MEXICO: Union ballot exposes NAFTA's broken labour rights promises

March 28, 2001
Issue 

BY DAVID BACON

RIO BRAVO, TAMAULIPAS — Advocates of the North American Free Trade Agreement promised that free trade would bring a new era of respect for workers rights in all three countries — the United States, Canada and Mexico. Especially south of the border, they said, the treaty's labour "side-agreement" would ensure that workers could vote freely for the unions of their choice, in clean elections, by secret ballot.

But the March 2 vote at the huge Duro Bag plant in Rio Bravo, just across the river from Texas, is likely instead to become the symbol of how those promises have been broken. And with more promises on the horizon, as the Bush administration pushes for fast track authority to extend NAFTA to include the whole Western Hemisphere (except Cuba), Duro may even become the poster child for the treaty's failure to protect workers rights.

On the morning of Friday, March 2, voting began inside the factory, where workers labour around the clock cutting and gluing chichi paper bags for the US gift market. On the ballot were two unions — the independent union organised by rank-and-file workers over the last year, and the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), a union affiliated to Mexico's former ruling capitalist party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The stage was set the day before, when observers outside the plant watched automatic weapons unloaded from a car and carried in through the plant gate. Then, as Friday morning approached, workers from the night shifts were prevented from going home as their shifts ended. Instead, they were held in an area behind doors blocked with metal sheets and the huge rolls of paper used to feed machines on the line. A few observers from the independent union, the Union of Duro Bag Workers, reported later that they could hear cries of "Let us out!" until company managers began playing music at deafening volume on the plant speaker system.

Then, observers report, workers from the day shift were taken in small groups into the room inside the factory where voting was taking place. They were escorted by CROC organisers, who handed them blue slips of paper on which the union's local number was printed. At the voting table, representatives of Mexico's national labour board asked each voter to declare aloud her or his choice between the independent union and the CROC. Both company supervisors and government-affiliated union representatives wrote notes as the voting took place.

In the end, only 502 workers voted out of a work force the company says numbers over 1400. And of them, only four workers openly declared their support for the independent union, while 498 voted for the CROC.

"While the Duro election is clearly a tragic defeat for the workers and their efforts to win better wages and conditions", said Robin Alexander, director of international relations for the US-based United Electrical Workers, which supported the independent union, "I hope the violations here were so blatant that they'll serve as a wake-up call".

Long history

Workers at Duro have a long history of agitating for better wages and conditions, which led to their effort to form an independent union. According to Eliud Almaguer, a fired rank-and-file leader, many people lost fingers in machinery because of fast production and little protection. Duro's vice-president of manufacturing, Bill Forstrom, says wages start at 60 pesos a day (about US$6). Another fired Duro worker, Consuelo Moreno, relates that, "my daughter had to drop out of school this year, because we didn't have the money for her to continue".

The Duro Bag Manufacturing Corporation, based in Ludlow, Kentucky, also operates seven US plants, and belongs to the family of CEO Charles Shor. For years, its had a protection contract with a Mexican local of the Paper, Cardboard and Wood Industry Union, part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM has been a pillar of support for the country's ruling PRI bureaucracy since the 1940s. With a protection contract, the company paid CTM union leaders to guarantee labour peace.

Two years ago, the workers in the Duro plant decided to actually change that contract, and elect union leaders, including Almaguer, dedicated to enforcing it. That effort led to his firing in October 1999, and a work stoppage last April, when a further 150 workers were terminated. The CTM then signed a new agreement with Duro, with none of the higher wages and increased safety demands the workers were seeking. They began organising an independent union in response.

When the election finally took place, none of the fired workers were allowed into the plant to vote. The CTM, which had grown increasingly unpopular, withdrew from the process the morning of the election, and was replaced by the CROC. Many workers didn't even know the name of the union they were told to vote for, independent union observers allege.

Throughout the past year, however, Duro workers have had help from the north, organised by the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, based in San Antonio, Texas, a group of unions, churches and community organisations in the US, Mexico and Canada. Help also came from Mexico's new independent labour federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), based in Mexico City. Last summer they pressured the governor of Tamaulipas state, where the plant is located, into granting the independent union legal status.

US union support

US support was particularly controversial, leading to charges by Mexican employers and the government-affiliated unions that US unions were trying to chase the company's work back into its US plants. Rick de la Cruz, a vice-president of Local 6-314 of the US Paper, Atomic, Chemical and Energy Workers (PACE, which represents three Duro plants in the US), visited Mexico with fellow unionists from his Texas plant to support the independent union. He thinks the charges are ridiculous. "If that work leaves Mexico, it's not coming back to the US — it's going somewhere workers have even fewer rights", he says. "We just think everyone should have human rights, and not just in Mexico — in the US too."

Duro vice-president Bill Forstrom admits that the company only keeps automated operations north of the border, while its labour intensive operations are concentrated in Rio Bravo. "We're in Mexico to take advantage of inexpensive labour", he says. And in reaction to a protest outside Duro's Kentucky headquarters just prior to the election, company managers refused to allow the president of the PACE local at its Ludlow plant, Dave Klontz, to travel to Rio Bravo as an observer.

Border employers watching the Duro fight also feel threatened. Duro is just one of 3450 foreign-owned factories, employing over 1.2 million Mexican workers, according to the National Association of Maquiladoras. If more of these workers run their own unions, negotiate their own contracts, and raise wages, it will be very costly to the foreign corporations operating maquiladoras.

The company's legal battle was handled by attorneys from the Mexican employers' association, COPARMEX, the equivalent of the US National Association of Manufacturers. Those ties now reach up to the top level of the administration of Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox. Fox's labour secretary Carlos Abascal was formerly COPARMEX chief.

When the independent union at Duro presented its petition for the election to Abascal, it requested it be held on neutral ground with a secret ballot. Abascal denied the request, and the federal labour board, under his control, went on to administer the balloting in Rio Bravo. That decision to force workers to cast their votes in front of company managers, inside the plant, violated an agreement negotiated between his predecessor, Mariano Palacios Alcocer, and former US labour secretary Alexis Herman.

The agreement grew out of two celebrated cases filed under the NAFTA labour side-agreement — at the Han Young plant in Tijuana, and the ITAPSA plant in Mexico City. Abascal's decision to ignore it is one more hole in NAFTA's already-tattered credibility.

Since the treaty went into effect in January 1995, more than 20 complaints have been filed under the labour side-agreement. Almost all have charged that Mexico does not enforce laws guaranteeing workers the right to form unions of their choice, and to strike effectively when they do. A few have been filed against the US, charging a similar unwillingness to enforce workers' rights.

No remedies have ever been imposed which would have required rehiring a single fired worker, nor has a single independent union been able to negotiate a contract, as a result of any ruling in a case under the treaty. In Tijuana last June, independent unionists in its most publicised case — the strike at the Han Young factory — were even beaten and expelled from a public meeting to discuss workers' rights, called by the Mexican labour sub-secretary.

US officials present at the time made no public protest over the violence and expulsions. But they did, however, boast about one outcome of the Han Young case. According to Lewis Karesh, deputy secretary at the US Department of Labor under Herman, and head of the office which hears NAFTA complaints, the Mexican government promised that workers would be able to choose the union to represent them by secret ballot.

Duro was the first real test of that agreement, and despite protests from the US labour department, Abascal refused to abide by it.

"The Duro election strips away any idea that the NAFTA process can protect workers' rights. The side-agreement is bankrupt", declared Martha Ojeda, director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. "It shows that for both the US and Mexican governments, when the chips are down, their interest in promoting investment and free trade clearly outweighs any commitments they make about labour rights."

The Clinton administration argued that free trade agreements could protect workers rights while boosting profits for large corporations, and pointed to NAFTA's labour side-agreement as proof of its claim. Now the Bush administration and free trade supporters in Congress are expected to make similar arguments, as they seek approval to extend NAFTA to cover all of capitalist Latin America.

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