Joan Martínez Evora is a lecturer in business law at the Miami Herbert Business School. He has taught at the undergraduate, graduate, executive MBA, and law graduate levels. Before joining the School, Martínez Evora was a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law. He taught law of obligations (torts and contracts) and International Family Law. He had previously been a faculty member at the University of Havana School of Law, where he taught civil procedure.
On a sunny Florida morning, Joan sat down and decided to create a microsimulation. Professor Martinez sat at his keyboard, furiously tapping away. Thirteen hours later, he leaned back in his chair, satisfied. “Wow, I did it,” he thought to himself. He wanted to look beyond the parochial view in management; beyond the corrupt foreign practices or particular leadership skills. And he did.
A maquiladora, or maquila, is a company that allows factories to be largely duty-free and tariff-free. Many maquiladoras in Free Trade Zones and Industrial Parks in Latin America permit the imports of raw materials (like yarn) and export the finished product after tariff-free manufacturing. Maquila Inc. (Maquila of Hope) is the story of a United States manager who was transferred from the U.S. Headquarters to a maquiladora established in Honduras, Central America, in 2018, as part of a strategy to properly manage and sustainably expand manufacturing operations in the region.
In reality, Honduran textiles represent a considerable volume of yarn exports for the United States market and essential imports such as hospital uniforms and PPE. In the Capsim simulation, the United States manager must make a series of critical decisions: whether to pay a fee to the government-supported union leader (clearly not one who represents the interest of Hondurans textile workers); whether to fire an American employee who is pregnant with a child from the prior manager; and negotiating the purchase of a sewing machine, among many other ethically ambiguous decisions.
The simulation doesn’t have a happy ending. “If it’s too perfect, it’s not real,” Professor Martinez said. “The story I’m telling is one of those bad apples,” he said.
He hopes to expose students to the bad apples to recognize them in the industry before they take a bite.