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Television-Set Production in the Era of Digital TV

Mari Castañeda

This chapter examines the transcultural political economy of television-set production as the US (and other countries) made the transition to a digital television (DTV) platform. There was a time in the US when multiple stakeholders looked to digital-television production both as a problem and as a solution. In 1989 the US Congress began discussing the emergence of advanced television technologies. At stake, according to congressional leaders, were the national security and the gross national product (GNP), and both were at great risk if the US did not take a lead in the emerging era of digital communications (United States Congress, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c). During the same period there was a scare, especially among over-the-air broadcasters, that the days of television viewing were numbered. Despite the fact that millions of viewers around the globe still rely on television broadcasts for news, entertainment, and information, industry analysts in the late 1980s predicted that television–Internet convergence, Web–video productions, and consumers spending more time online through computers and mobile devices would kill the television industry. Finally, there was a debate among those in the US consumer electronics industry, which at that point was radically reduced by the influx of foreign manufacturers who were producing their technologies abroad and importing them below the market cost. Given the shifting communications landscape, what could be done to ensure that TV sets would not become extinct in the new era of global information and multimedia platforms?

Congress and the electronics industry answered this question through action. They asserted that consumers would still need accessible electronic devices to stay connected to the airwaves and to steer onto the information superhighway. For elected officials on Capitol Hill, advanced television (which later became known as “high definition television” and, eventually, as DTV) was a solution to how the US was going to maintain and expand its role as a global superpower in an age when high technologies were rapidly transforming political, economic, and cultural landscapes (Castañeda Paredes, 2000, p. 4). At a 1989 Senate hearing on the prospects for the development of a US advanced television industry, both policymakers and corporate owners agreed that

These political statements made it clear that digital television was perceived as a powerful tool that needed to be subjected to state policy, in an effort to exert some level of economic and political influence over its production and dissemination.

Additionally, former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley (1997) suggested that the changeover to DTV would permanently change the way the US and the world utilize television and information technologies. If this was true, then the shift would be historically significant, since TV is, without a doubt, the world's preeminent leisure-time cultural activity. Some 98% of the American population owns television sets, and over 900 million units are in use around the world (Johnson, 1998). In order for viewers to receive the digital-based broadcast programming, audiences have either to buy new digital television sets (which currently cost between $250 to $5,000 and range from low-end to high-end) or to buy converter boxes, which cost from $40 to over $80 and deliver a lower grade of services. Despite the seemingly low cost for equipment that is now available, the electronics market for digital television is valued at $76 billion in the US and at $335 worldwide (Consumer Electronics Association, 2007–2008). The growing sales point indeed to the huge market restructuring that is currently underway within television equipment, programming, and advertising markets. Furthermore, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which reduced tariffs by an additional 50%, set the stage for the movement of capital into Mexico's borderlands, where cheaper labor could be utilized as a competitive tool for reducing production costs and for bolstering profit margins, especially for high-tech electronics (United States Congress, 1962).

Nearly 20 years after these initial fears and predictions, we see that the pervasive use of social networking technologies, of wireless handheld devices, and of digital television clearly points to the power of new information technologies. It confirms, as Dan Schiller (1999) points out, a “new epoch of [. . .] digital capitalism” (p. xiv). The electronics infrastructure of the twenty-first century is not merely a system of technological hardware, but a global network of networks, upon which “the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy” is far more reaching through digital media than ever before (Schiller, 1999, p. xiv). Moreover, Schiller (2009) argues that, despite the pervasiveness of the media, “the existing information society is deeply divided [. . .] marked by increasing economic inequality [. . .] [and shaking the] limited but substantial democratic features and practices” of information provision to their core (p. 147). Thus the sector of communications-based consumer electronics is an important entry point into the digital infrastructure of high-speed telecommunications. This sector is increasingly vital for workers' and citizens' participation in the global economy, but it is often available unequally and undemocratically, as Schiller argues. Given the importance of television within the broader landscape of consumer electronics, this chapter will examine how the complexity of technical standards for DTV, the increase of free-trade policies, and the globalization of production have reconstituted television-set manufacturing. It will also focus on the emerging “Silicon Border” along the US–Mexico divide and the ways in which labor, trade, and new technologies continue to intersect with the material conditions of race, gender, and immigration in the digital era. Ultimately, the chapter aims to demonstrate that digital television-set production is not simply about the making and consumption of TV sets, but, more importantly, about the making of a “new, ruthless economy,” which threatens to deepen information and social inequalities (Schiller, 1999, p. 207). It is critical to study this area of media production, since it is a microcosm of the tensions that are unfolding within national and global communications.

In an effort to present such a study, the chapter is divided into four sections. The first section discusses how the historical debates over television technical standards affected the technological development of digital television in the United States. More importantly, the section demonstrates how the process of standards setting and property creation is not simply about adopting the best technology, but about bolstering the political and economic interests of key players. This section is followed by a discussion about the role of free-trade policies and globalization in generating digital-television properties and market demand over the concerns and organized resistance of labor. The third section examines the role of the maquiladora system along the US–Mexico border in the manufacture of digital television and its enduring importance as a global trade platform. Finally, the chapter investigates the ramifications of high-tech manufacturing for workers – especially for young Mexican women, who constitute the majority of the labor force in consumer electronics factories located south of the border. Ultimately, the chapter aims to demonstrate how television-set production in the era of DTV entails more than simply producing digitized audio-visual equipment: the manufacturing of high technology requires an intense political and economic effort, which has real implications for people and culture.

Setting the Standard for Digital Television

In 1996, after a decade of congressional hearings and industry analyses, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the broadcast Advanced Television System Committee's “digital television standards” and consequently unleashed a new era of television in the US. The road to broadcast DTV, however, was not easy. In fact it was fraught with competing notions of what the future of high-tech television should be based upon. At the core of the debate was the ideological shift toward expanding market and consumer-driven approaches not only to telecommunication policies, but to social, educational, and healthcare policies as well. The FCC's decision to adopt a dual scanning mode in the new broadcast standard and thus to do away with analog transmissions set the stage for members of the National Association of Broadcasters and of station affiliates (who preferred the interlaced scanning of traditional TV sets) and for representatives of computer interests (who preferred the progressive scanning of computer monitors) to compete in the marketplace – where consumers, not government, would select the best model for receiving DTV signals.

Such competition, argued high-tech companies like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, in fact helped create a thriving retail computer industry in the US. This preference for a “market-driven selection” also corresponded with the FCC's decision to exclude technical stipulations for video-receiver resolution. That is, the market, rather than the Commission, would determine whether high definition, standard definition, or a hybrid TV model would succeed as the dominant format in receiver equipment. Presently, consumer dollars have largely been spent on high-definition PC hybrid widescreen models that include either interlaced or progressive scanning; but, as media reports have noted, there is still much confusion from consumers as to what the extra cash spent on hybridity is really buying (Deame, 2001).

To understand the process for establishing DTV standards in the 1990s, it is important to examine, first, the agenda for setting color-TV standards in the 1950s. Although this earlier battle occurred on the global stage, the two political processes shared the logic by which technical standards should drive the consumer TV market (Crane, 1979, p. 11). At that time three main global competitors were seeking approval from the FCC for their color TV standard: NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.¹ Citing public and corporate investments, the FCC selected the NTSC standard for color TV, even though engineers regarded that standard as somewhat inferior (Kittross, 1979, p. 265). After some hemming and hawing, the FCC claimed that it wanted to keep the standard within the US framework in order not to disrupt the well-established broadcast television infrastructure (Armstrong, 2007, p. 133). With this decision, color TV materialized. Over time black-and-white television sets were phased out, as the market demand for color-based equipment grew.

In many ways, the same logic was utilized in DTV because it was assumed that market demand would select the best TV electronics. The difference lies in the fact that there were only three global standards to select from in early television, whereas in digital television there were six major technical standards in the US alone. The rise in advanced communication technologies and the venues for accessing convergent information thus shifted the paradigm toward the adoption of multiple standards for digital television. This was an important issue for the various players involved in the development of DTV standards. The tensions regarding the future of broadcast media were evidenced by the background of the invited members of the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television System, the organization responsible for developing what would eventually become the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standards for digital television. This committee was dominated by interests in telecommunications, satellite broadcasting, cable television, consumer electronics, and content programming, and it largely included technical experts in multimedia and computers (Wu, Hirakawa, Reimers, & Whitaker, 2006, p. 15).

Ultimately, after years of government hearings, technical studies, and industry debates, concessions were made between broadcast and computer interests. Larry Irving, former assistant secretary of the National Information and Telecommunications Administration, summed it best: at stake here were more than concerns over broadcast television – it was the “future American economy in terms of manufacturing, trade, technological development, job growth and international investment” – fields that were increasingly intertwined with the future of telecommunications and new media (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1996, p. 1). In the communications area of consumer electronics, the promotion of a competitive marketplace was therefore viewed as paramount – and viewed so to a higher degree than supporting a limited standardized system for broadcast equipment was, since the former also underpins local, national, and international communications and economic transactions. In some ways, there was a notion that adopting the broadest set of technical standards would allow the state and market to “adapt to the realities of informational power,” which would certainly emerge in the future, although they were unidentifiable at the time (Braman, 2004, p. 161).

The technical DTV broadcast statutes adopted by the FCC were recognized as the starting point for impacting related sectors such as equipment manufacturing, the retail and mass marketing of receiver sets, and the logical commercial development of the new system. The billions of dollars poured into the transition indeed demonstrate that the standards-setting process, with its risks, conflicts, cooperation, and accommodation, constituted a central component of “wealth creation”; and, as the world achieved greater economic and cultural connectivity, standards have gained greater significance (David & Steinmueller, 1996, p. 820). “Technical standards clearly do not flow ‘neutrally’ from some fountain of best engineering practice, but, rather, they reflect the full range of strategic behaviours that are seen in other economic activities affecting technology and market formation” (ibid., p. 829).

Yet the rise of the computer industry and its looming convergence not only with television equipment but also with television content and business practices made it necessary to adopt DTV standards that would be flexible and adaptable to the shifting political–economic context of new media equipment. As Schiller (1999) noted in Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System, “at stake in this unprecedented transition to neoliberal or market-driven telecommunications is nothing less than the production base and the control structure of an emerging digital capitalism” (p. 37). In other words, this historical moment demonstrates an even greater affinity of media policymakers with the unbridled economic approach to global information infrastructure. Yet it is also important to note that the market orientation toward the emerging media technologies is not occurring in a regulatory vacuum, devoid of government intervention. In fact, as in previous media histories, the property creation of new communication industries is rooted in “designing government policy for business that encourages marketplace competition” (Streeter, 1996, p. 167). Some level of state arbitration was necessary in order to provide nominal order toward the property creation of DTV. Permitting a full-fledged, unfettered marketplace of standards would have created too many unknowns and conditions that may have impacted national security and the communications industries negatively.

I have noted in an earlier article (Castañeda, 2007) that the adoption of multiple technical standards greatly stifled the manufacturers' ability to produce an economy of scale for television receiver sets, since the economies of scope for digital television varied too widely among multiple standards (p. 92). It was not until most recently that the TV manufacturing industry adopted an integrated-standards approach, which allowed consumers to purchase a television set that included both interlaced and progressive scanning with 720 or 1080 pixel lines, rather than separate TV consoles with discrete standards. Hence manufacturers have made peace with the fact the FCC approved multiple standards by reaching a point in the creation of DTV in which television sets simply include all or most of the standards. Despite this shift, there is still much confusion from consumers (and from some retail sales associates) over the availability of multiple DTV formats – which include varieties between plasma, flat screen, and Internet-ready options. This state of things has induced, in consumers, a permanent cautiousness and an unwillingness to purchase a new television set unless it's absolutely necessary to do so (W. Santos, personal communication, July 15, 2008). The ripple effect caused by the lackluster consumer appetite for DTV equipment as well as by the broadcasters' protracted installment of new digital, high-definition production technologies has tempered the “initial” excitement over DTV, thus creating a context in which the official DTV transition deadline has had to be pushed back several times (García Leiva & Starks, 2009). It has taken over a decade for consumers to endorse the switchover to digital television, largely because the complexity and confusion over different standards stifled the ability to build consumer confidence in the new media product (W. Santos, personal communication, July 15, 2008).

The gradual start of DTV demonstrates that the importance of technical standards cannot be underestimated, since they set the technological context through which the manufacturing, distribution, and consumption of equipment can take place. According to Roy Rada (1993), standards are the language of success through which business can communicate with a certain degree of certainty. With a variety of standards, there was concern that it would be difficult to discern which DTV formats would be successful and which would not. As the section above demonstrates, the current era of digital capitalism is not merely the result of technical ingenuity, but also of specific policymaking aimed at media property creation; standards-setting was one area of such policymaking. Free-trade policies constituted another area, which the next section discusses.

Creating the Market for DTV while Taming Production Labor

The emergence of digital (high-definition) television in the mid-1990s was perceived by some US trade officials as an opportunity for the US to regain its position as a global powerhouse in consumer electronics. After nearly 50 years of television set production, the US had lost its dominance as a lead producer. As early as 1966, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) responded to the competitive threat of foreign consumer electronics companies by moving television production to Mexico, thus taking advantage of the Mexican government's implementation of a border-based manufacturing program the previous year (Cowie, 1999, p. 71). The large labor force readily available in Mexico, the onslaught of foreign television commodities from Asia, and the fomenting anti-union sentiment in the US led to the migration of most American TV manufacturers by the late 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, in the post-Fordist transition, manufacturers relocated all or large parts of their manufacturing to developing countries, in a quest for cheap labor and in a attempt to circumvent the negative effects of “overproduction, price erosion and fierce competition” (Cowie, 1999, p. 148).² Some believed that the emerging DTV market could potentially reverse this downward spiral of off-shore production, which had began decades earlier. They were wrong.

As shown in the previous section, the ideology of free trade and open markets was an integral part of the discussion about the development and transition to DTV since its beginnings. This new technology embodied a pivotal change, which started 70 years earlier, toward the transnationalization of communications market relations, the expansion of US trade interests, and electronics corporations' growing stake in overseas markets. Information policy expert William J. Drake notes:

Indeed, as noted by former US Secretary of State Warren Christopher during a 1995 hearing with the Senate Foreign Operations Subcommittee, communication systems are critical for regional and international trade, since they create a context for open societies, and thus for open markets and for positive geopolitical relations.

Aside from and prior to this political equation between free trade and open societies, it was the US interest in “open markets” via multilateral trade policies in the 1960s/1970s that was equally responsible for the shrinking market share of US consumer electronics and for the successful implementation of off-shore manufacturing. US tariff laws such as the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 assisted the migration of companies, because they stipulated that products processed or assembled with exported US materials would only be taxed on the value added abroad once the finished products were imported back to the US. This meant that TV manufacturers would be taxed solely for labor costs (the value added), but not for the exported materials that were initially used to build the TV sets. Thus the reduction of tariffs on electronics manufacturing helped create the context that later envisioned digital television as the redeemer of US technology industries.

In the early 1970s electronics unions foresaw the impact that open market regulation would have on employment opportunities and on the potential domination of foreign countries through “product dumping” (Helleiner, 1977, p. 109). As a result, unions aimed to demonstrate the shortsightedness of multilateral free-trade agreements by petitioning against them and by using scare tactics regarding national security. According to an article by Victor Canto (1983/4) in the libertarian Cato Journal, the workers' calls for a protectionist policy came in response to the growing fear that US products were losing their international competitiveness in the wake of open markets. Yet such markets were encouraged by government trade officials, who at the time viewed restrictions as potentially “counterproductive, impoverishing domestic and foreign producers and consumers alike” (Canto, 1983/4, p. 683). Ultimately this trade scenario did not take pay heed to workers; but they did not go away quietly.

The 1971 tariff petition filed for instance by the International Union of Electrical Radio and Machine Workers in the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) claims that the RCA plant in Memphis, Tennessee shut down because of “concessions granted” to RCA by the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 – a federal legislative act that promoted reduced tariffs for bi-national and cross-border manufacturing (United States Tariff Commission, 1971a, p. 1). The petitions from former workers at RCA – as well as at Emerson Television and Radio Company in New Jersey, at Zenith Corporation in Illinois, and at Television Manufacturers of America Company in Illinois – to the FCC were attempts to link the expansion of open trade policies with falling rates of employment in US television electronics manufacturing (United States Tariff Commission, 1971b, 1971c, 1971d, 1971e). They charged that the government was not creating policy in the best interest of American workers.

The state sided with business interests. In response to all four petitions, the FCC ruled “no finding” within its final report of November 1971 and maintained that the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 did not “cause, or threaten to cause, the unemployment, or underemployment, of a significant number or proportion of the workers” at television-related plants (United States Tariff Commission, 1971f, p. 3). The American Electronics Associations (AEA) concurred with the FCC, and it also argued that US trade policies were not the problem. According to AEA, the downturn of US consumer electronics was in part the result of Japan's lack of reciprocity for an “open” television market; this was best illustrated by the government's high import tariffs, which prohibited non-Japanese consumer electronic corporations from entering Japan's domestic television equipment market (United States Congress, 1989b). Although this was not entirely explicit, there was also a level of Asian xenophobia that influenced the negatively perceived presence of Japanese products and manufacturers (Hiraoka, 1989; Nelson, 2005).

The 20 years of free-trade policies and legislation that encouraged off-shore manufacturing in consumer electronics produced the landscape in which the US was no longer competitive in high technology manufacturing. According to Jeffery Hart in his book The Politics of HDTV in the United States,

It was the fear of foreign dependence in an increasingly high-tech world and the prospect of reigniting the US consumer electronics industry that spurred Congress into action to support the development of DTV, despite the fact that the US government had created this difficult situation in the first place.

Nearly two decades after the electronic unions warned the FCC and the Congress against the negative effects that unfettered trade expansion would have on consumer electronics, at a 1989 hearing, the American Electronics Association requested that Congress support and jump-start a program that would foster “the beginnings of a US [advanced television] industry” (United States Congress, p. 46). Democratic Party senators at the time, such as John Glenn and Albert Gore, Jr., responded to the perceived threat of electronics multinationals from overseas with battle cries for federal-government intervention and for the active conservation of “the nation's future balance of trade” (ibid., p. 3). In a separate hearing in 1989, Senator Glenn further argued: “This debate is absolutely critical [. . .] I am very concerned about the role of our electronics industry in developing HDTV, which means to me more than just household television sets” (ibid., p. 3). Given the significance of high-volume components in the aggregate-electronics market, the industrial control over the design and manufacture of these underlying technologies became the crux of advanced television-policy agendas around the globe.

The belief in the centrality of communications in the global economy was still evident two decades later, at the May 2009 Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Washington Forum, where the main focus of the event continued to be the role of free trade and of technology policy in the transition to digital television. Republican US Representative Roy Blunt from Missouri was especially fêted for his impassioned advocacy of digital television and free trade. During the Washington, DC forum, the president of CEA, Gary Shapiro, remarked: “We honor Rep. Blunt for reaching across the aisle to build bi-partisan support for the Columbia Free Trade Agreement and for his leadership on DTV” (Consumer Electronics Association, 2009, p. 1). Fifteen years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and after FCC's support of advanced television standards, the CEA still touts all free-trade agreements as key components for the future success of digital consumer electronics. This is not surprising, since the CEA is the US representative to the global consumer electronics industry, and one of the tenets of its mission is to ensure the prominence of US electronics in worldwide trade. At the start of 2009, the CEA noted that its four main foci for the next few years were going to be green technologies, free trade, broadband access, and the changeover to digital television (ibid.). This emphasis is logical, given the convergence between digital electronics, the expansion of the Internet as a site of economic production, and the $1.4 trillion produced each year by the US consumer electronics industry (Gross, 2008; Park & Roome, 2002). The proliferation of free-trade policies has thus recast DTV: it is not only about television sets, it encompasses the future market expansion of the communications–information sector on a global scale.

Indeed all the mania of living in an information society is impacting the production of electronic equipment that is needed in order for the millions of informational terabytes to be accessible in the digital age. Since technology must be built at a faster rate and lower cost in order to justify the investments made in advanced systems, the production of digital technologies is largely taking place outside the US. Although this is not new, the digitalization of consumer electronics has intensified the globalization of production. Concurrently, the global economic crisis has forced corporations to rethink their off-shore production strategies, and the manufacturing processes available just south of the US border, through the maquiladora system, continue to be a prime framework for accessible, low-cost production in a transborder environment with favorable trade conditions. Similar manufacturing arrangements (production of the maquila type) are also emerging across Latin America; but, more importantly, what the maquiladora system offers to “US, European and Asian capital [are] the advantages of free entry into several South American countries due to [their] bilateral trade agreements (Gerber & San Diego Dialogue Program, 1999, p. 7). At a moment when markets across the Americas are in need of millions of advanced television sets for the ongoing transition to DTV, the manufacturing of TV equipment along the US–Mexico border provides a cheap and expedient production of electronic goods, as well as trade access. It is important to examine at whose expense and under what conditions the production of digital television sets is taking place. The next section will explore this issue further.

DTV Set Production at the US–Mexico Border

There is a long history of mass media and television-set production at the US–Mexico border (Fox, 1999). Foreign outsourcing proved to be an effective method of countering the onslaught of competition, which was inadvertently brought about by international patent licensing. Sales of television sets made in the US began to decline as intense foreign competition chipped away at market share, which set in motion a historical transformation of the US television industry – from national production to a transnational, border-based export platform model. The maquiladora model, used originally for automobile and textile commodities, created a context in which similar transborder manufacturing methods were utilized for communication technologies such as television and radio sets, as well as for silicon-based high-end technologies such as computers.

In explaining how the political economy of set production was unique to Mexico, Nichola Lowe and Martin Kenney (1999) compare their platform model with that of Taiwan, which was also developing in East Asia about the same time. In Taiwan, Japanese investors developed joint manufacturing and communications efforts in the country's free-trade zones, and, as a result, they improved their “access to the highly protected Taiwanese consumer [and components] market” (Lowe & Kenney 1999, pp. 1428–1429). In Mexico, on the other hand, the maquiladora system was simply regarded as an advantageous tool for exploiting lower labor costs, and “foreign investors had little interest in growing consumer base in Mexico. Rather, they were focused on the single goal of surviving in the US market” (ibid., p. 1435). Lowe and Kenney argue that the different approaches and perceptions of foreign investors essentially solidified Mexico's failure to develop an “indigenous” and self-sustaining consumer electronics industry, while the island of Taiwan experienced a successful “expansion of foreign exchange, employment and development of assembler–supplier relations” (Lowe & Kenney, 2000, p. 49). In the Mexican-border context, trade policies and investor preferences for specific market share created a different manufacturing industry in Mexico, and by extension in Latin America, from the one they created in Taiwan, and by extension in Asia. The outcome of those differences is more striking today, as Asia recovers more quickly than Latin America from the global economic crisis of 2008–2009.³

As Silicon Valley in Northern California became the epitome of industrial design and of high-tech ingenuity, the Silicon Border became its mirror image for industrial manufacturing. Located just over the US–Mexico border, in Mexicali (which lies opposite Calexico in California), the manufacturing complex known as “Silicon Border, Science Park of the Americas” embodies fast and cheap production in the digital age (Dickerson, 2008). Officially announced in 2004, the “Silicon Border” park was intended to become the premier site for semiconductor production in North America. Since all media and information technologies, large and small, are dependent on silicon chips for their operation, the investors in the 10,000-acre industrial complex believed that the development would produce jobs and less dependence on foreign companies, especially Asian. According to the chairman of Silicon Border D. J. Hill, not only will the industrial park provide 100,000 jobs to Mexicans and US workers located at the Mexicali–Calexico border, but, more importantly, national security will be protected for both countries. Hill stated: “By making a place in North America, we have from a security standpoint an alternative place for manufacturing [. . .] because if Taiwan unifies with China, the advanced manufacturing will be controlled by a communist country” (Pisor, 2005). The mounting concern over dependency and the rising costs of the overseas supply chains instigated the need to rethink the importation of high-tech goods from Asia.

The digitalization of television production has not only led to the demise of traditional TV sets, which used cathode-ray tubes; it has also influenced factory production methods. Although initially consumers were lukewarm toward DTV, the firm 2010 congressional deadline for the digital switchover finally spurred the consumer demand for flat-screen, computer-friendly TV sets. Not surprisingly, the high demand has also caused price wars and a rapid fall in the prices of multi-standard flat-screen panel TV sets (Taub, 2006). This market situation caused manufacturers to rethink their production and inventory strategies. For instance TCL-Thomson Electronics, the world's largest TV maker, noted that it takes 90 days to manufacturer and ship a conventional TV set to the US, but that, in order to remain competitively viable, the company wants to shorten the production time to less than 30 days, and also to shorten the travel time to the US (Economist, 2006). Historically, it has taken 20 days for a TV-sized consumer electronic product to cross the Pacific Ocean. A TCL-Thomson Electronics manufacturing plant located at the Silicon Border, however, cuts those production and travel phases in half or less. Sony Electronics Corporation actually employed this model for years, through its design and manufacturing centers in San Diego, Tijuana, and Mexicali (Castañeda Paredes, 2003). Consequently, the current global economic crisis has reinvigorated Mexican high-tech centers like the Silicon Border as economically efficient manufacturing sites, especially for North American markets. The recent adoption of green technology in the industrial park has also transformed the Silicon Border into a prime site for advanced manufacturing. According to Dickerson (2008), the greening of transborder production offers a number of advantages, such as lower operating costs, tax preferences under NAFTA, and closer proximity to potential customers in the US and in its global trading partners.

It is important to note that Silicon Border is not working in isolation but is part of a larger landscape of industrial parks that exist along the US–Mexico border and the Mexican Gulf Coast, all of which serve the continent's digital electronics market. Such a vast market also necessitates an extensive labor force. The next section will therefore discuss the issues that arise when racialized labor, uneven trade flows, and new technologies intersect at the point of production in the digital era.

The Ramifications of High-Tech Manufacturing

The current drive for the mass production of high-tech electronics is creating an array of outcomes for workers, the two most important areas where this happens being health and environment. In the last five years, various film and online documentaries have portrayed and given voice to the uneven consequences of environmental and labor practices within the broader field of consumer electronics production and to the emotional toll of the geopolitics between the US and Mexico.⁴ In Maquilapolis: City of Factories (2006), filmmakers Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre tell the stories of maquila workers, particularly Carmen Duran and Lourdes Lujan, two women who work for Sanyo Electric Co., one of the largest television-set producers in the world. The film traces the harsh effects that the maquiladora industry has on its workers, as well as these women's families and communities. The documentary follows Duran and Lujan: they earn between $6 to $11 a day, which is higher than the typical $3–$5 factory wages, but they are exposed to deplorable working conditions, managerial intimidation, and taxing health problems caused by environmental toxins. The documentary ends with Duran and Lujan winning a legal battle in which Sanyo is forced to pay severance monies to its workers, and Sanyo decides to relocate its Tijuana-based manufacturing unit to East Asia – specifically, to Taiwan.

Just as postcolonial models continue to exist in relation to transborder manufacturing, the material conditions of race, gender, and immigration in the digital era are present. In fact these issues are becoming more important than ever, as women from historically exploited ethnic and class backgrounds continue to constitute an important workforce in the electronics industry not only in Latin America, but in Asia as well.⁵ For instance, in Mexico, women largely between the ages of 18 and 30 constitute more than half of the maquila workforce (Comité Fronterizos de Obreros, 2007; Vásquez Ruiz, 2007). This proportion actually represents a drop in the number of female maquiladora workers, since the notion of “cheap, docile, and female” is not necessarily a given: more women organize around labor issues (Peña, 1993). Despite such organizing, and despite the fact that factories were hiring more men in the 1990s, the “maquila-grade female” was still the aspired standard worker (Salzinger, 2004, p. 56). The physical, emotional, and social toll of factory work on these women cannot be underestimated.

In a report to the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), Schatan and Castilleja (2005) argued that, because the electronics assembly industry in Mexico was established under vulnerable environmental conditions, both the workers' and the community's health were affected by electronics-based maquiladoras' use of toxic substances and by their noncompliance with environmental standards for high-tech manufacturing. The study also demonstrated that the push for unfettered production and trade was deeply impacting the weakest sector of the labor force, which consisted largely of young women. According to journalist Elizabeth Grossman (2006), women and men who work in maquiladoras are exposed to a daunting amount of air- and water-borne pollutants, as well as to a plethora of chemicals that can cause severe health issues, such as kidney failure. Lead, for example, is utilized in the production of television and computer screens, yet it is highly toxic for the nervous system and especially dangerous for children. The often substandard working conditions of maquila assembly lines fail to protect workers and their families and increase the chances that they will suffer from a slew of health complaints such as chest pain, upper airway irritation, sore throats, excessive mucus, rashes, headaches, dizziness, memory loss, depression, and hair loss. Breast cancer has been on the rise from exposure to and inadequate disposal of hazardous materials. Individuals working on the maquila production floors have increased chances that their children will suffer major “birth defects [. . .] ranging from limb deformities to anencephaly” (Kourous, 1998, p. 2). Add to this the outbreaks in food poisoning that workers at both Philips and RCA television maquila plants in Tijuana suffered, and one would conclude that maquiladoras are not safe environments.

Furthermore, the repetitive work exerts its own tolls. Informatics-based labor produces eye, wrist, and back aches. The work conditions are no different from “swift sewing in garment factories,” in that high-tech surveillance, which is in place in this context, “docks workers for slowness and typos, and pushes them to faster and more punctilious work” (Nathan, 2000). Despite the belief that advanced technologies have the potential to level the playing field, the digital era has not eradicated social inequities, but in fact has exacerbated the negative dynamics that maintain the status quo.

The impact of maquiladoras is transnational, a fact that most US consumers rarely consider. The City of Industry in California, for instance, boasts the largest array of maquiladora twin-sister plants, located just 150 miles north of the US–Mexico border. These plants are the final processing centers for maquiladora-produced electronics and other commodities certified as “made in the USA.” A brief interview-based study of the workers, which I conducted with City of Industry workers from 2005 to 2007, showed that 70% of the workers in my sample were largely Mexican immigrants and nearly 80% were women. Although the final processing plants were in the US, the treatment of workers was still problematic, even if it was better than in the sister maquiladora plants in Mexico. Women workers reported indirect pressures on the job, such as passive–aggressive “jokes” about their employment future, and low-grade health difficulties that they soothed by drinking alcoholic beverages after work.

In fact, Sarah Hill (2001) argues that neoliberal policies have often produced a discursive legitimacy toward the physical hardships experienced by people working in environmentally poor conditions. As Hill notes, “First World anxiety about rainforest depletion has not always worked in the service of the indigenous people who live there” (p. 158). Environmental health effects, nevertheless, are uneven between the producing and the receiving countries. The level of impact of hazardous waste on workers varies according to where they are located on the production divide. Manufacturing countries like Mexico will continue to experience the negative consequences of high-tech manufacturing, by comparison with consuming countries like the US. Digital technologies and Internet access may increasingly be viewed as the great equalizers; but, when one examines the global manufacturing marketplace, it is apparent that long-standing imbalances of structural power continue to exist. In this sense, the digitalization of television is not only changing the rates and kinds of human impacts, but also exacerbating the differences between countries.

Although the film Maquilaopolis (City of Factories) reaches the conclusion that US maquilas will leave Mexico, Sanyo kept a border presence via its corporate partnerships with other telecommunications and electronics producers, which sold approximately one million liquid-crystal display (LCD) TVs in North America alone (Nikkei Weekly, 2008). The cyclical flows of operating expenses – such as rising material, transportation and labor costs in Asia, and the largess of the Americas' continental market – are critical reasons why corporations like Sanyo did not fully abandon the maquila manufacturing system. For instance, Sanyo plans to triple its North American sales of “electronic products,” including digital television sets, by the end of the fiscal year 2011, even if the production of more electronics also generates more electronic waste and toxins (Kane, 2008, p. B6). At the same time, these women may be the source of resistance in the future. According to Betty Robles from the Mexican Maquila Women Workers Network:

This is clearly demonstrated by the increased participation of women in Latin American social movements and in transnational organizations such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, which aim to support workers' rights and community struggles, but especially to “place special emphasis on defending the rights of women who suffer discrimination, humiliation, and sexual harassment in the workplace” (Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 2008, para. 1).

Conclusion

Television-set production in the digital era (and consumer electronics more generally) is an elaborate tale of how political, economic, and cultural forces have transformed (albeit unevenly) the communications industry into a prime site for digital capitalism. Although the switch to digital is often discussed as merely existing at the level of policymakers and consumers, it is irresponsible to not understand how the DTV transition will impact television-set production and workers at the forefront of those assembly lines. The movement to digital television and to information technology convergence has only just begun, and it is safe to forecast that the issues discussed in this chapter will not be resolved any time soon. However, as consumers of new technologies and as global citizens interested in social progress, it is imperative that we understand the production origins and the workforce context of the high-tech consumer equipment we consume everyday. Perhaps this will foster the recognition that the United States does not operate in a vacuum and that the anti-Latino immigrant-policy actions (which regard especially those of Mexican descent) are a performance that aims to suppress the reality of the enormous dependence of the US on Latin American and Latino labor, even now in the digital era.

Mayer's (2009, p. 16) analysis of digital television-set manufacturing in Manaus, Brazil, for instance, uncovers another site where global production, communication policy, and flexible labor “will likely accelerate the pre-existing trends that promote inequalities in industrial manufacturing zones, including increased stratification between the upper and lower ends of the social hierarchy as well as the isolation of managerial and technical classes in the zone from other elites.” She concludes: “Without a policy process that considers social inequalities in production locales, digital television instead may mean just another technology on the assembly line.”

Ironically, the transition to DTV is perplexing and causes anxiety to many consumers because the technology is such a deep financial investment on a personal scale. Yet there is a broader political–economic landscape, which is shaping that investment in ways that consumers, policymakers, or even the TV-set makers themselves cannot even begin to imagine (Galperin, 1999). The re-tooling of audiovisual industries already underway has made many aspects of the production process unpredictable, and yet the location of these processes in Latin America, and in Mexico in particular, seems certain to continue (Galperin, 2006). The global production of television sets and of consumer electronics has been characterized by intensified scales and by geographic dispersals, particularly to China and other Asian countries. While China may now be the leading producer of manufactured goods, and Asia as a whole may be the economists' “bright star” on the road to recovery from the recent 2008–2009 recession, the North American continent continues to look to Latin America for low-cost labor in order to satisfy its consumer markets (Burgress, 2010; National Intelligence Council, 2007).⁶ According to the US National Intelligence Council (2007), low labor costs, especially along the manufacturing zones at the border, sustain a context that, for all practical purposes, has integrated the northern states of Mexico into the US economy. In other words Mexico, and Latin America more generally, will remain strategic partners in the US and media industries' future economic growth. This chapter's historical analysis of the policy, economic, and employment practices of television manufacturing at the US–Mexico border demonstrates that the regional logic of maquiladoras will continue to be relevant in the new era of digital media, because maquiladoras provide the nuts and bolts of cheap labor, accessible transborder pathways, and a trade regime that benefits foreign investors. How exactly this future will be reconciled with the other ongoing border problems, such as unhealthy and exploitative labor conditions, political corruption, immigration flows, and narcotics-related violence, remains to be seen.

NOTES

1 NTSC (National Television System Committee) is used in North America and Japan. PAL (Phase Alternation by Line) is used in Western Europe. SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire) is used in France, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East (Crane, 1979, p. 11).

2 Jefferson Cowie's (1999) study of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) manufacturing relocations from Camden, New Jersey to Bloomington, Indiana, then to Memphis, Tennessee, and ultimately to Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico makes evident that the sad state of consumer electronics in the US was the result of a 70-year quest to escalate profits while lowering production costs – at all costs.

3 The global economic crisis of 2008–2009 is described by Cao et al. (2010) as the period in which the near collapse of the global financial systems is the largest economic shock to occur in 80 years (p. 12).

4 Border Film Project (2010) and Ojeda (2006) are two noteworthy examples of how activists utilize media outlets to show the inequities of the global manufacturing marketplace.

5 Safa (1981) and Sassen-Koob (1984) were some of the first to critically examine the links, especially in developing countries, between transnational production, labor, and women and to historicize the use of female workers as cheap labor. Since then, feminist scholarship has continued to investigate those links (see Fernández-Kelly, 2008; Fussell, 2000; McLaughlin & Johnson, 2007; Ong, 1991; Rios, 1990).

6 At last tally, Mexico continues to have the lowest hourly compensation costs at $3.91 an hour, compared to Canada's and United States' average of over $30 an hour (Manning & Butera, 2000, p. 194).

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