Linking worker health and well-being with business performance measures in the maquiladora manufacturing industry in the US-Mexico border region

The maquiladora manufacturing industry along the US-Mexico border (specifically in the El Paso/Juarez border area) has easy access to plentiful inexpensive labor for manufacturing operations that involve significant manual labor components such as product assembly operations in plastics, automotive and electronic assembly plants. While the significant advantage to be gained from the inexpensive labor market may alone dictate business performance and productivity goals, these goals may be improved by applying ergonomics. The hypothesis of this research is that workers health and well-being and the quality of working life of workers in these maquiladora industries are significantly related to Business Performance Measures. Under the assumption that worker motivation and the ergonomic conditions of the workstation are highly related with the worker health and well-being diverse data from these stations was gathered using surveys and ergonomic checklists and then analyzed using descriptive statistics. Canonical correlations were used to establish correlations between the ergonomic improvements; well-being and Business Performance Measures. Finally, from a sample population of eight maquiladora industries; different success cases linking ergonomic improvements and Business Performance Measures were studied in order to validate the hypothesis that ergonomic improvements positively affect the measures of performance of the maquiladora manufacturing industry in the US/Mexico border. Through all of these tools the relationship between different ergonomic improvements; health and well-being and the Business Performance measures was proved.