Open World Conference of Workers

March 8, 2001

Dear supporters of labor rights in the U.S. and Canada:

We send you fraternal greetings in the name of electrical workers and trade union representatives from the energy industry in Mexico.

We are writing this letter to invite you to participate in the Tri-National (Mexico, U.S., Canada) Workers Conference Against Deregulation and Privatization and For the Repeal of NAFTA. The Conference will be held May 26-27 in Mexico City at the hall of the National Nuclear Industry Workers Union (SUTIN). One of the main goals of the conference is to build support for the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation, which will take place in Berlin, Germany, in February 2002.

The Bush administration, in the face of the impending economic recession, is seeking to implement a series of policies that will shield the multinational corporations from the effects of the recession and that will permit them to continue making mega-profits on the basis of over-exploitation and speculation.

Recently Bush met with Mexican President Vicente Fox. At their meeting in Mexico they reached two fundamental decisions: (1) promote the swift adoption of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and (2) take steps toward the creation of a unified electrical system and grid for the three signatory countries of NAFTA: Mexico, the United States and Canada.

In the case of the FTAA, what is involved is the attempt to abolish across the entire continent all labor rights, all environmental norms and all types of regulations which the multinational corporations consider an obstacle to their ability to rake in super-profits. To reach this objective, Bush has said he will seek Fast Track authority from the U.S. Congress.

In the case of the energy sector, the U.S. and Mexican governments are discussing the need to create a unified system that could be controlled directly by private utility corporations on both sides of the border.

In Mexico, working people believe strongly - and with great reason - that the existence of public ownership of the electrical and petroleum industries is a fundamental feature of Mexico's national sovereignty. For many years, we have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the privatization of the national electrical industry. Now Fox has just announced that he intends to push through the privatization of electricity. He has thrown down the gauntlet.

In the United States, we have read about the disastrous consequences of the deregulation in California, with the alarming utility rate increases, the power shortages, and the like - all of which are most harmful to the state's working families.

One example of what the corporations are after can be seen with the NAFTA board's transportation decision. We have read statements from U.S. truck drivers who state, correctly, that the proliferation of Mexican trucks on U.S. highways is tantamount to "sweatshops on wheels," as the low wages paid to Mexican drivers will be used to drive down the wages and working conditions of U.S. drivers. You should also know that Mexican drivers will be adversely affected by the NAFTA transportation ruling, as the Mexican trucking industry simply will be swallowed up by the large U.S. trucking corporations.

A similar situation will occur with the energy sector. The U.S. electric and gas corporations are seeking a foothold in Mexico to increase their profits and to use the low wages paid to Mexican workers to drive down the wages of U.S. electrical workers. And if the workers north of the border refuse to make concessions, the bosses threaten to close their plants and move across the Rio Bravo, which they have done at a rapidly increasing rate.

The fastest-growing industry in Mexico is that of the maquiladoras, or pass-through sweatshops. Here workers have no rights. When they attempt to organize an independent union, as they tried to do recently at the Duro Bag Corp. in Tamaulipas, they are met with the goons of the company unions and the repressive arm of the state.

These policies have been fueled by NAFTA, and will be further promoted under the FTAA.

As some of the U.S. truck drivers have stated, the only solution in the face of this combined assault - and this attempt to pit Mexican workers against their American sisters and brothers - is for workers on both sides of the borders to link arms in the struggle for better wages and working conditions, and for unrestricted labor rights - beginning with the right to free and independent unions. The only solution is link arms in the struggle to repeal NAFTA and to block the passage of the FTAA.

We believe firmly that in the face of the globalization proposed by the multinationals and governments, it is necessary to unite our forces in the struggle to promote labor rights and to put a halt to all the policies of deregulation that flow from the NAFTA and FTAA accords.

This is why we invite you to join us at the Tri-National Workers Conference Against Deregulation and Privatization and for the Repeal of NAFTA.

We hope to see you in Mexico City on May 26-27.

Fraternally,

Rubinstein Durán Ochoa, General Secretary, Section 130 of the Electrical Workers Union of the Mexican Republic (SUTERM); Carmelo Santos, Department Delegate, Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME); and Arturo Díaz Alegría, Executive board member, Democratic Tendency of the SUTERM

P.S. Please find attached a copy of the Conference Appeal and information regarding conference registration and lodging

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Appeal for a Tri-National (Mexico, Canada, United States) Workers' Conference 

Against Deregulation and Privatizations and for the Repeal of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Mexico City, Mexico, May 26-27, 2001

Introduction

We - delegates who have assembled on November 18, 2000, in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas (Chiapas) at the "Fifth Convention in Defense of the Nation, Against Deregulation and Privatizations, and for the Repeal of NAFTA" - hereby issue an "Appeal for a Tri-National (Mexico, Canada, United States) Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and Privatizations and for the Repeal of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)."

We propose that this Tri-National Workers' Conference take place in Mexico City on May 26-27, 2001, as a stepping stone to build the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All, which will be held in Germany in February 2002 at the initiative of the International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International (ILC), the Continuations Committee of the Open World Conference (OWC), and a number of German trade unions.

Seven Years of NAFTA

January 1, 2001, marks the seventh anniversary of the signing of NAFTA by the governments of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The disastrous results of NAFTA are there for all to see:

a) Jobs and wages: Mexico has been embraced by the multinational corporations as a country with cheap labor and cheap natural resources. The minimum wage is barely $4 a day. During the government of Ernesto Zedillo, the average wage of Mexican workers lost 48.3 % of its purchasing power.

In the United States, the results of NAFTA are clear - despite the vain attempts of the Clinton administration to cover up the facts. At least 400,000 - and perhaps as many as 600,000 jobs - have been lost as a direct result of NAFTA. Employers continue to threaten plant closures and production shifts to Mexico in the drive to lower wages of all U.S. workers and hamper union organizing attempts. In Canada, the number of full-time jobs with benefits has been slashed dramatically, as have been union jobs as a whole.

b) Delocalizations: The governments of Mexico and the United States promote delocalizations of businesses, that is, the transfer of the productive facilities of these giant corporations to Mexico or even to regions in the United States (particularly in the Southeast of the United States), where there is more flexibility of the workforce, lower wages and a far lower rate of unionization.

In Mexico, the industrial sector that has grown most rapidly is that of the maquilas (pass-through sweatshops), where 1.5 million workers (mainly women, youth, and even children) are submitted to the most savage exploitation, with precarious jobs and no labor rights. This is a sector where even Mexican federal labor law does not apply and where the so-called unions are in fact direct instruments of the bosses and the government.

Production in Canada is also being moved to lower-wage countries, as in the case of the Bauer Skate Company in Ontario - which was bought by the Nike Corporation, operated in Canada for six months, and then moved to Malaysia, along with 500 factory jobs.

In their drive for maximum profits, global corporations pit working people, our communities, and entire nations against one another in a downward spiral of takebacks, concessions, and direct assaults - what has come to be known appropriately as the "race to the bottom."

c) Export of cheap labor: Another result of NAFTA is the dramatic increase in migration from Mexico to the United States by adults and youth aspiring to a job and better wages. Entire populations from various states of Mexico (Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, etc.) are left without a male population. An estimated 1.3 million Mexicans attempt to cross the border each year. Some of them succeed, while others are forced back. Many of them die of heat exhaustion in the desert, or they drown in the Rio Bravo. Others still are assassinated by the Migra or they are hunted down as animals by U.S. ranchers. This mass of undocumented workers exerts a constant pressure to lower the salaries of U.S. workers, while the Mexican workers in the United States are treated miserably, having no rights - in particular, no rights to organize collectively.

d) Privatization: NAFTA is the over-arching plan that imposes privatization of public services and enterprises as well as the deregulation of finance and labor legislation. In Mexico, over the past seven years, the national railroad system has been turned over to the multinationals, with the ensuing loss of the collective-bargaining agreement and with the layoffs of thousands of workers. In the case of Mexico City, the Ruta 100 public bus system was dismantled and its union and collective bargaining agreement destroyed. Thousands of bus drivers were left without a job. In the United States, privatization of transportation, public services, and even sectors of education has moved ahead. The deregulation of public utilities (particularly electricity), trucking, and telecommunications in the United States has had extremely negative results for consumers, while severely attacking the unions in those sectors.

To conclude, NAFTA has only benefited the large corporations, primarily the U.S. multinational corporations, imposing still greater flexibility of the work force - all with the full support of the three signatory governments.

The Extension of NAFTA through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)

A new offensive against the workers and peoples of the entire Western Hemisphere is in the works. The objective of the Clinton administration- fully embraced by new Mexican President Vicente Fox and by Canadian Prime Minister Chretien - has been to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by the year 2003. This objective was dealt a major setback when the U.S. Congress, under the sustained pressure of the U.S. workers and their trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, blocked "fast-track" authority to expand NAFTA.

Both major party candidates to the U.S. presidency, Al Gore and George Bush, pledged to deepen the policies of the Clinton administration in the realm of "free trade." Both candidates pledged to promote FTAA vigorously and to deepen the drive to "remove all barriers" to the free circulation of U.S. capital and goods in the hemisphere. Whichever candidate wins the presidency will continue to promote the interests of Big Business at the expense of the workers and peoples of the region.

Vicente Fox Quesada, the new Mexican president, is offering to turn over to the U.S. multinational corporations control and ownership of the oil and electricity industries, which are the source of much of the country's wealth as well as the material basis of the sovereignty of the nation.

The Free Trade Areas of the Americas is a plan aimed at driving down even further the cost of labor in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States and Canada, through the liquidation of the rights and organizations of the workers. In the case of Mexico, as has been announced already by the new team of President-elect Fox, the priority is to deliver the Mexican national oil enterprise, Pemex, to the multinationals.

On that same plane, the so-called "Plan Colombia" - which, on the surface, is presented as a war against the drug dealers - is in fact part and parcel of the same policies aimed at dismantling the national borders of the countries of this region. What is involved is the pursuit of a war to help the multinationals make further inroads on the continent and to carry out fully the Free Trade Areas of the Americas.

Let there be no doubt: The U.S. government seeks to liquidate workers' rights and to dismantle the national sovereignty of the countries of Latin America and of the entire continent.

Deregulation and "Free Trade" - an International Policy

The policies of deregulation - which target social protection systems and collective rights won through bitter struggle by workers and their organizations over many decades - are international in scope.

But the resistance of working people to this assault has not abated; if anything it has increased. In the United States, workers and their trade union federation were able to put a halt to fast-track. In Mexico, the electrical workers, through their mass mobilizations, have been able to prevent - at least for the time being - the privatization of the electricity industry. In Mexico, as well, public-sector workers engaged in a massive strike for a year-end bonus that has paralyzed the government. In Canada, workers waged a general strike to prevent the initial attempts to privatize health care and social security.

To advance this resistance across borders, the trade union delegates who assembled on June 11, 2000, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the International Workers' Conference in Defense of ILO Conventions, issued a Call for an International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All. Such a conference is also aimed at advancing the follow-up work of the Open World Conference in Defense of Trade Union Independence and Democratic Rights, which was held in San Francisco in February 2000.

What comes through loud and clear in the Appeal for the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All is the need for workers the world over to fight back against the policies aimed at substituting individualized labor relations for the collective relations established through collective bargaining agreements and codified in enforceable labor rights.

All governments today - in the name of "globalization" and promoting the "comparative advantages" of the corporations in the host countries (cheap labor, lack of social security, etc.) - seek to subordinate the Conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) to the World Trade Organization. In so doing, they seek to replace these ILO Conventions with mere recommendations that have no enforcement power.

One case in point is the recent revision of ILO Convention 103 in defense of maternity rights. The revision of ILO Convention 103 and its replacement with Convention 183 has led to the removal of the iron-clad prohibition to fire a pregnant woman from her job. Already governments on every continent have seized upon the revision of ILO Convention 103 to modify their own labor legislation in such a way as to undermine and reverse the maternity rights of women at work.

The call for the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation concludes by pointing out that there is an urgent need to organize on every continent a sustained fightback against all forms of deregulation with the aim of defending collective rights and rejecting the individualization of those rights.

In Mexico, the United States, and Canada, the deregulation offensive is rooted in the "free trade" agenda of the multinational corporations and of the governments in their service. This offensive has a name: It is NAFTA. It is the FTAA, which will only extend the devastation inflicted on the three countries of North America to the rest of the continent.

In light of this dramatic situation, and to prepare the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All, we call on working people, students, youth, activists, retirees, to join in Mexico City on May 26-27, 2001, at a Tri-National Workers' Conference to help advance the fightback around the following demands:

o Repeal NAFTA!

o Stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)!

o Stop Deregulation!

o Defense of PEMEX and of the national electrical industry in Mexico!

o No to the privatization of the public services and enterprises (health care, education, social security, etc.)!

o Amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the United States!

o Solidarity and unity of working people across North America and throughout the hemisphere!

o Full Labor Rights for All!

o For the right to self-determination for all the oppressed peoples of the continent!

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ELECTRICAL WORKERS' LETTER OF INVITATION

[The following communication was received from representatives of two Mexican electrical workers' unions. The translation is by Dan La Botz.]

Brothers and Sisters of the Energy Sector of the United States,

Please receive a cordial greeting from the workers and Mexican union representatives of the energy sector.

We invite you to participate in a conference of workers from Mexico the United States and Canada that will take place on May 26 and 27, 2001 in Mexico City in the auditorium of the Sole Union of Workers of the Nuclear Industry (SUTIN).

This conference will serve to prepare for the international conference against deregulation and for labor union rights for all that will take place in Berlin, Germany in February 2002.

The Bush government, in the context of the political crisis of the elections and the recession that has appeared in the United States, wants to apply a series of measures so that multinational corporations will not be so adversely affected by the consequences of the recession and so that they will continue to receive the benefits of an economy based on speculation, and not on the needs of the families of workers and communities.

Recently, president Bush met with president Fox in Mexico. In this meeting they put forward two essential points: speeding up the establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and creating a single system in the energy sector within the area made up of the three countries [Canada, Mexico and the United States] in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

In the first case this is about suppressing, throughout the continent, labor and environmental norms and all sorts of regulations that the corporations consider an obstacle to receiving their profits. In order to achieve this objective, Bush is going to ask the U.S. Congress for "fast track" authority.

In the second case, the governments of Mexico and the United States hope to create a single energy system that will be controlled directly by and for the corporations and that will be against the interests of workers and communities.

In Mexico, the people rightly think that the electrical industry and the petroleum industry should be public property and that such public property is the fundamental basis for their nation's existence and of their national sovereignty.

In the United States we have seen the consequences of deregulation in the electrical sector in the state of California which has been detrimental to the interests of the electrical workers and of the population.

The transportation sector provides a good example of what the corporations have in mind for U.S. workers. U.S. truck drivers think that Mexican trucks will be sweatshops on wheels, used to lower the wages of U.S. truck drivers. The same situation is proposed for the energy sector and for as many sectors of the U.S. economy as possible. Use the low wages of the South to reduce the wages and benefits in the North!

The corporations have taken advantage of the cheap labor in the maquiladoras established in Mexico in order to "run away South" every time U.S. workers demand their rights or a living wage. This policy has been broadened with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Today what the corporations want to do is take advantage of the FTAA and the energy agreement in order to use the Mexican working class to pressure the U.S. workers, by paying low wages and denying the right to independent unions as was seen recently in the case of the Duro Bag company in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico.

As the U.S. truck drivers say, the only way out given this political strategy that pits some workers against others, is a fight for higher wages and rights of unionization for Mexican workers, and the struggle for the rights of all workers in North America. We have to fight to deny Bush the "fast track" which was won earlier by the Clinton government, and all of the workers in North America, whether from Canada, Mexico or the United States, have to unite and struggle to overturn NAFTA and to stop the FTAA.

We believe that faced with the globalization which is proposed by the multinational corporations and the governments, it is necessary that we unite our forces in order to fight for respect for all labor rights for all workers and to stop the politics of deregulation, the central axis of which is NAFTA and the FTAA.

With this in mind we invite you to join us at the Conference of workers from Mexico, the United States and Canada against deregulation, for labor rights, and for overturning NAFTA and stopping the FTAA. Join us in Mexico City on May 26 and 27 of 2001.

Fraternally,

Rubinstein Durán Orchoa, general secretary of Local 130 of the Sole Union of Electrical Workers of the Mexican Republic (SUTERM); Carmelo Santos, Departmental Delegate of the Mexican Union of electrical Workers (SME); and Arturo Díaz Alegría, member of the democratic slate of SUTERM.