years, Martha tried to democratize the unions here. But the union leaders in Mexico City refused to recognize her.

In 1994 the union general secretary here called her an agitator and a Communist, and she was forced to leave. But she became well-known among the workers because she tried to help them at other plants too. Then it seemed the whole world painted Martha Ojeda as a ghost to scare people, and used her as an example of what could happen if you got into these problems.

But a couple of years later, when I was invited to join one of the groups again, I went.

They invited me to a workshop about health and safety--the problems you could suffer because of repetitive motion. I realized that that it's not wrong to show workers the dangers in their jobs.

The companies and the newspapers say we're putting the maquiladoras in danger, but we're just showing workers what's wrong with the way the work is organized. When I understood that, I decided to become a voluntary organizer. Everything I learn I try to pass on, so that it will help everyone else.