Workplaces are different than everyday life regardless of what country you’re in. Working in Mexico is definitely different than working in the U. S. My family was very lucky when moving their business to Mexico. The original employees hired have done a tremendous job. Although they were mostly young, they were very mature and had a great work ethic. As we’ve begun to open our factories and hire additional employees we’ve experienced many new challenges.
Production/factory work is different than anything that we’ve done before. The company had always wholesaled products made in Mexico and distributed them to retailers throughout the U. S. The basic function of our original employees in the warehouse was to do quality control and pack orders. There’s considerable flexibility in this work. All of the employees know their jobs, have the ability to organize their work and take breaks as they need them.
Factory production is different. It has to be much more organized, discipline and monitored. In addition, there’s a very long learning curve to doing the grabado so that there’s not an immediate economic benefit to the company. We hired a maestro from another city to teach. He’s an older man who we thought was very excited about teaching younger people the craft and also our desire to hire disabled individuals. More about this later...
Currently we have five individuals learning to do grabado, carving on glass. We’ve lost three employees along the way. Two employees left due to either running away with their boyfriend or getting married. The third employee that left was the second disabled individual hired. He basically left due to sexually harassing one of the young women. He resigned on his own when confronted.
For two years the company had been operating with young people working side by side and we had never experienced any problems of this nature… but… this is life and reality in today’s world… or just something that we recognize today and take seriously.
Previous to this we had talked to the maestro about letting us know if the employees were working hard or if there were any problems. Unfortunately he didn’t let us know about this situation. My regret is that we didn’t know about this earlier and might have been able to prevent this outcome. In order to not have this happen again and have a more organized production environment, we decided to have a supervisor in this area.
Three and a half months ago we hired our first disabled individual. Juan is a great individual with great presence. He’s in his late 30’s, married and has four kids. Juan was born with his disability and is basically paralyzed from the waste down. He stands less than 5’ tall and uses what I call polio crutches to get around. We decided to promote him to supervisor.
More to come…
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