By David Bacon
IRVINE, California — At the end of August, the gate into the Friction auto brake plant in Irvine swung shut for the last time. Its 110 workers moved on.
It's not unknown for factories in the United States to close as their production moves south. But this Orange County plant closed, not just because its production was moved, but because its workers reached across the border to help their co-workers at a Mexican plant belonging to the same company.
The battles around both factories show a new level of union resolve to cross borders to deal with a common employer in the era of free trade. But they are also a stark reminder of the obstacles these efforts face.
Friction belongs to a Connecticut-based transnational auto parts manufacturer, Echlin Inc. Throughout 1996 and 1997, workers at Echlin's ITAPSA brake plant in Mexico City endeavoured to form an independent union in their factory. Last US summer, three ITAPSA workers visited their Irvine counterparts to find out about conditions in US plants. They held an informal meeting at lunchtime in the street outside the facility.
The largely immigrant Mexican workforce at Friction identified with the effort. "We wanted to help the workers there win their rights", says Maria Villela, president of Local 1090 of the United Electrical Workers, the union at the plant.
ITAPSA workers needed all the help they could get. According to the independent Mexican union they tried to join, STIMAHCS, dozens of them were fired for their organising effort. An election was held at the plant on September 10 last year, but the independent union lost to a government-affiliated union Echlin supported.
After the election at ITAPSA, a new tri-national alliance of unions filed a complaint over the violation of workers' rights with the body set up to enforce North American Free Trade Agreement's (NAFTA) labour side-agreement. At a hearing before the National Administrative Office of the US Department of Labor, in Washington on March 23, more than two dozen ITAPSA workers and other union officials made submissions. Echlin never showed up.
On July 31, the NAO issued its report, declaring that workers "were subjected to retaliation by their employer and the established union in the workplace, including threats of physical harm and dismissal".
In Irvine, Friction workers continued to support their Mexican counterparts after the ITAPSA election. They signed a petition, demanding that Echlin re-hire the fired workers and recognise the independent union. When Villela and other union members presented it to Friction plant manager Mark Levy, "we could see in his face how angry he was. He told us we had drawn a line between the union and the company", she recalls.
In February, Echlin formally notified the union it was closing the Irvine plant. The move came as a shock to Friction workers, who have an average of 11 years on the job. "We think it's revenge", Villela declares. "We work like crazy here, and make the best product in the industry."
Echlin spokesperson Paul Ryder confirms that the work is being moved, although he says it's only going to other US factories. "We have overcapacity for that product line", he says. "The closure is just the normal course of business." He wouldn't respond to the allegation that the closure is revenge for workers' solidarity actions.
But the company may have had two other important reasons for its hostility to its Orange County workforce.
Workers organised their union there in 1994. Echlin's hostility was evident in a letter from the company's senior vice-president, Milton Makoski, to another union. He wrote: "We are opposed to union organisation of our current non-union locations ... We will fight every effort to unionise Echlin employees." He noted approvingly that, despite "60 years of determined and relentless efforts" by unions, a majority of Echlin's employees are still unorganised.
"There is only one [operation] in existence", he regretted, "where the employees ... have elected to be represented by a union". That operation was the Friction plant.
Once they organised their union, the Irvine workers became the spark plug of a NAFTA-zone alliance of unions with contracts in Echlin's factories, including the teamsters, the United Electrical Workers (UE), the paperworkers and Unite in the US, and the Canadian steelworkers and auto workers.
Unions in this unique labour alliance sought to assist each other in bargaining and organising. As the US auto industry relies increasingly on parts made in maquiladoras, increased union focus on struggles such at those at ITAPSA may just be beginning.
NAFTA's labour side-agreement contains no penalties for companies or governments which violate workers' labour rights. Nor does it protect workers like those at Friction, who take action to support their co-workers in other countries.
According to University of California professor Harley Shaiken, "in Mexican plants US investors get First-World rates of productivity, and a workforce with a Third-World standard of living".
To meet this challenge, "a growing number of unions are trying to deal with each other across borders", observes the UE's director of international solidarity, Robin Alexander. "Maybe there is no single answer to their problems, but we won't find any answers at all without looking for them.
Perhaps that was the sin of the Friction workers. They looked.