June 1995
by Andrew Wheat
by Laura McClure
by Stephen Coats
Nigeria - A Strike for Democracy
by Katherine Isaac
by Paul Majkut
AFL-CIO Reborn?
The Front
Globalizing Trade Unions
An Interview with Bill Jordan
Panning Fiji’s Gold Industry
Under Clinton’s plan, OSHA fines on companies breaking workplace safety rules will be reduced or eliminated if errant companies put in place health and safety programs in consultation with their workers. Workplace inspections would also be reduced for these companies.
The plan is based on a two-year pilot project involving 200 workplaces in Maine. The project, in which 98 percent of the businesses opted to set up worker safety and health programs rather than pay penalties, resulted in "an extraordinary reduction in workplace injuries and illnesses," according to Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
"We’re interested in prevention, not punishment," Clinton says. "It would suit me if we had a year in this country where OSHA did not levy a single fine, because if that happened, we’d have safer workplaces, more productive businesses, we’d be making more money with happier people going to work every day."
Robert Wages, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, calls the Clinton approach "ridiculous," noting, "We’ve had joint committees in the oil industry since 1973, and we don’t have a compellingly good record to show for it."
"I don’t think there’s a logical connection between taking punitive damages away and making workplaces safer," Wages adds. "It’s just class-one pandering."
The plan was formulated as part of Clinton’s "Reinventing Government" program, and in response to a Republican proposal to cut OSHA’s budget by 50 percent.
"I am stunned and dismayed at th[is] catastrophic event," said Anglo Chair Julian Ogilvie Thompson in a May 12 statement. "My colleagues and I in the management of the Anglo American Corporation are determined to see that the cause of the disaster is vigorously investigated and that every aspect of the event is fully revealed."
South Africa has seen more mining disasters than any other country. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) estimates that, in 1994, 424 people were killed and 5,727 injured in 5,851 accidents. The South African Labor Ministry issued a statement following the Vaal Reefs disaster underscoring "the need for better health and safety measures" in the mines.
"We blame management for the negligence which caused the disaster," says National Union of Mineworkers President James Motlatsi. "At Vaal Reefs, safety shortcuts had become routine working practices in order to save time and to save money."
"We have been demanding the right of mineworkers to be involved in maintaining safety, safety inspections and training, but the companies have always refused."
Anglo denies the negligence charges.
The bill, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kansas, would require proposed regulations with an effect on the economy in excess of $50 million to undergo risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis to weigh the benefits of consumer protection against the industry costs of regulatory compliance before enactment. No government agency would be able to apply regulations if their costs outweighed their monetary benefits.
Critics have stressed the difficulty of quantifying the advantages of regulations and have decried the burden of tallying such costs at a time when Congress is cutting the funding of many government agencies.
Under the new bill, says Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook, "people will be endangered while faceless corporate entities flourish. The bottom line will outweigh the value of consumer safety ... more lives will be ruined and more lives lost as a result."
A statement by the Consumers Union said the bill "would undercut existing consumer protections and greatly retard the development of new protections."
Critics point to meat inspection standards as a prime example of how consumers would lose out under the bill. In January 1995, the USDA proposed a new meat inspection system to replace existing standards that have been in place since 1906. The new rules would protect consumers from contaminated meat by requiring procedures such as sanitizing animals with anti-microbial treatment, keeping meat properly refrigerated and testing for pathogens including E. coli and salmonella. Dole’s bill would send the new meat inspection rules back to the USDA to be redrafted in accordance with new "regulatory reform" requirements.
"We know how to prevent the spread of E. coli, yet the Senate is about to weaken ... meat inspection techniques that haven’t changed since the turn of the century," says Donna Rosenbaum, director and co-founder of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), a grassroots group of hundreds of families whose children have died or fallen ill due to E. coli poisoning.
"The regulatory reform bill would not block tougher health and food safety standards," Dole says. "The bill simply asks that agencies use common sense to avoid unnecessary costs when pursuing important goals such as health and safety."
- Aaron Freeman
The severity of the crisis facing organized labor has overcome union leaders’ proclivity for blind organizational loyalty and near-automatic opposition to internal dissent. "We can’t wait any longer and watch the continued decline of the American labor movement," says Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and a leading player in the effort to replace the old AFL-CIO regime.
Having forced the retirement of Kirkland, the insurgent unions now appear poised to install a slate headed by John Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Richard Trumka, president of the United Mine Workers of America, is the slate’s candidate for secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, the labor federation’s number two position; and the insurgents have put forward Linda Chavez- Thompson, an AFSCME vice president, as their candidate for executive vice president, a newly-proposed position.
Although they will have to overcome the presidential candidacy of Tom Donahue, secretary treasurer under Kirkland, the insurgent coalition - led by big unions such as the Teamsters, AFSCME, SEIU, the United Auto Workers, the Machinists and the Steelworkers - claims already to have locked up more than half the votes for the October election.
If they are successful, the challenges facing Sweeney and the new AFL-CIO leadership will be enormous. They will have to chart a very different course than the one mapped out by the reclusive Kirkland if they hope to resuscitate the labor movement.
Kirkland failed in his role as a movement leader. He disdained public appearances, and failed to put a human face on the labor movement - even as it became increasingly important to do so as right-wing forces branded labor a "special interest." He failed to deliver as a political leader, providing no meaningful opposition to the Reagan onslaught and unable to eke out any significant victories even under the Democratic Clinton administration.
Kirkland acted decisively only in international affairs - and there destructively. His anti-communist mania led the AFL-CIO to work with the Reagan administration and the CIA, supporting conservative business unions and opposing progressive unions throughout the Third World - at exactly the time when alliances with progressive unions became critically important to respond to economic globalization.
If he takes the helm of the AFL-CIO, Sweeney’s most important task will be to recruit new members to the labor movement. Organized labor now represents under 16 percent of the workforce, less than half the total in 1960. Representation in the private sector - where patterns are set for workers in both the private and public sectors - hovers around 10 percent.
The AFL-CIO does not do direct organizing - workers belong to the individual unions that combine to make up the federation, not to the federation itself - but it can lead a renewed movement-wide commitment to organizing.
Sweeney has compiled a strong record of supporting organizing as president of SEIU. SEIU has been one of the few unions in recent years to make a serious commitment to organizing - and its investment has paid off, with the union’s membership growing by more than half in the last 15 years.
The union has successfully employed aggressive and innovative organizing strategies. Faced with the problem of building owners hiring janitors through independent contractors and then switching contractors if the janitors unionized, for example, SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign has refused to be defeated by the independent contractor ruse. Instead, it has led pickets, protests and sit-ins against the real employers - image- conscious building owners. The result: more than 30,000 building service workers organized in the last eight years.
If Sweeney can infuse the SEIU’s creative organizing spirit into the entire labor movement and facilitate a substantial commitment of union resources to organizing - as he has promised to do - organized labor may be able to stop its decline.
Sweeney will also have to establish a high profile and set a new, forceful tone for the labor movement. He will have to appear regularly on the news talk shows and in the other public forums Kirkland avoided. But more importantly, he will have to speak to workers on the front lines of labor battles and work to become a figure with whom workers want to identify. One place to visit immediately is Decatur, Illinois, the site of three bitter strikes and lockouts, including one at Caterpillar, which is the biggest union- busting effort since the PATCO air controllers strike.
On the political front, a Sweeney-led labor movement can be expected to work more closely with community groups and national public interest organizations to promote a broad progressive agenda. And there is certainly no shortage of vital issues for labor to tackle (minimum wage, striker replacements, worker safety, health care, free trade, an investment-oriented national budget and daycare, to name just a few).
But although organizing and political activism reinforce each other, for the most part organizing must precede effective political action. Once the labor movement is an active presence in workplaces and again in sync with workers’ mindsets, unions can reemerge as powerful players in the political arena.
With ultimate union power in the United States located in national unions rather than the national federation, the remaking of the AFL-CIO - if that is what a Sweeney takeover would signify - will not ensure the remaking of the U.S. labor movement. If the insurgents’ success in internal politics jump-starts the movement, however, the prospects for a successful progressive response to the rightward lurch in U.S. politics will brighten.
Yang Bong-soo, an employee fired from the plant in February for conducting a sit- in to protest the factory’s excessive production workload, set himself on fire at the entrance to the plant after Hyundai security guards refused him entry to attend a union meeting. Yang died in a hospital four weeks later. His struggle galvanized workers at the plant and led to work stoppages throughout the week of May 15.
Strike leaders demanded compensation for then-critically-injured Yang, the return of seven workers dismissed from the Ulsan plant since 1992 and an apology.
Hyundai responded by shutting down the plant indefinitely.
A May 18 rally against the shutdown by 5,000 strikers and members of the Hyundai Precision and Industry and Hyundai Heavy Industry unions was followed by a May 19 pre-dawn raid on the plant by 2,000 riot police. Police arrested more than 300 protestors and charged 13 protest leaders with leading an illegal strike.
The police raid followed threats by Hyundai union leaders to bring the company to a grinding halt if the government and the corporation resorted to force rather than negotiation to end the walkout.
On June 3, over 10,000 Korean students and labor organizers demonstrated in Seoul against government crackdowns on unions, demanding the release of detained labor leaders. The demonstration was fueled not only by the events in Ulsan, but also by labor discontent with the government’s attempts to privatize Korea Telecom, the national telephone company.
On June 6, Seoul police ignored protests by religious authorities and stormed a Buddhist temple and the city’s Catholic Cathedral to arrest 13 Korea Telecom union leaders who had been holding sit-ins there since before the demonstrations. Six of these leaders were in the midst of a hunger strike begun in late May to protest the privatization initiative.
According to Ellen Greenberg of the Seoul-based Yong Dong Po Urban Industrial Mission, protestors fear that privatization of the telecommunications sector in Korea will "lead to job reductions of thousands of workers, and provide a way for the government to reduce union influence," as well as increasing the power of chaebols.
Chaebols are huge industrial conglomerates - usually built along kinship lines - that dominate the Korean economy and wield enormous political influence. Unionists fear that chaebol control of the telecommunications industry would lead to anti-competitive behavior.
According to news wire reports and the labor journal Korean Worker, the government has insisted that it will not tolerate illegal union actions that President Kim Young-Sam has characterized as "national-security threatening." The Korean Ministry of Labor in Seoul did not respond to inquiries by Multinational Monitor about the government response to the protests.
The May and June conflicts come on the heels of six months of renewed labor unrest in Korea. The Korea Telecom fight mirrors disputes in the later half of 1994 involving the National Railway Engineers Federation and the Seoul Subway Workers Union. Strikes by these unions in July 1994 over wage freezes prompted police raids and the arrest of 20 union leaders, five of whom had been sheltered in the Cho-Gye Buddhist Temple. Several monks were injured as they attempted to block the arrests.
On April 18, 1995, an independent Korean Council of Trade Unions (KCTU) delegation visiting new Labor Minister Jin Nyum was set upon by riot police without provocation, according to Korean and international trade unions. A report from the KCTU and the Washington, D.C.-based AFL-CIO International Affairs Department indicates that police beat and detained dozens of workers, forcing the hospitalization of eight workers with injuries ranging from brain damage to broken limbs. The next day, police stormed the hospital to incarcerate six injured workers.
While the labor conflicts of the last few months pale beside the massive, anti- military government unrest of the late 1980s, the recent surge in labor militancy has worried the government. It seems particularly concerned about moves by workers to organize trade union councils independent of the pro-government Federation of Korea Trade Unions.
Although Korea’s military government was replaced by a civilian administration in 1993, labor repression continues virtually unabated, despite election promises to reform Korea’s harsh labor laws. "Two years into a so-called democratic government, you still have the police and the military treating labor actions as criminal actions and a government that is ignoring the advice of the International Labor Organization to bring its laws into compliance with international standards," says Pharis Harvey of the Washington, D.C.- based International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund.
Lim Song Khu, assistant secretary of the Seoul Subway Workers Union, speaking to labor activists in Australia in 1994, made a similar point. "The only change [in Korea] is that the ideology of international competition has replaced Cold War ideology. The restraint of wage increases and attempts to negatively revise the labor laws are all justified in the name of improving Korean competition in the international market."
Korean labor law continues to ban unions not included in the Federation of Korea Trade Unions. Government critics view this limitation as an attempt to curb independent national and industry-wide union organizations, such as the Workers’ Federation of Hyundai Companies.
"The government and industry are dead-set against the formation of any chaebol-wide trade union federation," says Harvey. "Hyundai has the strongest chaebol [so] whenever any Hyundai [union] organization attempts to strike, [the company and the government] bring in the full power of the government in an attempt to suppress them." Since many Hyundai unionists are quite militant, says Harvey, "the disputes often escalate to armed violence on the part of the government."
Changes in the broader Korean economy may also be driving recent government crackdowns on the South Korean labor movement. Wages have increased rapidly since the late 1980s.
"These wages are a real concern to the government, particularly the economic planners," says Gordon Flake, research director at the Korean government-funded Korea Economic Institute. "The government sees their competitiveness eroding as their traditional strengths in the low-value-added, labor-intensive goods such as footwear and electronics are lost to China and Southeast Asia."
Harvey agrees that international competition provides a partial explanation for the actions of the government. He notes, however, "international competitiveness is used as an excuse by Korea and every other repressive government."
Perhaps more important in explaining the government crackdown is the campaign for the June 27 local elections in which the ruling party is faring poorly. "Labor unrest is generally looked down upon by [Korean] society at large," says Flake. "If the president can seem strong and seem to have firm control, he will be viewed favorably by the public at large."
Harvey agrees with this assessment. "The present government does not have a labor constituency and so will play to the middle class who are worried about competitiveness by engaging in strong actions, irrespective of what these actions will mean to Korea’s long-term development success."
- Craig Forcese
Like many other brand-name shoe and apparel makers, Nike contracts out the job of actually manufacturing the goods it designs, markets and sells. Most of Nike’s suppliers are Korean- or Taiwanese-run operations in Indonesia .
In response to accusations by workers making shoes in Nike’s 10 Indonesian supplier factories - accusations voiced sometimes by the workers but more often through international allies who do not have to fear for their jobs or safety - Nike adopted a voluntary code of conduct in 1992. The company also entered into "memorandums of understanding" with each of its suppliers to ensure they uphold Nike standards.
But a look at current Nike activities in Indonesia shows that the company and its suppliers frequently violate their most basic promises.
Code of misconduct
Workers at Nike’s supplier factories report dangerous conditions, intimidation of employees and paltry wages.
Siti (not her real name), a worker at the P.T. Pratama Abedi Industri (PAI) factory in Serpong, near Jakarta, was physically abused by her Korean supervisor, Mr. Kang, in April. Slapped in the face and swatted on her behind, Siti had inadvertently scuffed a Nike shoe she was working on, rendering it unacceptable to the buyer. Kang, who had come to PAI from P.T. Nagasakti (NASA), another of Nike’s 10 Indonesian suppliers, brought over Mr. Lee, another supervisor, to see her mistake. "You are a dog!" he shouted in the only Korean words that the workers understand. She was too fearful to lodge a protest, Siti says.
The workers at PAI work 60-hour weeks with few breaks. "The only rest you can get is after you collapse at your machine," Siti says. It happened to her recently, she says. She nodded off and hit her head, after which she got a short rest in the infirmary.
When asked if management excuses mistakes made by workers who toil to the point of exhaustion, Siti replies that her supervisors are very unforgiving. Physical attacks on workers occur often, she says.
A friend of Siti’s says Mr. Kang recently slapped each member of a 14-person quality control team at PAI.
Some of the 12,000 workers at the huge Nikomas plant, Nike’s largest supplier in Indonesia, tell similar stories. Nikomas workers say line supervisors demand unrealistic production targets which lead to serious injuries. "A worker lost four fingers last week," one says, adding that someone lost a few fingertips the previous night. "Workers go to dangerous machinery without even a week’s training," adds Tantowi, a Nikomas employee.
Cheating on wages is also a problem at Nikomas, workers allege. Last year, the company delayed payment of a new minimum wage scheduled to begin April 1. The wage was to go from about $1.35 to $1.80 per day. In fact, the company did not begin to pay the increased wage until a massive strike was called in mid-July.
Nikomas has dealt harshly with protesting workers. In March 1995, the company locked 12 workers who expressed grievances in an unused room on the factory premises for a week, keeping them under the watch of a uniformed member of the local military command. Since then, the workers have been suspended without pay in violation of the Indonesian labor code.
Nike did not respond to questions about the 12 workers.
Memorandum of misunderstanding
These sorts of abuses are supposed to be a thing of the past. Nike now insists that each of its suppliers sign a "memorandum of understanding," which is supposed to guarantee that contractors comply with Nike’s codes, forswear forced labor and respect the environment. The memorandum is the centerpiece of a 100-plus-page "Nike Production Primer" sent to journalists and researchers at ethical investment funds in late 1994. Nike first started touting the memorandum - along with its Code of Conduct - more than three years ago. The Primer devotes about 10 pages to addressing specific charges of abusive labor practices by Nike suppliers, mostly in Indonesia. The rest of the Primer is filled with statements by factory managers indicating that each is applying the new standards.
The Production Primer notes only two instances of intervention by Nike’s managers in Indonesia over the three and a half years since the code and memorandum been introduced. Those who work for Nike suppliers suggest much more supervision will be necessary if Nike’s purported standards are to be meaningfully enforced.
Tantowi, a Nikomas employee, brightens when told of the memorandum of Understanding. He is happy to learn that the Primer promises that the memorandum should be posted - in English and Indonesian - near each production line in Nike- producing factories.
While no factory workers interviewed by Multinational Monitor ever saw the memorandum, it is prominently posted at the entrance of Nike’s twenty-second-floor office in downtown Jakarta.
Nike did not respond to questions about whether their memorandum of understanding was posted at each production line as promised in the Primer.
"Do you think Nike’s American managers would respond to our demands - based on the memorandum - if we went straight to them?" Tantowi asks.
Tantowi is keenly aware of the leverage Nike’s U.S. managers can exert on their supplier supervisors in Indonesia. "We feel so much better when [the buyers are] around," Tantowi says. He was among the hundreds of workers at P.T. Nikomas last year who witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a U.S. Nike manager dressing down a malevolent Taiwanese supervisor, Simon Chi. Chi had lost his temper with a young Indonesian line worker, shouting in such a threatening manner that the girl fainted and was taken to the infirmary.
Conversations with workers who produce Nike shoes suggest the mother company does indeed have the authority to dramatically improve the plight of their contract labor force - if the company ever were to decide to vigorously enforce its written standards.
Recent labor unrest in Indonesia has improved workers’ bargaining strength modestly. Activists and academics alike say that the hundreds of strikes around Jakarta in the last three years have forced employers to pay at least the government-set minimum wage. But, to attract foreign investment, the minimum wage is set at just 6 percent above the poverty line.
In repressive Indonesia, prospects for more far-reaching improvements in working conditions appear dim in Nike supplier factories unless Nike sends a clear signal to its suppliers.
- Jeff Ballinger
Sidebar
Out of Step
With Local Norms
PROPONENTS OF EXPORT-LED development argue that export industries lead to higher-paid jobs for Third World workers.
But at least one company in Indonesia has found that to win and maintain Nike contracts it needs to squeeze workers performing contract work for Nike exports harder than it does those producing shoes for the local market.
Producing cheap shoes for the Indonesian market, the Canadian company Bata pays full-time workers nearly double the rate it pays workers making expensive sports shoes for export. Laborers making Nike shoes for Bata are designated "contract workers" and rarely granted the status of permanent workers. For permanent employees, Bata has a collective labor agreement, which contains a seniority scale for workers who stay with the company. The lack of increased pay after the first year’s experience is one of the chief complaints workers have against Nike suppliers operating in Indonesia.
Bata’s full-time workers also get a holiday bonus of between $170 and $450 each year. The most that their Nike contract workers receive is about $50.
- J.B.
by Andrew Wheat
MEXICO CITY - A MEXICAN AFFILIATE of U.S.-based Kirkwood Industries has terminated as many as three- fifths of some 240 workers at its electrical component plant in Mexico City since March 1995, replacing them with workers supplied by a union of the company’s choosing. Sacked workers say they were fired for trying to form an independent labor union that would represent their interests rather than those of Kirkwood.
During the six decades that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has ruled Mexico , the government has tightly controlled the country’s major labor unions such as the huge Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Repeatedly during the administrations of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his successor, current president Ernesto Zedillo, CTM leader Fidel Velásquez, who emerged as a union leader in the 1930s, has embraced government economic pacts that have been devastating for workers. The pacts endorsed by Velásquez, now 95, have driven down workers’ real wages as the cost of basic necessities has soared. A recent study by the Institute of American Union Studies found that in the last 12 years real Mexican wages have suffered their worst decline in modern history, with worker buying power falling to one-third of its 1982 level.
Workers throughout Mexico have tried to organize unions that actually will represent their interests. Under the terms of the labor side agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a few of these efforts have gained some international attention. Recent complaints filed with the NAFTA-created National Administrative Office (NAO) have charged Sony, Honeywell and General Electric with illegally interfering with the rights of workers in maquiladora border assembly plants to freely associate and organize (see Social Dumping’ in Mexico Under NAFTA," Multinational Monitor, April 1995 ). At best, however, the toothless NAO’s only power in NAFTA countries is that of moral suasion.
Independent-minded workers
Kirkwood’s labor problems began in late 1994. Kirkwood workers, most of whom are women, complained that the plant’s lunch room and toilets were filthy. Another complaint they made was that plant security guards, who frisk employees at the plant gates, and an engineer, Juan Sebastian San Vicente, sexually harassed some women workers. In addition to these charges, some workers - most of whom have since been fired - had a more fundamental demand: an independent union.
"We had a union [a CTM affiliate] but it was only concerned with the welfare of the firm," says Ernesto Alfonso Recanco, a sacked Kirkwood lathe operator who leads the workers seeking independent union representation. "The workers here have not had any ... representation during the 18 to 20 years since this plant opened here."
Under Mexico’s labor law, workers have the right to form unions, change unions or switch union leadership. The catch is that Mexican authorities must approve any such changes and companies employ coercive tactics to prevent departures from compliant union representation. Labor authorities have used their approval powers to promote unions aligned with the government and business. And businesses have intimidated, fired and bribed workers and threatened to close plants if an independent union prevails.
Kirkwood workers say that when they began to assert their independence, the CTM affiliate withdrew and was replaced by another union, the Confederation of Workers and Peasants of the State of Mexico (COCEM), which also has close ties to the ruling PRI. Expelled Kirkwood workers and the independent Authentic Labor Front (known by its Spanish acronym, FAT) say the COCEM is infamous for its strong-arm tactics in helping companies break up independent union initiatives.
Benedicto Martínez Orozco is one of three top FAT leaders and the secretary general of STIMAHCS, the FAT-affiliated metal workers union that is seeking to represent Kirkwood workers. Martínez says that the day Kirkwood fired Recanco, 15 COCEM thugs and armed police officers loaded Recanco into a car and took him to a restaurant where they tried to convince him to resign. Martínez says COCEM’s close ties with the PRI’s party machinery in the State of Mexico allows COCEM to mobilize a police presence on its behalf. The Kirkwood plant straddles the border between northern Mexico City and the State of Mexico, one of 32 Mexican states.
"All the problems began in December [1994], when COCEM arrived," says Virginia Vallegas Chimal. A Kirkwood worker for 10 years, Vallegas says she was fired after she refused a demand by plant manager Emilio Grandio that she pledge allegiance to COCEM. Vallegas, an inspector of the electrical components that Kirkwood produces for appliance makers such as Philips, Sunbeam and Braun, says the company falsely accused her and some of her co-workers of crimes, reporting to the police that they had committed theft, sabotage and even attempted to kidnap the plant manager.
Hands-off policy
No representative of Kirkwood management in Mexico City could be reached for comment, despite repeated calls from Multinational Monitor. An attorney at Kirkwood’s Cleveland, Ohio headquarters, Greg Ensigne, says the privately held company is a minority owner in the Mexico City operation; he identified the majority owner as a Mexican named Mauricio Merikanskas. Asked why the Mexico plant bears the Kirkwood name, Ensigne says his company’s name is used for marketing purposes. "Our name is synonymous with the [electrical] computator business worldwide, so all of our foreign affiliates carry the Kirkwood name in some reference," he says.
It is a common practice for foreigners to invest in Mexico through so-called prestanombres or the "borrowed names" of Mexican nationals, an arrangement designed to insulate foreign investors from liabilities. But, according to Ensigne, "We don’t have any control over the [Mexico City] operations whatsoever on any basis." Ensigne says he has no detailed knowledge of the labor problems at the Kirkwood plant in Mexico, saying that his knowledge of specific worker complaints is limited to letters of complaint that the company has received in response to a solidarity campaign promoted by U.S. unions such as the United Electrical Workers of America. "A visit [to Mexico] had been planned in the latter part of May which, because of other business, had to be cancelled," Ensigne says. "I was going to go down personally to see what was happening, not that we’d have any control, but just so we’d have our own first-hand information."
Martínez says the position taken by the U.S. Kirkwood is convenient, if disingenuous. "They are not as removed from the situation" as they suggest, he says. "As investors, they have the means to intervene." He says Kirkwood is cautiously distancing itself because if the "labor conflict in Mexico got extremely bad, it could affect [Kirkwood’s] investments in its U.S. plant."
Hands-on policy
Some workers say that maintaining contact with fired workers is sufficient grounds for dismissal at Kirkwood. Francisca Benítez Cantera, one of the most recently fired workers, says Kirkwood employed her to polish electrical collectors, a job that is usually done with protective gloves because the metal collectors cut fingers and hands. After the dismissals had begun and management observed that she was friendly with the fired workers protesting outside the plant gates, Benítez says her boss refused to give her gloves in an attempt to get her to resign. "He always told me that there were none left. I asked him to change my job, but it continued until my hands bled. Some workers had gloves and others didn’t. Some of those who didn’t have gloves were with the FAT but those who did have gloves were with COCEM."
Benítez says that despite the harassment, she refused to quit and the company decided to fire her. She says that when she was fired on May 27 she asked her immediate supervisor what she had done wrong. According to Benítez he said, "Sincerely, you didn’t do anything but your fraternizing with the comrades brought this upon you."
Augustina Villera Barerra says she is one of the women who engineer Juan Sebastian San Vicente harassed. "He would come around as if to review papers, but it wasn’t that. What he really wanted was for me to go out with him," she says. "But since I never accepted, he began to box me in. He threatened me and told me that if I wouldn’t go out with him, he would report lies about me [to management]. He would try to get me any way he could. If I was working in one spot, he would move me to another and demand more production from me."
Juan Sebastian San Vicente is less flirtatious with reporters than his female subordinates accuse him of being with them. Leaving the plant for his lunch break, the engineer declined to discuss the matter and said he had no idea why workers were demonstrating in front of his workplace. Growing irritable at being questioned, he issued a vague warning: "Be careful, we are in Mexico."
The purge
Under Mexican law, a fired worker can appeal to the local Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, composed of one representative each from the unions, business and the government. But with Mexico’s official unions and a government that bends over backwards for multinational companies, these boards typically reflect a narrow business perspective. Martínez says the Board of Reconciliation and Arbitration normally rules in favor of the company and the official unions but it acted legally and fairly in the Kirkwood case - up until the time of the June 21 union vote.
Regardless of the impartiality of interests on a given board, even if a worker is found to have been fired unjustly, he or she has no right to be reinstated, provided that the employer pays three months pay plus other damages. "An employer can at any time fire union organizers, activists or dissidents, pay them the indemnification and damages and be rid of them," observes Dan La Botz in Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today.
In the Kirkwood case, there appears to have been an all-out purge of workers seeking union independence. "STIMAHCS filed its title request [to represent Kirkwood workers] on March 13 of this year," Martínez says. "The first layoffs began on March 23, 10 days after we filed our request. Since then there has been a whole chain of firings." On the eve of a June 21 vote to determine which union will represent Kirkwood, Antonio Villalva, another one of FAT’s three national leaders, said that Kirkwood had fired more than 150 of some 240 workers at the Mexico City plant.
Villalva says that at an important meeting of the Board of Reconciliation on June 14, COCEM and Kirkwood argued that only workers who were employed at the plant as of May 9, 1995 should be allowed to vote. "What they wanted was for the COCEM workers who have replaced the fired workers to be allowed to vote, because they are all with the COCEM," Villalva says. Under Mexican law, workers employed at the plant at the time a formal request for union representation is submitted, in this case March 13, are the ones who are supposed to be eligible to vote. Villalva says the Board agreed that March 13 would be used to determine eligibility.
The June 21 union vote, however, which the COCEM won, was fraught with irregularities, according to FAT. Martínez says workers told him that, on the eve of the vote, the plant called workers in one by one to pressure them to sign a pledge to vote for COCEM. Some of those who refused were added to a list of workers "who, supposedly because of the importance of their jobs, were not allowed to attend the vote." Martínez says he also received reports of workers being offered bribes to accept severance pay, which disqualifies them from voting. "We estimate that about 85 workers [out of the original eligible pool of 240] accepted money," he says. "But we don't know exactly because we no longer have contact with those who accepted money." In the midst of a severe economic recession in which even Mexican Labor Minister Santiago Oñate expects 700,000 workers to be laid off in 1995, Martínez says he believes that many workers refused severance pay in what appears to have been a failed bid to elect an independent union and regain the jobs.
Of the 153 votes cast, Martínez says 26 were for FAT and 127 for COCEM. Of the 127 for COCEM, he says 94 were cast by supervisory staff, secretaries and others who do not work on the shop floor and who Martínez says the board official should not have allowed to vote. Subtracting these 94 votes from the total, he says there were only 59 legitimate votes cast, 26 for FAT and 33 for COCEM. These 59 valid votes represent just 25 percent of the original pool of 240 workers who were eligible to vote when FAT applied to represent plant workers in March. FAT plans to contest the voting process and the illegitimate votes in an upcoming hearing before the full Board of Conciliation and Arbitration but the independent labor federation holds little hope for a remedy. "The way we see it, given how the [board] authority acted, there is little chance," Martínez says. "The authority appeared to be very inclined toward the plant."
Asset or liability?
Martínez says enlightened managers realize that to be competitive over the long term they need workers who are well represented and who feel like a valued part of the company and who will strive to meet mutually proscribed quality goals. "Kirkwood, Sony and GE represent the most backward thinking businesses," he says. He concedes, however, that plants employing relatively unskilled labor, as Kirkwood does, are better positioned to pursue a slash-and-burn labor policy.
Some Mexican businesspeople are coming around to the view that the official unions are more of a liability than an asset. The Business Center of Northern Coahuila, a trade group representing Mexican businesses along the Texas border, recently announced that it would convene a conference to seek better employer-employee relations. More than 20 industries have fled the area in the face of increasing labor unrest, the group’s president, Germán Roblesgil Maza told the Mexican daily El Financiero. A particularly embarrassing example occurred when a Japanese plant, Obras Maestras, left the region after the former head of the local CTM, José Luis Camarillo, tried to shake down its management for $60,000, Roblesgil said.
Since the December 1994 peso devaluation, Kirkwood’s already minimal Mexican labor costs have been reduced by 40 percent. Vallegas says her inspection wage was 30 pesos or $5 a day, but most of her co-workers earn $3.30 a day, a little more than Mexico City’s $3 minimum daily wage.
"With this salary it is impossible to live - you’re half fed," says Vallegas. "You need 50 or 60 [pesos, or about $9 to $10] a day to live. With 30 pesos you can’t do anything, and those that make the minimum - even less. I have to stretch what I earn to make miracles."
Sidebar
FAT: Mexico’s Independent Trade
Federation
Benedicto Martínez Orozco is one of three national coordinators of the Authentic Labor Front (known by its Spanish acronym FAT), Mexico’s only independent labor federation. Martinez has been secretary general of the FAT-affiliated metalworkers union, STIMAHCS, since its founding six years ago. He got his training as a worker in the auto parts industry.
Multinational Monitor: What is the Authentic Labor Front [FAT]?
Benedicto Martínez Orozco: FAT was formed in 1960 as an alternative to Mexico’s official, corporatist unions. FAT struggles for democracy, free association and the independence of unions from the control of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) and other unions that we call "officialist." During its 35 years, FAT has been part of important struggles in this country, struggles that have been difficult because business owners prefer to have docile unions that they control. When workers attempt to organize a union that will really work in their interests, management becomes very oppressive of workers, sometimes even physically.
FAT originated among the shoe workers of the Leon valley in Guanajuato and among shoe workers in the Federal District [Mexico City]. Nevertheless, over the years, FAT has diversified and it now has three national unions, two of metalworkers and one textile union. FAT also has industrial unions that only operate in the State of Mexico, rural unions, printer unions and various other unions.
In the 1980s, FAT decided to make its decision-making more horizontal. Earlier, FAT operated under a general secretary. Today, the union has three coordinators and a 17-person national executive committee. The three coordinators are elected in a congress, regional representatives are elected in the regions of their origin and representatives are elected from FAT’s four sectors: the peasant sector, the popular neighborhoods sector, the cooperative sector and the union sector.
The government does not permit organizations like ours to play an important role in big business sectors. We know from those who led FAT in the early days that the government told them that FAT could not organize big businesses because that would threaten foreign investment. Since the beginning, FAT’s turf has been small- and medium- sized industries, which are largely Mexican owned.
Nonetheless, we hope that the officialist union leaders [who are permitted to represent big business sectors] will realize that they can’t continue their obsolete practices for many more years. There has been considerable change in the political climate of this country. If the society as a whole continues to demand liberty, free association and democracy, this will necessarily have to affect the unions as well. The unions cannot remain at the sidelines of these national demands; they will have to change, too.
We continue to see protection of big capital. The government, in its zeal to welcome foreign investment, impedes democratization to guarantee profits for transnational investment capital. We also recognize that this approach hasn’t worked. Even though our government has offered cheap labor and has implemented every possible mechanism to guarantee a tranquil investment climate, it hasn’t turned out the way the government said it would. In the last years of the Salinas regime, there was a lot of talk about the tremendous investment in this country, but most of this capital was invested in the stock market and has not created jobs.
MM: How would you compare the political organization of FAT with that of the CTM?
BMO: There really is no point of comparison because in the CTM, Fidel Velásquez has for many, many years headed the federation. Practically whatever he says is what the regional and state leaders impose. In our organization, it’s completely different. Here, the three national coordinators are elected in a congress by the delegates of the regional districts. The sectoral representatives are elected by their respective sectors.
MM: Fidel Velásquez isn’t elected?
BMO: Technically, yes, there is a vote, but we all know what the result will be. If Fidel says that [candidate X] must be elected, then of course all the delegates will elect this representative. This is an attempt to paint a democratic coat over what is really a controlled situation; it has nothing to do with democracy. We understand democracy to be the complete liberty of affiliates to elect their representatives, including the right to disagree with those [candidates] proposed by others.
MM: This year, the CTM called off its "May Day" parade - traditionally a show of unity for Mexican workers - for fear that angry workers would embarrass President Ernesto Zedillo. Does the CTM have problems with its base?
BMO: This May 1 business is very important because the great majority of the workers in this country resent the crisis that, since December 1994, has brought high inflation again. The workers have watched their wages diminish considerably.
There is generalized discontent among the workers and the public over the economic policies applied by the regime. Unfortunately, the official unions have taken an active role in the government’s decisions to impose wage ceilings and limit increases in the minimum wage, which affects union-negotiated wages.
In January, the minimum wage was raised 4 percent and in April it was raised 12 percent for a total of 16 percent. But inflation this year has already exceeded this increase. The workers see this and know about the inflation that still lays ahead of them [this year]. All this has demoralized workers.
The labor federations and official union leaders didn’t want workers to mobilize on the streets for May 1 because they feared that they couldn’t control the workers and that there could have been spirited protests underneath the presidential balcony. They were not prepared to tolerate the insubordination of their affiliates. To avoid taking chances, they preferred to cancel the May 1 parade this year.
We believe the officialist unions have outlived their usefulness, even for plant management, because they no longer have control over their affiliates and they don’t represent anything or anybody. Right now, when the plants are struggling with the crisis and an extremely competitive market, they need strong [union] counterparts who can advance things consistent with a mutual agreement to improve production and quality. Each company and national productivity - all the more with Mexico’s entry into NAFTA and the competitive fray of the largest producers - must be super competitive. When workers do not have a representative organization that participates in the important decisions of a plant, all the decisions will be made by management and the workers will always be left with the impression that they were imposed upon. When there is strong, true representation of the workers, on the other hand, productivity and quality goals are discussed between the union and management. When they reach an agreement, it has the benefit of generating realistic expectations that goals indeed will be met.
MM: Do multinational companies operating in Mexico, such as Kirkwood, Sony, GE and Honeywell, believe that strong independent unions contribute to productivity, quality and competitiveness?
BMO: Kirkwood , Sony and GE represent the most backward managerial thinking. We have had some experiences in which the union participated with management of more forward-looking companies to achieve common goals. We have one plant in which we had productive discussions over what we could do to achieve quality goals; the union was very active and even management recognized its role.
But if management is not looking to the future, and only considers today, it will do what Kirkwood and Sony are doing. Kirkwood, for instance, accused us of being communists in a flier. We are struggling as a union organization just so that interests of workers are respected and there is union democracy. If this is what it means to be a communist, then, yes, maybe we are communists. But I think the characterization is exaggerated and outdated.
MM: Given that cheap labor is a leading attraction for many multinationals that decide to come to Mexico, is it realistic to think that they won’t fight to keep labor costs at a minimum?
BMO: We are in a very disadvantaged position. The high unemployment rate has cheapened the value of laborers. As such, some plants can be very profitable by keeping their labor prices to a minimum because their production is labor-intensive.
But for other plants it is not necessarily an advantage that workers earn very little and [management] continually must train new workers; production in these plants requires a certain level of skill with tools and machinery.
We believe that it doesn’t make any sense to continue with the logic that paying less assures greater profits. The world has become highly competitive and there are products here from all over the world. If products produced in Mexico lack quality, there is no way they will be able to compete. Plants must invest in skilled labor to compete.
When we negotiate with plants, we argue that a worker who has his basic needs met is a worker who will produce more and meet quality goals. But if workers are primarily concerned about how they can resolve the economic problems of their households, their thoughts are not there in the plant. They are thinking that after work they have to go work somewhere else so they can afford shoes for their children or buy the week’s groceries.
MM: What is FAT’s political role?
BMO: We do not agree with the regime. We struggle for democracy, for the right of free association, and union freedom. We are totally opposed to corporatism. This is a position that is totally distinct from that of the CTM. In this sense we play an active role in the political life of the unions and the country. Evidently, our political position is shared and promoted by many other Mexican organizations and people who struggle for democracy, independence and autonomy.
There is a discernible pattern in the PRI government now to form a strong alliance with the [National Action Party] PAN and pursue bipartisanship. We don’t know what will happen in the [presidential election] year 2000, but perhaps it will be our lot to have a bipartisan system like the United States. We think the two parties [PRI and PAN] are of the same family. We have noticed that the PAN governors who have been elected in recent years are business people. When my boss is also the government at the same time, my plight as a worker is not improved. We hope that with all of these changes there will be real respect for the will of the people and they will no longer try to impose what the people do not want. At this time, the great majority of Mexicans vote against the PRI; it is not a reasoned vote for political policies. This is a delicate time - the country could swing to the extreme right.
by Laura McClure
AFTER A ONE-MONTH STRIKE, members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) won a limited victory with the Leslie Fay Company in July 1994. Leslie Fay, one of the largest U.S. dressmakers, wanted to move all of its production abroad. But under the agreement, 600 of Leslie Fay’s 1,800 workers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia will remain on the job until July 25, 1995. Then their fate will hinge on the findings of a joint labor-management committee created to explore how the company "can continue to profitably produce dresses domestically and compete successfully in the moderate dress marketplace."
Winning even such temporary relief has not come easily for U.S. garment and textile unions. The export of jobs has been relentless, draining ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) of the bulk of their members. Once, these unions could claim some 900,000 members between them. Now, their combined strength is about 350,000. Since 1979, the United States has lost an average of 3,451 textile and apparel jobs every month.
It is not hard to see why ILGWU and ACTWU have decided, after more than 50 years of separate and often competing efforts, to merge. The new union, to be called UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees), is expected to be approved at ACTWU and ILGWU conventions in late June.
If all goes as planned, UNITE will begin its life with a new $10 million organizing fund. Union leaders say that fostering stronger links with unions in Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico , where so many U.S. garment jobs have been exported, will be high on UNITE’s agenda.
Staff members at both unions (several of whom asked not to be named as the merger is still being finalized) agreed that the single greatest benefit of the merger is an increased organizing capacity. But no one can predict the character of the new union, which will be headed by ILGWU president Jay Mazur.
Apparel industry spokespeople have been blunt about the new union’s prospects, given the state of a global market that pits U.S. workers against their lower wage counterparts around the globe. Eli Elias, president of the New York Skirt and Sportswear Association, suggested the Hebrew prayer for the dead for the two unions, even if they do merge: "You can say Kaddish for both of them. The whole apparel business is going global, and in less time than you think, the domestic apparel manufacturing industry will be negligible," Elias told Women’s Wear Daily.
Money and members
Two deep needs are behind the merger: ACTWU’s need for funds and ILGWU’s need for members. The trick will be for UNITE to meet the needs of both unions, and draw from each of their strengths. An ACTWU staffer likens the merger to a marriage between two problematic partners: "It’s a marriage where one party is sloppy and the other curses a lot. When they get married, you hope that they won’t both wind up sloppy and cursing a lot."
The ILGWU, which has traditionally represented workers in the women’s garment industry, has a base in smaller, urban shops that often employ immigrant women. Many shops are highly-mobile subcontractors. The union has always been strongest in the Northeast, but its membership is now heavily concentrated in the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia, where, notes ILGWU vice president Sol Hoffman, "you often have undocumented workers working for less than the minimum wage." When it comes to organizing, he adds, "it’s almost an impossible situation." Hoffman says that while the union has more organizers on staff now than it has had for many years, "we’ve still had fewer successes."
Many small New York City garment shops have moved to neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where they often employ very recent and sometimes undocumented immigrants from Central and Latin America, Mexico and China. At night, passersby can sometimes steal glimpses of workers bent over their sewing machines in dim, poorly ventilated rooms. Late into the night, in apartments all around the neighborhood, women do "homework" on their sewing machines, stitching pieces of fabric that have been furtively delivered by unmarked vans. Wages are often paid by the piece. Employers are notorious for abruptly closing up shop without paying workers what they are owed. Without representation, workers have no real recourse.
Like the industry itself, organizing garment workers is labor-intensive. The ILGWU has begun to try a "workers’ center" approach to organizing in New York and Los Angeles, although so far the union’s success with this has been limited. The workers’ center model has perhaps been pioneered most aggressively by a number of workers’ organizations not affiliated with the union, such as New York City’s Chinese Staff and Workers Association. It is a community-based approach: the union or organization establishes a center in the community, offering services, language courses and other assistance, and slowly builds a connection with workers.
If many ILGWU organizing efforts have been unrewarding, the union has had more luck holding on to its assets. The union has $176 million in assets according to a key union staffer, and a rich union-controlled pension fund. ACTWU sorely needs a financial boost from ILGWU. ACTWU does control the country’s only 100 percent union-owned bank (which ACTWU president Jack Sheinkman will head after the merger), which has provided the union with some financial support.
Still, ACTWU’s funds have dwindled, and the staff has already contracted. One of the reasons the money is going, staffers say, is the expense of the union’s aggressive organizing program. ACTWU has traditionally represented workers in the textile industry and in men’s apparel, often employed in larger, rural shops. But the union has also branched out to organize workers at such companies as Xerox and K-Mart . UNITE is sure to continue the move to expand beyond the troubled garment industry.
As ACTWU’s clothing and textile jobs have migrated to the southern United States, the union has tried to follow them. In fact, ACTWU’s most successful organizing efforts have been in the union-hostile South and Southeast. There, ACTWU has pioneered a highly involving model of organizing and has hired a crew of talented organizers, a mix of union rank-and-filers and energetic college graduates.
When the union conducts an organizing drive, says ACTWU southern regional director Bruce Raynor, "We try to actually talk face-to-face with each worker in their home, at least twice. We do extensive education not only about the union, but about employer campaign tactics, so the workers are prepared." Raynor adds that "unionism is a very radical notion in the South. So you can’t afford to have people belong to the union and not understand the union." Raynor says that 1993 and 1994 were "the two best years we’ve had in 20 years," both in terms of the number of plants organized and the number of workers who have joined the union. The union’s latest big win brought in about 2,500 new members from the Tultex Corp. plant in Martinsville, Virginia.
Even so, winning comes hard and requires tremendous investment. The union election that finally brought ACTWU in at the Tultex plant was preceded by two failed elections in 1989 and 1990. In 1991, after its second intensive drive to organize more than 6,000 workers at Fieldcrest Cannon in North Carolina [see "Organizing the South," Multinational Monitor, September 1991], ACTWU narrowly lost a union election. The union charges that the company used illegal intimidation and fired union supporters to control the outcome.
Activist union
As U.S. unions go, ACTWU has been on the socially active side. ACTWU president Sheinkman co-chairs and has long helped to sustain the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America. For years, the National Labor Committee, officially an alliance of some two dozen U.S. union presidents, has educated U.S. unionists and the public about workers in Central America and the Caribbean, and helped build links between workers. The organization opposed some of the worst Cold War postures of the AFL-CIO overseas.
In 1992, the National Labor Committee, under the leadership of executive director Charlie Kernaghan, exposed how the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Commerce Department encouraged U.S.-based companies to locate in impoverished countries in the Caribbean Basin [see Aiding and Abetting Corporate Flight: U.S. Aid in the Caribbean Basin," Multinational Monitor, January/February, 1993 ]. The National Labor Committee’s current campaign targets Mandarin International , a Taiwanese-owned plant in El Salvador that has terrorized the 850 workers, mostly women, trying to win union rights at the plant. The company is under contract to The Gap , JCPenney , Eddie Bauer and Dayton-Hudson .
Both ACTWU and ILGWU have a direct stake in efforts by workers in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico to organize. They maintain that textile and apparel jobs will continue to be exported in bulk to countries such as El Salvador, Honduras , the Dominican Republic , Guatemala and Costa Rica , so long as employers are able to abuse Latin American workers and pay them well under a dollar an hour.
The two U.S. unions have sought to establish bonds and a system of mutual support with unionists in Central America and the Caribbean. They have been engaged, along with a number of other U.S. unions, in efforts to communicate and link up with unionists in Mexico, particularly in the maquiladoras.
ACTWU and ILGWU supported a long, hard effort by unionists in the Dominican Republic to organize at Bibong Apparel Corporation. Bibong, which had contracts with both ILGWU and ACTWU shops, was located in a free trade zone. Workers were fired, blacklisted and physically threatened during their organizing campaign. After their union was recognized in July 1994, Dominican unionists were able to organize three more companies in the free trade zone, representing some 2,500 workers.
In the Dominican Republic, as elsewhere, says Ron Blackwell, an economist with ACTWU and Sheinkman’s executive assistant, the union’s first move was to establish contact with the indigenous unions in that country. "And the proposition to them is to say simply, ‘We have an interest in the factories of these companies, their contractors and their competitors being organized. If organizing them fits into your strategy, we have something in common. And recognizing that we have different levels of financial resources, we of course bear an equitable proportion of the financial responsibilities.’" This approach, he adds, "is not based on clientelism or even notions of global solidarity, but rather on union- building values."
The union’s strategy for trying to improve labor standards and working conditions internationally operates on three levels, Blackwell explains. The union urges U.S.-owned companies to sign a "code of conduct" pledging decent labor standards in their operations overseas, and then works, along with sister unions, to enforce those pledges.
ACTWU has also tried to negotiate conditions with employers in collective bargaining. In one case, ACTWU agreed to let an employer import a limited amount of apparel, provided that it obtains prior union approval, that it ships the material through a union-controlled warehouse and that it guarantees that workers in the country of origin will enjoy fundamental worker rights and a living wage.
ACTWU, as well as ILGWU, have both fought for conditioning all U.S. and international aid, trade privileges and investment on respect for workers’ rights in recipient countries. The two unions were quite active in the coalition to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, and now they are jointly fighting the proposed Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act, which would lift tariffs and open markets to allow freer imports of apparel from the Caribbean.
"Because of systematic repression and violation of labor rights across Central America and the Caribbean, wages are being artificially suppressed," Mazur and Sheinkman argued in a statement opposing the measure. In El Salvador, they say, maquiladora exports to the United States in the past decade are up 3,800 percent, while real wages there have been slashed by 53 percent. In their statement, the union presidents say the initiative would give multinationals and their maquiladora partners $240 million a year in increased tariff handouts for their products to enter the U.S. market. At base, the union presidents say, "This is the corporate agenda."
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS in Guatemala have been on the rise over the past year, and trade unionists are often the target of this new wave of violence. In the maquiladora sector, which in Guatemala produces apparel for the U.S. market, labor activists have become victims of harassment, kidnapping and murder. In the past, maquiladora labor leaders have generally not faced the same level of violence as activists in other sectors, but a number of recent incidents suggests that this situation is changing.
For example, on September 30, 1994, the entire executive committee of the Marissa maquiladora union was abducted and threatened with death. In March 1995, the violence reached a new level with the first assassination of a labor leader in the maquiladora sector, Alexander Yovany Gomez. And in May 1995, Flor de Maria Seguero, a union organizer, was abducted, beaten and raped three times. Seguero has been active in focusing international attention on worker rights violations in the maquiladora sector. Last year, Seguero attended U.S. congressional hearings on working conditions in Central America.
Guatemala on probation
After a six-year struggle, worker rights advocates persuaded the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in August 1992 to accept two petitions filed under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) trade program challenging the systemic denial of worker rights in Guatemala. The petitions, filed by the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project , the AFL-CIO and eight other U.S. trade union and human rights organizations, documented extensive worker rights violations in Guatemala’s maquiladora sector and other industries.
GSP extends duty-free trade benefits to certain commodities from Third World countries, but these benefits are supposed to be conditioned on beneficiary countries "taking steps" to afford their workers "internationally-recognized worker rights." These rights are legally defined to include acceptable working conditions, the right to organize, and prohibitions on child labor and slave labor.
Acceptance of the 1992 petitions placed Guatemala "under review," a probation- like status. Guatemala has been under continuous review since August 1992. By keeping Guatemala under review, the USTR is acknowledging that Guatemala has not taken sufficient steps to end probation. But review status also means that, in the USTR’s estimation, Guatemalan labor conditions are not bad enough to warrant termination of GSP benefits.
Since the petitions were accepted, Guatemala has approved its most significant labor code reform in 40 years, opened two new labor courts, hired new labor inspectors, granted legal recognition to the first maquiladora unions in six years, recognized unions that have had applications pending for years (such as the Army Bank union), recognized a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant union in the record time of just two months and, in October 1994, increased the legal minimum wage by 40 percent to about $2.50 a day.
Yet, these steps have not brought significant progress to workers for two main reasons: labor laws go unenforced and anti-union violence goes unpunished.
Guatemalan labor courts are not functioning, having resolved just one out of the 600 cases that have come before them in the past two years. The minimum wage is not paid by most employers. The government rarely imposes fines for violations and, when it does, the fines are rarely paid. The government stands idly by while members of most of the maquiladora unions that it has recognized have been the targets of death threats, bribery and illegal firings and plant closings. Not a single maquiladora works under an independent union contract, and half the maquiladora unions have been destroyed in the past year.
In a country that remains one of the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere, impunity persists for those who kill, torture, disappear or threaten trade unionists. Not a single perpetrator of violence against workers has been prosecuted during the review period despite scores of cases.
Moreover, violence by right-wing forces against trade unionists, including in the maquiladora sector, has been on the rise. Examples involving workers producing directly or indirectly for U.S. companies include:
o The September 30, 1994 assassination of Carlos Ermelindo Veliz, secretary of agreements for the union at the Chinook Finca which produces bananas for Chiquita Brands.
o Reported death threats, forcible evictions of workers and illegal firings at two banana plantations that supply Del Monte.
o The abduction of maquiladora union leader Deborah Guzman on February 28, 1995.
o The March 29, 1995 beating of Adela Augustín, secretary general of the union representing the Cortex maquiladora that produces for Eddie Bauer , Merry- Go-Round Enterprises and other U.S. companies.
o The killing of three workers in an attack by the Guatemalan National Police and private security forces on August 24, 1994. Peasants had occupied a cattle ranch, Improsa Exacta, to protest the owner’s failure to pay the legal minimum wage and other legally mandated benefits. The ranch reportedly exports duty-free beef to the United States.
o The first killing of a maquiladora labor activist in March 1995. Alexander Yovany Gomez, a member of the union executive committee at RCA Industries, was beaten to death.
Last year, despite continued abuse of workers in Guatemala, the Clinton administration rejected requests by petitioners and members of Congress to prod Guatemala by suspending duty-free imports of Guatemalan sugar. The administration, apparently more concerned with providing political support for President Ramirio de Leon Carpio, tried to drop Guatemala’s trade probation. But the USTR’s efforts to end GSP review on July 1, 1994 were turned back by strong congressional opposition and pressure from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which was particularly concerned about the transfer of several thousand Leslie Fay apparel jobs to Central America from northeastern states.
On October 1, 1994, a decision to end Guatemala’s probationary status was delayed indefinitely in the face of continued opposition in Congress prompted by a new surge of violence in Guatemala. Representative George Brown, D-California, said the USTR has "been unable to furnish convincing evidence of concrete progress" on Guatemalan worker rights. Brown, then chair of the International Labor Rights Working Group, led last year’s congressional push to keep the heat on Guatemala. In October 1994, Brown and 58 other U.S. representatives wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, insisting that probation be maintained. A similar letter initiated by Senator James Jeffords, R-Vermont, was signed by 19 senators.
Prior to both attempts, U.S. embassy officials had told Guatemalan government and business leaders that termination of the GSP review was imminent, according to the newsletter Inside NAFTA. Such signals undercut the threat of the petition and compromised efforts to advance worker rights in Guatemala.
The USTR’s attempt to lift Guatemala’s review prematurely illustrates the administration’s unwillingness to use worker rights trade provisions effectively, says Pharis Harvey, executive director of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund. "USTR has still not realized how much it could accomplish by truly enforcing the worker rights provisions of U.S. trade law," says Harvey.
Conditioning trade
Despite inadequate support from the U.S. government, GSP probation has yielded modest progress for worker rights in recent years. Guatemalan trade union leaders, who have dared to publicly back the probation, say probation has not worked miracles but any pressure on behalf of workers is better than nothing. "GSP pressure has not gained anything substantial or extraordinary," says Sergio Guzman, a leader of the progressive labor organization UNSITRAGUA. "However, it has helped open space for discussion between employers, workers and the government."
Elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, GSP leverage has also had a limited but positive impact on worker rights. It has contributed to the negotiation of the first maquiladora union contracts in the Dominican Republic, opened up some organizing space within Honduran maquiladoras, and led to the passage of a new labor code in El Salvador.
Not surprisingly, all the major trade union federations in Guatemala and most of the rest of the region argue that any new trade agreements with the United States should include strong labor protections. "We can’t ignore the rights of workers as market integration moves forward," says Juan Francisco Alfaro, head of the AFL-CIO-backed labor federation (CUSG) in Guatemala. "We demand that any regional integration includes the same protections currently under GSP." Another trade union body in the region says that any proposal for new U.S. trade benefits should be defeated if it does not include worker rights provisions that are at least as strong as those in the current GSP and Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) laws.
Even if the new trade benefits protect worker rights, U.S. trade policy is expected to become an even weaker protector of worker rights in the near future. The labor side agreement President Clinton attached to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a step backwards from the labor protections afforded by the GSP and CBI. Worker rights conditions are entirely absent from the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accord that establishes the World Trade Organization. And the new Republican majority in the U.S. Congress has indicated that it will not provide the fast- track negotiating authority that the Clinton administration wants to expand NAFTA if it contains labor or environmental protections. "There is clearly a weakening of political will in Washington to link worker rights to U.S. trade policy," says Professor Lance Compa, an international labor relations expert at Yale University.
Management-written labor codes
While U.S. business is opposed to having international or U.S. trade agreements establish protections for workers, many companies are less opposed to setting - and implementing - their own standards for workers. An increasing number of U.S. companies are adopting codes of conduct for their overseas "business partners" that govern working conditions and some basic worker rights at foreign factories that supply U.S. corporations. These "sourcing codes" typically require contractors to meet certain standards, such as a prohibition on child labor, slave labor or physical abuse. Levi’s led the way in 1992 after a Washington Post story exposed abuses at a Levi’s contractor in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands which locked workers in the factory overnight and paid them sub- minimum wages. Other major retailers have joined the trend. Codes have now been adopted by Wal-Mart , JCPenney , Reebok and others.
Most of these sourcing codes are minimalist. They simply require contractors to abide by local law and pay prevailing area wages, which are usually well below the poverty line. Only Reebok and Levi’s make reference to the right of workers to organize unions. And most codes are barely monitored, if at all. "Sourcing codes, which only work for companies that care about their brand image and consumer opinion, need to be strengthened, expanded, and independently monitored if they are to become fully effective in ensuring decent working conditions and basic rights for workers," Compa says.
Despite these limitations, sourcing codes acknowledge that U.S. companies are accountable for policing working conditions and worker rights at the foreign factories that supply them. Responding to a grassroots campaign focused on abuses in Guatemala, Starbucks Coffee Company, the leading U.S. gourmet coffee company, recently became the first U.S. company to extend this principle to the agricultural sector. Starbucks announced at its February 15, 1995 shareholder meeting that it would adopt a code of conduct for its international suppliers of green coffee beans.
Experience in Guatemala shows that sourcing codes can be used effectively to promote worker rights if there are independent investigators who can document and report abuses directly to the U.S. companies with the implicit threat of making the abuses public. Workers who had been illegally fired for two years at the Confecciones Unidas maquiladora in Guatemala City were reinstated when Sears, Wal-Mart and JCPenney pressured their supplier in response to information supplied by the U.S./Government Labor Education Project. Physical abuse and sexual harassment ended at another factory, East-West, when U.S. companies intervened. And conditions improved at the JMB apparel maquiladora owned by the U.S. firm Cigne in the fall of 1994 after the Working Assets social investment firm began making inquiries about the company’s Guatemala operations. Workers reported a reduction in physical abuse and better treatment by supervisors after Working Assets’ inquiries.
"Sourcing codes are no substitute for effective worker rights conditions in U.S. and international trade agreements," argues Compa. But in a "free-trade" era, when U.S. and international trade policy is abandoning even the rhetoric of setting an international floor for basic worker rights, sourcing codes takes on an added importance in the struggle to ensure respect for basic rights of workers around the world.
Sidebar
New Benefits for Central American
Maquiladoras?
BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT LEADERS representing maquiladoras in Central
America and the Caribbean are again calling for duty-free treatment for apparel shipped by
Caribbean Basin maquiladoras to the United States.
Advocates of such a trade gift for the Caribbean region argue that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has put their region’s maquiladoras at a competitive disadvantage with Mexico. Central America’s apparel industry, which dominates the region’s maquiladora boom, has been hardest hit by Mexican competition under NAFTA, according to Clinton administration officials.
An earlier attempt to secure duty-free benefits for the region through U.S. implementing legislation for the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was abandoned last year. Pro-GATT legislators dropped the matter after a private viewing of a video produced by the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America. The video graphically depicted child labor and other worker rights violations at Honduran maquiladoras producing for brand-name U.S. firms. GATT supporters feared that a public airing of the documentary would focus unwanted attention on labor abuses and could lose votes for GATT.
With GATT approved, leaders in Congress and the Clinton administration have promised quick action on duty-free apparel benefits for the region. The Clinton Administration’s 1995 proposal and a similar bill, the Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act, introduced by Trade Subcommittee Chair Philip Crane, R-Illinois, would expand the duty- free trade benefits currently provided by the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) trade program to include apparel.
Neither the administration proposal nor the Crane bill would make any changes in CBI’s current worker rights provisions. CBI’s labor provisions are identical to those of the Generalized System of Preferences, except that CBI contains no public petition process.
Nonetheless, some members of the new Congress may try to further weaken these lax provisions or even omit them. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, and other House Republican leaders have made it clear that they oppose linking U.S. market access to worker rights. The Clinton administration’s own commitment is tenuous, having included the worker rights provisions in last year’s proposal only after vigorous lobbying of U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor by worker rights and Central America advocates. The administration also excluded worker rights from its testimony on the legislation in the February hearings.
by Katherine Isaac
A STRIKE CALLED BY NIGERIA ’S OIL WORKERS’ UNIONS in July 1994 galvanized Nigeria’s democracy movement in its demand -now gaining international recognition - that the military government of General Sani Abacha relinquish power to a democratically elected government.
"The impact of the strike was devastating beyond a shadow of a doubt. Fuel for vehicles, cooking and lights was unavailable. The country was at a dead standstill," says Nigeria-based Thomas Medley, program director for the AFL-CIO’s African American Labor Center.
The strike was a courageous act in the midst of harsh repression, including violence against strikers and imprisonment of labor leaders. The military government has managed by ever-more brutal methods to hold on to power in the year since the strike. But Nigerian voices calling for democracy have not been silenced, and they are increasingly being joined by the international labor and human rights movements.
Military annuls elections
Plagued by protests, strikes and riots, Nigeria has been hovering on the edge of economic and political chaos since June 1993, when the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida annulled elections that were expected to transfer power to an elected, civilian government. Nigeria has been under military rule for 28 of the 34 years since it won its independence from Britain.
Citizens of Africa’s most populous country expressed their desire to return to civilian rule by voting for the Social Democratic Party candidate Moshood Abiola. When early election results showed Abiola in the lead, the military regime intervened, citing voting irregularities and declaring the election null and void without ever releasing voting results. In November 1993, General Sani Abacha, promising an eventual return to democracy, seized power from the previous military administration.
Demands for democracy intensified when, on the first anniversary of the June 1993 election, the 56-year-old Abiola declared himself president of Nigeria. He was arrested promptly by General Abacha’s military regime, and is still being held on treason charges without trial or access to lawyers and family.
A Nigerian High Court ordered Abiola released on the condition that he refrain from acts the government considers subversive, effectively barring him from addressing political rallies, talking to the press or traveling abroad. Abiola declined, saying he would accept nothing less than unconditional freedom.
The strike: call and response
The National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), followed by PENGASSAN, Nigeria’s union of gas industry senior staff, engineers and administrators, called the July 1994 strike to protest the arrest of Abiola and deteriorating conditions in the oil industry.
The workers demanded that the results of the June 1993 election be recognized and power turned over to a representative government. The oil strike was augmented by a general strike of the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC), the nation’s umbrella union with 41 affiliates, and the Senior Staff Consultative Association of Nigeria (SESCAN). A written statement of the oil workers’ demands called on the government to "resolve the political crisis by respecting the democratic and sovereign will of the people as expressed in the last presidential elections. All democratic structures must be restored and the winner of the election [Abiola] installed."
The strike also protested the government’s economic policy. "Economic mismanagement and widespread corruption on the part of the Abacha regime have plunged the country into deep economic crisis," says Folabi Olagbaju of the Washington, D.C.-based International Roundtable on Nigeria, a coalition of labor, human rights and Nigerian democracy groups operating under the auspices of Amnesty International.
With some 96 percent of Nigeria’s 1994 foreign exchange earnings coming from oil exports, Nigeria’s economy is completely dependent on oil, and, the unions charge, corruption and mismanagement of the oil industry - including failure to maintain refineries and pipelines or even to pay outstanding debts to joint venture partners - are undermining the foundation of the national economy. Oil production accounts for more than one third of Nigeria’s gross national product and its oil export revenues are vital to the country’s ability to import goods and services and to service its $28 billion external debt.
The strike had a dramatic effect in the country. It succeeded in shutting down Nigeria’s refining operations, cutting crude production by 20 percent and disrupting fuel supplies within the country. "Living conditions came to a dead standstill" during the strike, says Medley.
Labor crackdown
General Sani Abacha’s regime moved swiftly to repress the strike. The government removed the democratically elected leadership of NUPENG, PENGASSAN and the NLC and appointed military administrators to run the unions. The military seized the unions’ offices, bank accounts and dues-collection facilities.
Frank Kokori, general secretary of NUPENG, was arrested, though no charges were filed against him, and other fired union leaders went into hiding to avoid arrest. According to the Brussels-based International Federation of Chemical, Energy and General Workers Unions (ICEF), four trade union officers - PENGASSAN officers F.A. Addo and F. Aidelomo, NUPENG President Wariebi K. Agamene and NLC Chairman in Edo State, Deacon Olu Aderibigbe - have since been arrested and the four, plus Kokori, are still being held incommunicado and without trial.
Petitions from the union leaders have been dismissed under new decrees that proclaim that the military government does not fall under the jurisdiction of Nigeria’s judiciary and that the courts lack jurisdiction to hear suits against government actions.
Harsh orders promulgated by Abacha in September 1994 intensified the crackdown. One decree removed habeas corpus protection against arbitrary detention. Another, with a retroactive effective date of August 18, 1994 - just prior to a number of arrests of government opponents - extends the permissible period of administrative detention. Newspapers and magazines that were shut down at the time of union arrests are still barred from publishing.
Amnesty International has denounced these decrees as "blatant contempt for the rule of law." The UN’s International Labor Organization ruled that measures taken against Nigerian trade unions in 1994 were excessive and constituted a violation of internationally recognized standards.
General Abacha responded to the nationwide call for democracy by establishing a National Constitutional Conference (CONFAB) in August 1994. CONFAB’s mandate is to make recommendations on how to end military rule. But large sectors of the population boycotted CONFAB; only 50,000 ballots were cast for delegates compared to 10 million votes in the quashed 1993 elections. Many Nigerian citizens have questioned CONFAB’s credibility, charging that Abacha handpicked many conference delegates. Olagbaju calls the conference "a delaying tactic to prolong military rule, giving the appearance of a move."
Another Abacha tactic is to assert that the unifying force of the military is necessary to prevent the country from disintegrating into civil war amongst ethnic and regional factions. "That is a myth that needs to be debunked," says Olagbaju, "and is only an excuse to intervene. The pro-democracy movement has wide appeal among diverse ethnic groups, and the demand for Abiola’s release is widespread. It is the bloated and politicalized military that poses the greatest threat to Nigeria. If it doesn’t give up power, Nigeria will have no chance of survival."
Political prisoners languish in jail
In October 1994, the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) sent a delegation to Nigeria to demand the release of imprisoned labor leaders. The delegation demanded that "detained trade unionists should either be released or, if they were alleged to have committed any criminal offenses, should be charged, brought before a properly constituted court of law without further delay and given full facilities to defend themselves. In any case, their families, lawyers and unions must be allowed proper access to them."
Senior army officials assured the delegation "that Kokori and others would be released or charged, that union autonomy would be restored and fired workers returned to work," according to the ICEF, which participated in the ICFTU delegation. None of these promises have been kept. Troops still occupy union offices and leaders are in prison. Officials in the Nigerian embassy in Washington, D.C. declined requests for comment on the situation.
The military government denied a December 1994 Amnesty International delegation access to detained trade union leaders and to pro-democracy activists including Moshood Abiola. The government did confirm that NUPENG leader Kokori was in detention, an allegation it had previously denied. "The authorities’ failure to allow Amnesty International access to political prisoners suggests that they have something to hide," says Amnesty International delegation leader Tiebile Drame.
Worldwide push
Nigeria watchers fear the potential consequences of continued repression and worsening economic conditions. "We realize that the current escalation of repression by the government coupled with the determination of the pro-democracy and anti-military groups to continue the struggle to the end can only lead to the eruption of violence, civil war and perhaps, this time, even to the disintegration of Nigeria," says an August 1994 statement of the Nigerian Democratic Movement. If the crisis is not resolved, says Thomas Medley of the African American Labor Congress, "this country of 100 million people will make Somalia look like a cake walk."
Activists around the world are rallying to prevent the worst from happening. In the United States, labor, human rights and Nigerian pro-democracy groups have joined forces to pressure the Nigerian government. A rally sponsored by the African-American Labor Center, the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the Seafarers Union, the Nigerian Democratic Movement and the Nigerian Roundtable drew 6,000 protestors to the Nigerian chancellery in Washington, D.C. in August 1994. The coalition demanded the immediate restoration of Nigerian trade union leadership and protested the continuing abuse of trade union and human rights by the military government.
The executive council of the AFL-CIO delivered a statement at the rally condemning the Nigerian military’s attempt to "smother democracy, muzzle the press and restrict workers rights and freedoms." The AFL-CIO urged the U.S. government, the United Nations and the world community to exert pressure to end the Abacha regime.
Several affiliates of the ICEF, including the Communications Workers of America and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW), are participating in the ICEF’s ongoing global Nigeria campaign, launched in February 1995. The campaign calls for the release of imprisoned Nigerian labor and democracy leaders. "It is our responsibility as trade unionists to support our brothers and sisters in Nigeria," says OCAW president Robert Wages. "We will continue to exert pressure to end the Abacha regime and restore full trade union rights."
TransAfrica announced a campaign in March backed by African-American politicians, scholars, entertainers and civil rights leaders to press for the restoration of democracy in Nigeria. TransAfrica sponsored an April 1995 protest in front of the Nigerian chancellery in Washington, D.C., in which several activists, including TransAfrica Executive Director Randall Robinson, were arrested for handcuffing themselves together and blocking the entrance to the embassy. "If there is a difference between what is going on in Nigeria and what occurred during apartheid in South Africa, it is color," Robinson said at the rally. "The Nigerian regime is just as brutal," he added.
Activists also are weighing the effectiveness of pressuring the regime with economic sanctions. Support is growing for U.S. oil companies to transfer Nigerian oil royalty payments now being made to the military government to an escrow account. Once democracy is restored, these funds could be drawn on to rebuild the country. Nigeria’s democracy movement has not called yet for an oil embargo, fearing it would exacerbate the country's economic crisis.
A November 1994 study by the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that a multilateral oil embargo against Nigeria could have a significant economic impact, but little support exists for such a measure among national governments. "A U.S. unilateral embargo on Nigerian oil would have almost no impact," the study concludes. "Because the world oil market is highly integrated, it could quickly adjust to a disruption in the usual patterns of supply caused by a unilateral embargo."
Some activists believe that several factors at play in the Nigerian crisis - a military dictatorship, fierce repression, a strong U.S. corporate presence, strong cultural links and an active expatriate community - ultimately could be the basis of broad international support for economic sanctions. Organizing around these factors could "harness the same enthusiasm garnered against apartheid in South Africa and bring it to bear on a new generation of issues facing Africa," says Mike Fleshman, the Africa Fund’s labor desk coordinator. Given the intensity of Abacha’s resolve, it may take that kind of pressure to bring democracy to Nigeria.
Sidebar
Mobil Scabs?
MOBIL OIL ATTEMPTED TO AMELIORATE the impact of the July 1994 oil strike on its Nigerian operations by replacing strikers with foreign workers, according to the Nigerian Civil Liberties Organization (CLO). Olisa Agbakoba of the CLO called Mobil’s action "contrary to the national interests and the democratization process" as well as "contrary to immigration regulations." Mobil denies the charges. "Mobil did not hire anyone to replace workers last summer," says Gail Campbell Wooley, a spokesperson at Mobil’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia.
- K.I.
by Paul Majkut
CHIAPAS, IF KNOWN OUTSIDE OF MEXICO , is these days associated with rebellious Mayans and revolutionary figures in hiding in the remains of the Lacandón rain forest, an ecological treasure now reduced to about 10 percent of its original area. The forest is situated in the mountain mists of Los Altos, the highlands of Mexico’s poorest state. But there is another Chiapas: the rich agricultural lowlands and foothills along the Pacific coast. It is called the Soconusco. Despite many differences, the Soconusco shares the turmoil of Los Altos.
The Soconusco is the primary coffee-growing region of Chiapas. It yields 42 percent of all coffee produced in Mexico. In the Soconusco, two very different men are locked in a struggle over this coffee crop and other matters. One is Carlos J. Bracamontes Gris, president of the powerful Chiapas State Coffee Producers Union. The other is Francisco Aranda, a leader of the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of Soconusco (COCES).
Trouble brewing
Tapachula, a muggy sub-tropical jungle city, is the economic center and administrative hub of the Soconusco. It is there that the long-repressed contradictions personified by Bracamontes and Aranda have boiled to the surface in the last two years in angry petitions, arrests, demonstrations and street violence.
On January 7, 1995, COCES marched on the municipal building of Tapachula. Five hundred demonstrators wanted answers to long-ignored questions about working conditions, environmental health, educational reform and political corruption. Led by Aranda, the activists started across town from the State of Chiapas administrative building, a building that COCES had been occupying for three months because it stands as a symbol of the state government COCES detests.
At the time of the building’s occupation, the Mexican army deployed as many as 50,000 troops to Los Altos. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation’s year-long rebellion in the highlands, based in the Lacandón rainforest, had not abated. Its romantic revolutionary leader, Subcomandante Marcos, was getting world attention for his wit and daring. The lowlands, for the most part, had been left to the federal police of Chiapas, widely known as the "blues," a reference to their dark blue uniforms.
These Blue-Shirt troops are more feared than the army because they have a history of violently enforcing the interests of the state’s property owners. In this capacity, they are often assisted by paramilitary mercenaries hired by plantation and ranch owners and thugs and apparatchiks paid by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). These elites have ruled the Soconusco since the 1920s. Blue Shirts patrol the State Building and the town in new, dark-blue Ford pick-ups while the army is occupied in the highlands.
The January 7 march was a culmination of more than 200 demonstrations, 25 sit- ins, and four hunger strikes that COCES had initiated in the past two years. This time, COCES was joined by other angry voices: the moderate appeals of those such as the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), who seek a fairer electoral system; the more strident demands of those who do not trust the system - most notably, the militant Emiliano Zapata Proletariat Organization; and numerous single-issue groups that gather under the COCES umbrella to advance their agendas.
The Soconusco is a society deeply divided between those whose banner is "peace and justice" and those who call for "law and order." Centuries of economic polarization have solidified the recurrent struggle between haves and have-nots. Before the march across town began, Aranda repeated what has become a theme throughout the Soconusco, throughout the state, and throughout the nation. He explained that the government of the rich does not act in good faith.
"The government says COCES is always fighting, but these are poor people in COCES. The government says there is no problem here," Aranda said, referring to innumerable petitions COCES has for years presented to municipal and state authorities. "Most of the time the government doesn’t answer us at all," he said. He reiterated the medical, educational, labor and environmental needs of the poor of Soconusco.
"This region has been marginalized by a state government that has been centralized," Aranda said. "The government has forgotten the Soconusco. It’s not the same for those people who have everything, who have their mouths and stomachs full. We have people who have nothing. They have tried to scare us, but we will defend ourselves. We are pacifists, but we will defend our rights that up to now have been stomped on."
Coffee rich
Carlos J. Bracamontes has everything. He is rich, a man of achievement and stature in the Soconusco business community, perhaps the best-known mover and shaker in the region. He is in direct contact with the governor of the state and the central government of Mexico City. A fourth-generation coffee baron, Carlos is the grandson of Carlos Gris, the entrepreneur who, early in the century, created the Soconusco coffee empire that his offspring inherited.
Because of peasant and Indian resistance to the slave-labor conditions that were features of his master plan, Gris brought in outsiders - Germans, Italians, French, and North Americans - as investors and managers for the coffee plantations. The North Americans brought with them Chinese laborers from San Francisco to replace the rebellious Indians. When the gringos left at the time of the 1910 revolution, they left behind indentured Chinese workers, who spawned a legacy of Chinese restaurants in the Soconusco.
Grandson Carlos J. Bracamontes’ economic and social views differ from Aranda’s. "We [coffee plantation owners] are suffering from a political crisis in Chiapas. It has created instability among producers because it has hit us directly," Bracamontes laments. He does not believe the heart of the political and economic crisis in the nation, Chiapas and the Soconusco is a result of the economic system. He believes it is the doing of unreasonable troublemakers and outsiders. He blames economic woes on the Zapatistas and COCES, though the present coffee crisis preceded them both.
A few days before the march on the municipal building in Tapachula, in the office of the Chiapas State Coffee Producers Union, Bracamontes reflected on the reasons for the current turmoil. "COCES is very radical," he said. "But the root of the problem is Ruiz," he said referring to Samuel Ruiz, the "red" Bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas.
"Ruiz has focused on the situation as a class struggle, not as a political movement that wants to help the poor. He wants the poor to take from the rich! But the origin of the rich and the poor has reasons," Bracamontes continues. "The poor don’t want to work - and the rich have attained what they have through 100 years of work. I don’t know where they get this idea that the rich exploit people." While the industrious Bracamontes discusses hard work in his plush office, coffee pickers tote 150-pound coffee sacks - about 4 million per year - up and down the steep hillsides on which the plants grow.
A few days later, the COCES march reached city hall in a clamor of shouts for peace and justice, led by Aranda. "These people," he said, referring to the marchers, "have had their consciousness lifted. Any of these groups, any in the Soconusco, will do a march or a sit-in. Our people will even openly take over a building." The march ended at the municipal building, with the Blue Shirts attacking. The ensuing riot resulted in two days of violence and looting, by far the most severe in the state’s year-long crisis.
The Blue Shirts arrested and imprisoned Aranda. Others fled to the countryside to reorganize. One, Maria López, a woman leader who a decade before had been arrested, tortured and raped by the police, fled to Mexico City. But COCES resumed organizing. Within days, new demonstrations were organized for Aranda’s release. People from throughout the Soconusco once again faced the Blue Shirts at the municipal building that dominates the town center. "Free Aranda!" they cried. Following more arrests and demonstrations, Aranda was released in February. He picked up where he left off.
Severed from Guatemala
Until New World independence from Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Soconusco was a separate province administered by Spanish authorities in Guatemala, Chiapas was another. To this day, there are those - particularly Guatemalans - who see the state as a part of Guatemala. Fr. Gonzalo Ituarte, O. P., the Vicar General of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a spokesperson for Bishop Ruiz, sympathizes with this sentiment.
"Chiapas belonged to Guatemala," Ituarte says. "There was something like a NAFTA between Mexico and Chiapas in 1824. We know what happened to Chiapas. The economic and social structure of Chiapas is much more similar to Guatemala than Mexico. That’s why the social revolution and the problems are similar."
"What happened" to Chiapas is that it became part of Mexico, first through economic union, then political. The parallels between the economic arrangement between Chiapas and Guatemala in the last century and the United States and Mexico today with NAFTA are ominous. In both cases, the working poor on either side of an international border lost.
Although Chiapas became a part of Mexico, the Soconusco - an area that in pre- independence days stretched from what is today Mexico through Guatemala and along the coast of El Salvador - had different ideas of independence from what was then Chiapas, today’s highlands. At that time, while Los Altos either attempted to maintain its independence or harbored strong pro-Guatemalan sentiments, the Soconusco favored either independence or annexation to Mexico.
Eventually, the two provinces were politically yoked together as one Mexican state. The old, independent-minded Los Altos capital of the original Chiapas, beautiful San Cristóbal de las Casas, was replaced by a new capital loyal to the Mexican central government. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, a town that British novelist Graham Greene called "the new ugly capital of Chiapas," became Mexico City’s surrogate. The animosity between the old and new capitals can be felt today. Meanwhile, Tapachula, the heart of the Soconusco, was also subjugated to Mexico City via Tuxtla. It was then that the Soconusco became the Other Chiapas, a region of Greater Chiapas.
"Red" bishops
The "red" bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, modeled himself after the town’s namesake and first bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas (1530), known as "Protector of the Indians." Both have records of uncompromising loyalty to the Indians of the area. The Mexican religious right, financed by its U.S. religious counterpart, has been fighting Ruiz for years. Juan Isais, president of the Mexican Confraternity of Evangelicals, has even petitioned Pope John Paul II to remove Ruiz. "He has brought no peace to Chiapans, and he has caused them great harm," Isais says.
Ruiz’s devotion to the Indians and poor has deep ideological roots that stretch back to Las Casas in the sixteenth century. Bishop Las Casas was indebted to Thomas More’s Utopia. The humanist ideas in More’s book inspired Las Casas with notions of the noble savage and a primitivism that lead him to protect what he saw as utopian societies in Los Altos. Alma Guillermoprieto, in an article in The New Yorker last year, saw Ruiz as a man enamored of the same radical peasant utopia located deep within the rainforest. In 1970, early in his episcopal career, Ruiz had "The Book of Exodus" translated into Tzeltal, one of the local Mayan dialects.
Dreams of primitive utopias have deep roots in the jungles of Chiapas and Soconusco, and Bishop Ruiz may just as well have been reading B. Traven’s General from the Jungle as Las Casas or Thomas More. B. Traven (a pseudonym) was a mysterious U.S. anarchist, possibly of German birth, who wrote a series of six novels about Chiapas in the 1930s, The Jungle Novels. A popular novelist in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, he is best remembered today as the author of the novel on which the John Huston movie, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart, was based. In the sixth and last novel of the cycle, General from the Jungle, set at the time of the Mexican revolution, an anarchist commune is created by peasant revolutionaries. The commune, Solipaz, or "Sun-and-Peace," mirrors the vision encouraged by Ruiz.
Trouble in the Lacandón rainforest is nothing new. Debt slavery has bred Indian rebellion since the Spanish first arrived. In 1558, Spaniard Pedro Ramírez de Quiñones led troops against Chiapan Indians in what has come to be called the War of the Cakchiqueles. Lacandón revolt was an off-and-on-again affair until the early 1700s.
In the town of Los Altos, the Tzeltals and Tzendals, two groups descended from the Maya, began a widespread revolt in 1712 that lasted two years. It was led by an Indian woman, María Angel, who claimed to have been inspired by the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Caste Wars, beginning in 1867, were led by another Indian, Pedro Diaz Cuscat.
The struggle continues
Little has changed in the other Chiapas. When former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari divided Mexico into three economic zones, Chiapas was put in Zone 3. Workers in Zone 3 receive the lowest minimum wage in the country, set at $3 a day.
In 1989, the International Coffee Organization let world coffee prices float. Prices collapsed. Now only 200,000 Mexican and Guatemalan day workers - about half the pre- depression number - work the coffee plantations in the Soconusco.
Growers in the Soconusco blame the five-year depression on the distant Zapatistas, though that insurrection began only a year ago, or "radicals" in COCES, which tries to organize independent unions. The struggle between the haves and have-nots of Chiapas, represented by Bracamontes and Aranda, continues. The Soconusco, the "other Chiapas," has again fallen under the shadow of events in the highlands, where Ruiz mediates the negotiations between the federal government and the Zapatistas. But each cup of Chiapan coffee contains the contradictions of this troubled state.
Sidebar
River of Toxins
COCES DEMONSTRATORS HAVE WON one partial victory in Tapachula. In the hills above the city, on the banks of the San Antonio River, Moscamet/Moscafrut, S.A., a multinational fertilizer and pesticide plant with financial backing from the United States, Guatemala and Mexico pumps out waste toxins in Metapa. Following COCES protests, the federal government appointed a Federal Commission to investigate long-standing COCES charges of toxic dumping in March 1995.
The problems at Moscamet/Moscafrut began in early 1993, when a child swimming in the San Antonio River came out with skin lesions and ranchers began reporting dying and miscarrying calves. COCES asked experts at the Oaxaca Technological Institute to analyze samples. The Institute’s analysis showed high levels of toxicity in the water and COCES began collecting anecdotal testimony from those who lived along the banks of the river. Interviewers discovered a pattern of complaints centered on skin disorders. When a sub-secretary in the governor’s office in Tuxtla was presented with the information by COCES leader Francisco Aranda, he replied that "there were no problems."
COCES believes the appointment of a Federal Commission in March - over the heads of state authorities - is a dramatic move in the right direction that it hopes will lead to pollution mitigation.
- P.M.
An interview with Bill Jordan
Bill Jordan is the newly elected general secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the largest international trade union grouping. The Brussels- based ICFTU has 188 national union affiliates in 134 countries, representing 126 million workers. An engineer by training, Jordan was previously president of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union in Britain. Jordan has also been the president of European Metalworkers’ Federation since 1986. He took office in January 1995.
Bill Jordan was interviewed at the United Nations Social Summit in March 1995 for Multinational Monitor by Hugh Williamson, a Germany-based freelance journalist specializing on international labor issues.
Multinational Monitor: What are your general priorities for the ICFTU?
Bill Jordan: The policies and priorities are agreed to by our truly international executive. We recognize there are two ways to tackle deteriorating conditions and the need to bring prosperity to working people. One is that you have international minimum standards that no civilized society should fall below. Just as a civilized society has laws, so a civilized economy should have minimum standards. We will continue to work for this with the International Labor Organization [ILO], national governments and regional organizations like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA].
The other key aspect is that one of the surest and most successful ways of transferring wealth to the people who create it has been through strong, free trade unions. No one can question the truth of that statement - it’s been demonstrated that in every country in the industrialized world where there has been a high level of prosperity for working people, we’ve seen trade unionism.
And it’s no coincidence that in Britain, where trade unions have been attacked and undermined for 15 years by a determined right-wing government, the country has fallen down on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development gross domestic product table.
We want to see the emergence of strong trade unionism, particularly in the developing world, where there is wealth created but - this is the tragedy - it is being retained in the hands of the few.
We also see one of the measures that would greatly promote the development of strong trade unions and wealth transference in the ILO conventions on freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining; these should be acknowledged as one of the raft of measures that ought to be the minimum standards in international trading.
How can wealth trickle down when there is no one empowered to ask and demand that wealth, where there’s no freedom to organize or change the government that is suppressing them? And yet democracies are prepared to let these people trade.
MM: How has the end of the Cold War affected the role and mission of the ICFTU?
Jordan: If my election proves anything, it proves the Cold War mentality is over. I received an overwhelming number of nominations from the developing world.
The ICFTU has never been more relevant than it is today. Governments and politicians used to hold sway over industry and commerce with the communist [threat], saying "look, we’ve got to be careful." That is now gone.
That is why the leaders of commerce and industry are in the driver’s seat, but it is the constitution of such groups to make money, not to look after people. Now that this political restraint is gone, the situation has frightened world leaders. The world is now global in a way it’s never been before, and to match that, you need a strong international trade union, perhaps for the first time in the history of the world.
Previously, there was no doubt that there was a union international that represented unions behind the Iron Curtain (the World Federation of Trade Unions, WFTU), and there were unions representing what was called the free world (the ICFTU). The WFTU’s influence has been devastated, they’re a spent force, and that merely points to the new responsibilities of the ICFTU. There is a global challenge - there needs to be a global response.
MM: British and other unions have said they are looking to your leadership to make ICFTU’s work more focused. How do you plan to respond to their calls for reform?
Jordan: I believe that in the past, there has been an emphasis on "fire- fighting," dealing with the many crises as they arose, one after the other, with less emphasis on setting objectives internationally and regionally. Now we have to set our objectives for what we want on the international scene.
If, for example, to be a member of NAFTA, each country has to have minimum standards, including the recognition of free trade unions, I’m less likely to be dashing over to some Latin American country to protest about the suppression of trade unionism, because we would have tackled the problem collectively.
We’ll only be able to do this if we strengthen the role of each union in each country, and set objectives with them, for them to influence their policy-makers.
MM: Will the ICFTU then play a role in setting national union objectives?
Jordan: No, we adopt policies that the national unions recognize as an international approach, and they have to play their part in that. It would be clear to them that these are the objectives we seek, and we would expect them to try to influence their governments to talk this language when they are taking part in regional discussions. But the lead does have to come from the top.
For example, the sheer scale of China ’s threat means there are those who say, "Can you ignore them? Can you take a stand against them?" Clearly Clinton failed to do this. I don’t think there’s anyone that doubts that, in his heart-of-hearts, Clinton would not want to trade with China. He’s not the sort of man that believes workforces should be treated in the way they are in China. But his decision was dictated by the powerful financial forces in America.
The same sort of pressures come on the ICFTU. Can we ignore them? I say we can’t; someone somewhere around the world, some small union can waver on this issue, but the ICFTU has to give a lead. What’s wrong is wrong. That’s what leadership is all about, that you take the majority with you.
MM: What about organizational reform: Do you see a different ICFTU emerging?
Jordan: I’m at the stage of assessing the effectiveness of the work we do. I’ve found a very talented workforce, but I’m assessing whether what they are being asked to do, and the form their work takes, is the most effective way of reaching the objectives of the ICFTU. It is too early to judge. It is self evident that the role of an international trade union which deals with almost every country in the world is complicated. It’s also dealing with the diverse politics of all those countries, and the aftermath of the collapse of communism and the turbulent politics that everyone’s witnessing. To be able to have policies that run true through that sort of turbulence is never going to be easy.
For example, in Russia , there are different currents of politics in southern Russia than in northern Russia, we know that. But the trade unions must make sure the way it goes about building up strong, free trade unions in those areas doesn’t run afoul of these politics.
MM: What are the global issues raised by the UN Social Summit which are of particular importance to the ICFTU?
Jordan: First, you have to ask yourself why this is the largest gathering of world leaders in the history of the world. The answer is because of the growing insecurity and inequality in the world of work around the globe. Unemployment is now not