Mexico City - Once a week, vans loaded with reams of material to be stitched into trousers and shirts for US retailers, drive through the muddy streets of the Los Reyes-La Paz neighbourhood on the outskirts of Mexico City.

The fabric is distributed to the area's many seamstresses, who have a week to each make about 50 trousers and shirts. For sewing all day for some of the biggest and most expensive department stores, these women earn about 4,000 pesos (283 dollars) a month.

"They are the rich girls in the neighbourhood," says Maria Ortega, who commutes six hours a day and earns 1,500 pesos (106 dollars) a month cleaning offices.

Given the anonymous and impersonal nature of outsourcing, the seamstresses have no contact with the US retailers and are not employed by them. They work for sub-contractors, without any written or binding agreements. They can lose their jobs at any time and for any reason.

As the industry is unregulated, the seamstresses are at the mercy of the brokers and have no means of asking for better salaries. In the fancy stores, the price of the clothes is sometimes five times the cost of making them.

Fed up of the long hours and meagre pay as a seamstress, Beatriz Solano, 35, travelled to the country's border with the United States to look for work. She found it in one of the estimated 3,000 "maquiladoras" - factories that assemble imported parts, usually electronics and textiles, and then export the final product to the US.

"This life is not for me," she said of her work as a seamstress. However, she is now back home, and unemployed.

Development experts and economists say that women are empowered when they work outside their homes. However, this has never been more than an illusion for poor Mexican women workers. They are very easily exploited, and many contend that the theory of empowerment through work is erroneous.

While they work outside their homes to supplement their husbands' wages, they continue to look after the household chores and their children. According to Mexico's National Population Council, an estimated 6.6 million Mexican homes will be headed by women in 2010.

Ortega the seamstress was just 17 years old when she came to Mexico City to marry her fiance, a construction worker. They had two daughters. After her husband died, Ortega learned to write with help from her school-going younger daughter. Her older daughter, 25, does not study or work, and her husband, a goldsmith's assistant, is also unemployed.

Earning just 5 dollars a day, Maria has to provide for the household of four.

The experiences of seamstresses and "maquiladora" female workers does not reveal just personal tragedies, but is also representative of the economic and social context in which poverty among women unfolds in Mexico.

In 2006, there were 2.8 million women working for the Mexican "maquiladora" industry, according to officials. It often offers good formal work opportunities for women. In Tijuana, for instance, Solano could earn 500 to 1,200 pesos per week.

The negatives, which Solano and other Mexican women like her didn't know about in advance, were the high cost of living and insecurity in the country's border cities.

The working conditions are usually poor. The younger and less experienced the worker, the easier it is for the bosses to exploit her. And since there are no written contracts, workers never get to know their rights.

Female workers also get lower wages, and have little chances for promotions. With rising unemployment, men and women now compete for jobs in the "maquiladoras." As the production process is largely automated, the employers argue that men are better prepared to work the machines. So it's the men who usually get stable employment with relatively high salaries. (dpa)