From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua. JENNIFER BICKHAM MENDEZ, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Abstract

“Jobs, Yes… But with Dignity!”
(Political slogan quoted in Mendez, p. 155)

Nicaragua’s Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement is a particularly apt organization to consider in the context of the neoliberal post-Sandinista period. Known as MEC, after union organizer María Elena Cuadra, the women who formed the group in 1994 have struggled to retain their commitment to the labor and populist social base of the CST, the Sandinista party’s workers organization from which they emerged.