Electrical Union New – IUE-CWA (AFL-CIO)
Tuesday, December 18, 2001

Weekend on the Mexican Border:
Free Trade Face to Face

Part One

On a recent weekend trip to the Mexican border, German Ramirez, a receiver in Building 153 and member of the IUE/CWA Local201 Legislative Committee and myself were hosted by the Authentic Workers Front (FAT), an independent Mexican union, the Border Committee of Women (CFO) and DODS, two workers rights groups doing education and organizing work on the border. The United Electrical Workers (UE) organized the trip and invited us to participate.

About fifty bucks a week is all I would get if I worked for GE in Mexico. That’s what I was told by workers employed in the U.S. factory filled Maquiladora region of the US/Mexican border.

German and I got a crash course on Mexican labor law and the resulting worker exploitation due to manipulations and abuse of the law. The organizer took us on a tour of three industrial parks that are home to the maquiladoras. Some very familiar names such as Whirlpool, Panasonic, Lexmark, G.E., Ametek and TRW, to name only a few, employ thousands of workers at disturbingly low wages. We toured the colonias, or neighborhoods, where eighty percent of the factory workers live in poverty. We also heard stories from workers about factory conditions and how they are beginning to respond to cruel and unfair treatment. The weekend went by quickly, but will leave a very memorable impression.

What We Saw in Mexico - Mexican Labor Law
Benedicto Martinez of the FAT gave us an introduction to Mexican labor law, which was necessary in order for us to understand how much of an up hill battle the workers have. Mexican labor laws are the best there are anywhere in the world. In fact written right in their constitution is the right to organize. Also, all workers are entitled by law to 10% profit sharing, a Christmas bonus, twelve weeks paid maternity leave, guarantied severance pay, and other benefits. On paper workers in Mexico have more protection and benefits than we do here in the United States.

What Martinez continued to explain was how the workers never receive these benefits and are not protected at all by their government or their unions from numerous abuses of the corporations. Even more disturbing were the ways in which the government, the official government – sanctioned unions, and the companies all work together directly and indirectly to deny workers their rights. This leads to the need for independent unions and centers for workers in Mexico.

Corporate Response to Mexican Labor Law
The corporations seem to all use similar tactics to keep workers in-line and discourage workers from organizing. Potential leaders or agitators are harassed and intimidated, beaten or fired. Some are given management positions. Workers are also threatened with having their jobs shipped to China if they try to air their complaints and grievances. Women are occasionally required to submit pregnancy testing or lose their jobs. Although this practice is illegal, the company will terminate a pregnant woman to get out of paying government mandated maternity leave. Many workers are also fired if they get injured on the job. Many companies require that personal protective equipment like safety glasses and safety shoes are deducted from their employee’s fifty-dollar a week paychecks.

The Unions, the Government, and the Company
When corporations decide they want to move to Mexico they are given a choice of which unions they want before settling in the country. The union that gives them the best deal is the one the corporation will pick. The web site of the McCallen Texas/Reynosa Mexico Economic Development Commission, for example, offers US corporations like Ametek a choice between different unions or no union at all. The workers have no choice.

The union contract is usually kept secret with no copy given to the membership. Most employees will be unaware that a union and a contract even exist unless it is absolutely necessary. If enough workers in the plant begin to complaint about a grievance the union will then appear to do management’s work, showing the employee the door. The unions work to protect the interest of the company and the government and not the workers.

A Startling Contrast - The Maquiladoras
The maquiladora factories are the most beautiful structures in the area. In Reynosa, thousands of workers are now employed by the world’s largest and most profitable corporations. Billions of investment dollars have been pouring into the country. Huge palace-like structures, surrounded by well-maintained landscapes of grass, trees and pretty shrubs, professionally designed, fill hundreds of thousands of acres in three industrial parks.

These are the monuments of triumph and success; each one is much more than just a factory building. Each one is a testament of success in the world of free trade. Old Glory flies out in front of a U.S. based corporation along with the Mexican and corporate flags, on towering flag poles, a symbol of victory by big business over organized labor in the United States, and victory of foreign investment over workers rights for the people of Mexico. These are the maquiladoras.

This is where unfinished products are shipped as exports mainly from the United States for assembly and shipped back to the US for sale. Ninety thousand workers in Reynosa are part of the over one million workers who are employed by a growing number of Maquiladoras. Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the growth of the Maquiladoras has exploded to 3500 factories on the border in the year 2000, up from 1200 in 1994 the year NAFTA was implemented.

The Poverty of the Colonias
The growing number of Maquiladoras is being fed from workers displaced from the countryside. Big Trans-national corporations like Cargill are buying up privatized farmland displacing farmers and people who ran small businesses. Many people, told of plentiful job opportunities, head for the border hoping for a better life, steady work, and a future with some of the biggest corporations in the world.

What they find and what we witnessed first hand on our neighborhood tour are the most disgraceful, unsanitary living conditions anyone could ever imagine. We’d done some reading, figured we were prepared, but total shock was the best way to describe how I felt when I saw the old shacks that lined the trash-filled, unpaved muddy and bumpy roads of the colonia. Children played amongst the old tires and abandoned old cars along with trash bags and other rubbish in the neighborhood. Many of the shacks where people lived were made from pallets that came from factories. The organizers told us that in Juarez, another Maquila town, workers lived in cardboard boxes that were used to transport machinery to the factories.

One issue that can’t be stressed enough is the idea that things are cheaper in Mexico; it is simply not true. We saw right away that prices for just about everything were the same as they were in the US. It was explained to us that prices are higher on the border because small business owners take advantage of their proximity to the border and US visitors with more money than the local population to spend on their products.

The contrast between the beautiful factories and the neighborhoods where the workers lived was almost too much to bear. I kept thinking how could this happen and wanted to help do something about it. If the corporations know what is going on down there and are taking advantage of it then shame on them. If they don’t know what is going on, which is really hard to believed then shame on them as well. I don’t know which is worse, them not knowing or knowing and not doing anything about it. In any case, the evidence of exploitation of Mexican workers by the corporations has never been more clearer to me as a result of this trip.

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