De la universidad y al trabajo

PART 2 OF TESTIMONY BY MARIA ELENA GUARDADO

I had my first daughter shortly after I graduated from Monterrey Tech. As I have said, in México having a child or being pregnant and being a woman is like throwing in the towel because it makes everything virtually impossible. For so many interviews I would have to include on my applications that I had no children and I was single. But the jobs would not last for more than maybe six or eight months because the Mexican markets can be unstable, and the new hires are usually the first to go.

Finally I was hired by Sam's Club in México. I have to tell you that for a woman that is married and has a child, a job as manager in Human Resources is an abolute dream come true. I have been very fortunate in that regard. But I have to tell you, even though I struggled to get jobs when I first graduated, and even when I thought it was unfair that less-qualified men got jobs that women like me were automatically ineligible for, I was still surprised to what degree we could determine who was hired and who was not.

In México, believe me, there is almost no understanding of labor laws, and Sam's was not required to report how it made its determinations for hirees nor for when we let people go. We were pretty much given free reign to choose as we wanted to. Here in the United States you could never do something like that. When I first came here, I discovered that by law every place of business had to have those big blue informationals that let the workers know about discrimination and even gives out numbers to call. In México, you can't call anyone to help you do anything!

One of the requirements we had for some clients was where they went to school. We had a list of prep schools and universities where we were told to automatically disqualify the applicants if they came from those schools. There were a few good school's thrown into the pot, there were some national prep schools, and a lot of the applicant's were not even considered if they graduated from the wrong university.

For both men and women, they had to be under a certain age. Usually it was thirty years old for both, but many times the limit was lower for women by about two years. And in México, unlike here, you are allowed to ask for age and marital status and all of that stuff. I think here in the United States it's illegal to ask for age during a job interview.

There were some jobs that were sometimes impossible to fill. For example, there was an administrative job where only men could be hired (a lot of the admin jobs went only to men). The applicant would've been required to have gone to only a handful of universities and have had five years experience--at least--doing some kind of management in the relevant fields. By the time the applicant's would have graduated from their university they would be about 22 or 23 years old. Then add five years of mandatory experience, 27 or 28. Then the next requirement was that they be under the age of 30--no matter what. Which gave the applicant only a 2-3 year timeframe in which their skills could be capitalized! That is practically impossible to fill such a position. Oh yes, and they had to be married! For every good paying job men HAD to be married or they would be disqualified.

The thinking behind having men be married is that if they have a wife and kids then they are less likely to quit the job because he has the responsibility for his entire family. That way, by asking the interview questions we asked, we could determine how much control we had over our potential employees.

And of course women were the exact opposite. Like in my case, even with an education from a nice school, women were usually disqualified if they were married. Exceptions could be made, but usually it was avoided because it was understood that if a woman was married, it only be a matter of time before she was pregnant and no firm wants to deal with that in México.

Women had the worst treatment. There were a number of retail sales companies I was familiar with. There is one that is pretty uppity, I think it is called Liverpool, I am not exactly certain, but every single young lady that is on the sales floor is required to be single. Not only are there strict rules against pregnant women, those who get married usually understand that they won't be able to work anymore.

At Sam's, it was not much better. A girl could be married, but it was better that she be married while she was an employee, because we could let that slide. Had it been an applicant who was married, it would've taken a lot of experience for us to consider her. These practices are not unusual at all in México. It is not exclusive to industry and it is not exclusive to retail or commodity sales. it is pretty much across the board. I think this is one of the reasons that foreign companies came to México and other countries like ours, they decide they want to invest in a cheaper market where they pay is good by our standards, and practically illegal by theirs and are protected by lack of laws against a lot of unethical practices.

I want to add how I came to be here in the United States. My husband and I were living in Mexico City for a few years, and after we left a party one night and making our way to our car, a couple of young hoodlums with guns forced us into our own car and drove us to an ATM. Those little punks were so obviously nervous that it made me jittery because he had his gun drawn and i was so scared that he would accidentally shoot it off.

In México, the situation we were in is called, "Secuestro Express" because it happens so often and it is finished so quickly that it is almost like a service. Many times the people who are held hostage call their family and get them to pay a lot of money to let them go. In our case, it was an ATM fraud and my husband gave those two a lot of money.

This unsafe environment was very emotionally draining for me and my daughters and I wanted to leave. I did not feel safe in México anymore, I could hardly get out of the house without running back inside the house or being so incredibly paranoid that I would ball up into a bundle of nerves as I got into my car. Driving was way worse. I would think of all the news stories about carjackings, and i knew how dangerous the city was. I wanted out. I talked to my husband and I suppose he got authorization from the company he worked for--I think it was Hewlett Packard--to work in the United States. They gave him the L-1 Visa, which is the highest Visa that anyone can get, and he got it mostly because of his status as an engineer.

That is how I came to be here in the United States.


END OF PART 2