Mexian Workers Reveal Problems at Ford

Mexico City — The "nude-in" was inaugurated June 13 as a tactic of worker protest against exploitation by U.S. multinational corporations operating in Mexico.

Several dozen naked workers from Ford's Cuautitlan auto plant near Mexico City marched through the offices of a government labor relations agency chanting "Si no hay solucion, nos quitamos hasta el calzon." ("If there is no solution, we strip down to our socks.")

"We are demonstrating because we have been stripped naked before the law," explained Marco Antonio Jimenez, one of the group's leaders. "This foreign company, our own government and the charros [corrupt, government-dominated union leaders] have taken away our human rights."

The protest was one of many undertaken by Ford Mexico workers during the past three years to oppose cuts in wage levels (now down to about $50 per week) and increases in workloads. Since January 1990, one protesting worker has been killed, eight others wounded, dozens beaten and more than 700 fired.

Like most of the largest U.S. manufacturing companies, Ford greatly expanded its operations in Mexico during the 1980s in order to make higher profits on production for U.S. consumers. In becoming the third largest exporter of goods from Mexico to the United States, Ford built new plants at Hermosillo and Chihuahua, in the border region. At both plants, the company's goal was to operate with very low wages and near-total "flexibility" — meaning that workloads could be increased at any time without worker input.

Implementation of this so-called team concept of labor relations (see "Management By Stress," Multinational Monitor, January/February 1990) at the new plants was threatened, however, as long as workers at the older Cuautitlan plant enjoyed the job rights and higher pay levels they had won over the years.

In 1987, Ford withdrew recognition of the Cuautitlan workers' contract, reduced the work force by more than a quarter, cut pay by an average of 50 percent and took away all accumulated seniority and pension credits.

"The company was so determined to increase workloads that they even installed urinals near the production lines," recalled Jimenez. "They said you shouldn't need someone to take your place while you go to the bathroom. You should be able to relieve yourself and still keep up with your job."

Prior to March 1988, the workers' union was controlled by the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), which is allied with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has ruled Mexico for the past 60 years. When CTM leaders defended the company actions, workers organized a slate of candidates which was elected to key local union offices. The company soon fired those elected leaders and their strongest supporters.

Jimenez protested the firings with a 35-day hunger strike during which he was beaten by police and by professional CTM golpeadores, or thugs. The company also fired 30 more rank-and-file union activists.

Ford's tactics failed to destroy workers' resistance, however. In December 1989, when Ford — with CTM support — withheld profit-sharing and bonus payments which they owed to employees by law, workers engaged in several work stoppages inside the plant to demand the money due them and the right to hold free, democratic union elections.

On January 5, 1990, six workers, attempting to distribute leaflets as the first shift entered the plant, were arrested without charge and taken by police to an undisclosed location. Only a sit-down strike by the rest of the work force gained their release.

Then, three days later, about 300 armed thugs were brought into the plant to prevent further protests. They came in CTM buses and were provided with uniforms and identification badges by the company so that management could later explain any disturbance by claiming that a fight had broken out between two groups of workers.

When the 3,800 unarmed workers attempted to force the thugs to leave, the thugs opened fire. One of the nine workers who was shot died several days later.

"We captured three of the thugs," said Jaime Pina, a member of the committee workers established to negotiate with the company-government-CTM alliance. 'The thugs told reporters they had been hired by the CTM and instructed and supplied by Ford management. But none of the officials who organized and directed the attack have ever been brought to justice."

For more than a month, workers refused to resume production until protection of their legal and contractual rights could be assured. Finally, on March 1, Ford, Mexican Secretary of Labor Arsenio Farell and the CTM signed an agreement under which all workers would be reinstated over a 30-day period.

Despite this agreement, the company has refused to take back more than 700 of the most active unionists. The workers have tried to pressure the company and the government through demonstrations blocking major highways, work stoppages at the plant and blockades of Ford Mexico's corporate offices.

Such tactics have assured that the Ford conflict remains a significant inconvenience for the government of Mexican President Carlos Salinas. Salinas has based his economic policies on attracting multinational corporations to Mexico by maintaining a wage control program, offering low rates of taxation and assuring "labor peace" through repression of democratic unions. A settlement unfavorable to Ford would send the wrong signal to those companies.

Continuing publicity about the lack of a solution at Ford reinforces Salinas' political opposition, which argues that the government is helping the multinationals get away with unregulated exploitation. Photos of the Ford workers' nude-in were featured prominently in nearly all of Mexico's major newspapers on the day that Salinas announced plans to negotiate a highly controversial "free trade" agreement — a deal which would make it even easier for American companies to use cheap Mexican labor to produce for the U.S. market.

"Any agreements to bring more companies like Ford here should require them to respect union democracy and bring our wages and working conditions up toward the level of U.S. workers," said Raul Escobar, spokesman for the Ford workers' negotiating committee. "That's the only way to protect workers in either country."

— Matt Witt

A Trashy Proposal

Two U.S. companies are pushing the impoverished Marshall Islands to provide a dumping ground for wastes produced in the United States. The cluster of Pacific islands, which served for years as a U.S. nuclear weapons testing ground and now houses a U.S. missile base, stands to gain much-needed land and money by agreeing to the deals. Environmental activists strongly oppose the plans, however, warning that they will have disastrous environmental and health consequences for the residents of the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls are awaiting environmental impact studies of the Micronesian Marine Development (Micromar) and Admiralty Pacific projects before deciding whether to accept either proposal.

This is not the first time the Marshalls have been urged to accept U.S. garbage (see "Islands of Garbage," Multinational Monitor, May 1989). The Seattle-based Admiralty Pacific gave up its original 1989 bid for a waste trade agreement in the face of negative worldwide media attention and the resignation of then- president Dan Fleming, who claimed to have discovered plans to secretly include nuclear waste in the disposal package. Fleming went on to incorporate Micromar the same year, proposing an allegedly safe waste disposal package similar to the original Admiralty Pacific landfill proposal. In the meantime, Admiralty altered its strategy from constructing landfills to building artificial reefs from discarded U.S. tires.

The company alleges that the plan was changed to ensure the health and safety of the people of the Marshall Islands. Greenpeace, however, in its July 1990 report, "Pollution for the Marshall Islands = Profits for the United States," decries the change as a scheme "to inexpensively discard used tires, and eventually other solid waste, by paying a cash-hungry country to take them." Admiralty Pacific has not yet announced plans to commission the environmental impact study which the Marshallese government has stipulated as necessary for the proposal's acceptance.

Micromar, in contrast, expects its environmental study to be finished by the end of this year, and the company's plan is widely regarded as more likely to be adopted and implemented than Admiralty's proposal.

According to Micromar President Fleming, his firm would ship U.S. municipal waste to the Marshall Islands, where it would be deposited as landfill. The waste, he explained to Multinational Monitor, would be stored in plastic bags the thickness of linoleum and placed in a lined landfill protected by "a massive sea wall on the ocean side and smaller walls on the remaining three sides." Potentially toxic leachates would be removed by a drainage system underneath the dump. The landfill would then be covered with a three foot thick layer of coral as well as six feet of soil.

The area could eventually support agriculture, Fleming says, and would help satisfy the Marshalls' need for land area and elevation while easing U.S. waste disposal problems. "It's a win-win situation--as long as we can prove it can be done in an environmentally sound way," says Fleming, "and nobody's proved to me that it can't."

Greenpeace dismisses Fleming's claims, charging "that the [Micromar] landfill will contain hazardous wastes and will likely release these wastes into the environment." Fleming admits that he "can't guarantee that there will be no toxic leaks," but claims that "it's extremely unlikely." He expects the upcoming environmental impact report to bear out his confidence, and welcomes environmentalists' scrutiny. Says Greenpeace waste trade campaigner Ann Leonard, however, "the environmental claims of [Micromar's] proposal are indefensible."

Greenpeace asserts that both the Marshalls and the United States will be harmed by the deal. Along with health and environmental risks to the Marshalls, the Greenpeace report emphasizes that inexpensive foreign waste disposal "acts as a disincentive for waste prevention measures, detracting from efforts to achieve a long term solution [to the problem of pollution in the United States]."

The Marshall Islands' need for land and money may override environmental concerns, however. The seventy square-mile chain of islands is home to over 40,000 people; with a rapidly growing population, the shortage of land is becoming a severe problem. This scarcity has been exacerbated by U.S. action in the Marshalls since they became part of the U.S. Pacific Trust following World War II. From 1946 to 1958, several of the northern atolls, including Bikini, were evacuated and used as a test site for U.S. atomic weapons. Of the approximately 100 islands evacuated, only a handful are presently habitable.

The United States further strained Marshallese land resources in 1961, when the Army built a missile base on Kwajalein, relocating the island's residents to nearby Ebeye. Approximately twenty people had lived on Ebeye before construction of the base; there are now 10,000. Both U.S. rental payments for use of Kwajalein and the approximately 600 jobs the base provides discourage displaced Marshallese from attempting reoccupation and contribute to the Islands' dependence on the United States.

Critics argue that the proposals to pay the Marshall Islands to accept U.S. waste unfairly capitalize on the Islands' need for money and land, and continue the Marshalls' forced fealty to the United States. "Deals like these force governments to make the unfair choice between poison and poverty," states the Greenpeace report. It goes on to recommend that the Marshall Islands ban the import of foreign wastes, and that the United States ban all export of the wastes it produces. "The rest of the world should not be poisoned by the toxic outcasts of North American wealth," says Leonard.

- Nadav Savio

The Other Economic Summit

The leaders of the seven richest countries met at the Seven Industrial Countries (G-7) Economic Summit in Houston in early July to rejoice in the triumph of capitalism. With somewhat less publicity, representatives of the world's poorest peoples gathered a few days earlier to call attention to the majority of the world's population which has suffered at the hands of the system the G-7 celebrated. Over 600 activists concerned with development and environmental issues came to Houston from all over the world to attend "The Other Economic Summit," which featured the "Summit of Seven of the World's Poorest Peoples" and the "Populist Leaders' Summit," attended by Brazil's Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva and Mexico's Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano.

The Third World representatives stressed that the disintegration of bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in the Eastern bloc does not prove the success of the Western economic model. Cardenas, to the contrary, equated fallen "authoritarian, dogmatic, centralized regimes in Eastern Europe" with the "neo-liberal, monetarist model" with which much of the Third World has been experimenting. "Both," he said, "are exported from abroad and alien to the people" who have suffered as a result of their policies.

Capitalism has failed to bring sustainable development to most of the world, argued the representatives from Bangladesh, Colombia, Guatemala, Native America, Haiti, the Philippines and Puerto Rico who attended the Summit of Seven of the World's Poorest Peoples. As a result, most of the world lives in dire poverty. "Today's issue is the issue of survival," said Salina Ahmed of Bangladesh.

In fact, social conditions deteriorated for much of the world in the 1980s. "For most of the Third World, the past decade has been a lost decade," stated the final communique of the populist leaders. In Mexico, Cardenas noted, the last decade witnessed a 56 percent decline in real wages, unemployment rates on the order of 30 percent and increased political violence, as the Mexican government struggled to maintain its hold over the populace.

The Third World representatives noted that people in many countries suffer from similar problems. When she heard a description of the plight of Filipino women, Ahmed said, she thought she was hearing a presentation on women in Bangladesh.

They also focused on common enemies and causes of their poverty. The "social injustice, political intolerance, perennial decline in living standards [and] environmental destruction [which] continue to characterize social life in most of our countries," stated the populist leaders' communique, "are caused primarily by unfair world structures and abuses and impositions of the rich and powerful countries over the poor. The dominant elites of our own countries have also contributed to this predicament."

The alternative summit's participants denounced the holders of Third World debt for forcing the South to transfer wealth to the North. Lula noted that in making payment on its debt in the 1980s, "South America transferred $250 billion to the United States." Brazil alone, he said, contributed more than $90 billion to the Northern countries.

Multinational companies also drew the wrath of the Third World representatives. Pedro Galindo, a trade unionist from Colombia, described with outrage the multinational corporate control over his country's economy. One hundred percent of the pharmaceutical, chemical, auto and paper industries and 90 percent of the coffee industry are controlled by foreign multinationals, he said. As an example of multinationals' dominance of the economy he pointed to an instance in which Occidental Petroleum sold 25 percent of a Colombian oil field to Shell for $1 billion, a transaction for which Colombia received only one dollar. He called on the participants to make the nineties "a decade of the Third World versus the multinationals."

The Summit of Seven of the World's Poorest Peoples issued a final declaration which outlined an agenda for reforming the international political economy to benefit the world's poorest peoples. The final statement included calls for: cancellation of foreign debt; creation of an International Reparations Fund, administered by Third World countries, which would compensate Third World victims of the economic policies of the rich countries; protection of the rights of indigenous peoples; development of a code of conduct for multinational corporations; and full compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights treaties.

The alternative summit was marred by political repression, which prevented expected participants from attending. A labor organizer who was supposed to represent Haiti was killed shortly before he was scheduled to leave for Houston. One representative from Colombia and one from Guatemala were unable to attend because they were denied visas to enter the United States. Adalberto Carvajal Salcedo, a Colombian presidential candidate who had planned to attend the Populist Leaders' Summit, also was denied a visa and was unable to come to Houston.

Despite their focus on the policies of the rich countries, the participants in the alternative summit recognized that it was not likely that they would influence the rich countries' leaders. Improving social conditions for people in the Third World "will not depend on acts of benevolence from any of the rich countries," said Lula. "We don't expect from the United States, Italy, France, Britain or Japan any acts of philanthropy." Instead, Lula stated, prospects for change depend on "Third World acts of courage to refuse to accept being treated like second-class people ... [and on] the capacity of our own people's organizations to establish new directions for development and for improving living conditions."

- Robert Weissman