Open
World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
NAFTA AT TEN
By DAVID BACON
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (11/16/03) -- This week thousands of demonstrators will
fill Miami streets, in a show of opposition to free trade unseen (at least
in this country) since the battles in Seattle four years ago. Opponents
plan to hit the proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas with the
same one-two punch that forced trade ministers to end talks in Cancun in
October with no new agreement. While a sea of grassroots opponents lay
siege in the streets to the Miami hall where ministers meet once again,
inside the meeting itself the new leftwing governments of Latin America -
Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina and Venezuela - have already formed an
implacable opposition.
As demonstration and debate unfold, in the eye of the storm is the one
free trade agreement that already provides an idea of what the Americas
can expect from the Bush free trade plan. In just a few short weeks, the
North American Free Trade Agreement will be ten years old. And for FTAA's
opponents, that ten-year history of devastation, wreaked in Mexico and the
US both, will be the key argument in stopping its extension to the rest of
Latin America.
The communities of working people and the poor, on both sides of the
border, have paid the price for trade liberalization, while the benefits
have been reaped by the tiny clique who promoted NAFTA ten years ago.
In one of life's ironies, successive Secretaries of the US Department of
Labor - among NAFTA's most ardent supporters - have kept close track of
the treaty's high cost in US jobs. By 2002, the department had certified
that 408,000 workers qualified for extensions of unemployment benefits,
because their employers had moved their jobs south of the border.
Most observers believe this is a vast undercount. According to NAFTA At
Seven, a report by the Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA eliminated
766,030 actual and potential U.S. jobs between 1994 and 2000 because of
the rapid growth in the net U.S. export deficit with Mexico and
Canada."
While the job picture for US workers was grim, NAFTA's impact on Mexican
jobs was devastating. Before leaving office (and Mexico itself, pursued by
charges of corruption), President Carlos Salinas de Gortari promised
Mexicans they would gain the jobs the US lost. And on tours to the US to
promote the treaty, he promised that this job gain, although painful for
US workers, would halt the northward flow of Mexican job seekers.
NAFTA's first year saw instead the loss of over a million jobs all across
Mexico, in the wake of economic crisis. To attract investment,
NAFTA-related reforms required the privatization of factories, railroads,
airlines and other large enterprises. This led to further huge waves of
layoffs. And because unemployment and economic desperation in Mexico
increased, immigration to the US has been the only hope for survival for
millions of Mexicans.
For a while, however, it seemed that the growth of maquiladora factories
along the border would make up for at least part of the job loss. By 2001,
over 1,300,000 workers were employed in over 2000 border plants, according
to the Maquiladora Industry Association. But tying the jobs of so many
Mexicans to the US market, for which the plants were producing, proved a
disaster as well. When US consumers stopped buying as the recession hit in
2001, maquiladoras also began shedding workers. The Mexican government
estimates that over 400,000 jobs disappeared in the process -- as the
saying goes on the border, when the US economy catches cold, Mexico gets
pneumonia. A two-year PR campaign by the association and the Mexican
government to blame the loss in border jobs on Chinese competition then
sought to obscure the obvious fact that the plants produced far more goods
than a recession-plagued market in the US could absorb.
But the most serious consequence of NAFTA has been its failure to protect
the rights of workers as promised by its supporters. To attract investment
to the maquiladoras, Mexican government authorities cooperated with
investors and compliant official unions in maintaining a low-wage economy,
reinforced with a system of labor control.
According to Martha Ojeda, director of the Coalition for Justice in the
Maquiladoras, the government-mandated minimum wage for workers on the
border is about $4.20. She estimates that a majority of maquiladora
workers earn close to this wage.
A study by the Center for Reflection, Education and Action, a religious
research group, found that at the minimum wage, it took a maquiladora
worker in Juarez almost an hour to earn enough money to buy a kilo (2.2
pounds) of rice, and a worker in Tijuana an hour and a half. And yet
another study by the Economics Faculty of the National Autonomous
University in Mexico City says Mexican wages have lost 81% of their buying
power in the last two decades.
To enforce this system, maquiladora workers are required to belong to
unions that have no intention of raising those low wages or helping them
end exhausting and dangerous working conditions. Throughout NAFTA's
ten-year history, workers have sought to break free in a long labor war
waged from plant to plant along the border. They have organized
independent unions, willing to fight for a larger share of the enormous
wealth the factories produce. But these efforts have been met with
firings, plant closures, and even physical violence.
Ten years of hearings held under NAFTA's labor sideagreement have
documented extensive violations of labor rights. In those few instances in
which workers have successfully formed independent unions, as they did at
Tijuana's Han Young plant in 1998-9, their strikes were broken, despite
guarantees under Mexico's Constitution and Federal Labor Law.
NAFTA's sponsors promised that the treaty's labor sideagreement would
protect workers, even though the treaty itself was intended to demolish
all barriers to foreign investment. The sideagreement proved toothleess.
In ten years not one fired worker has been returned to his or her job, and
not one independent union has gained legal status and a contract as a
result of the NAFTA process.
Instead, the historical labor protections built into Mexico's legal system
have been systematically undermined and eliminated as obstacles to
investment. Even when Mexican judges held that strikes were legal, as did
Maria Lourdes Villagomez Guillon of the Federal 5th District in 1998, and
Pedro Fernandez Reyes Colin of the First Collegial Court of the Fifteenth
District (Baja California's highest judicial authority) in 1999, their
decisions were defied with impunity by government authorities. Under
NAFTA, breaking strikes and unions on the border has become an integral
part of economic development, and legal protections for workers have been
swept away.
Four years ago, at the height of the protests against the World Trade
Organization, Zwelenzima Vavi, the head of the South African Congress of
Trade Unions, described the alternative to NAFTA and the free trade
philosophy underpinning it. "In the pursuit of profit," he said,
"governments are told to remove worker protections, and then use that
as an inducement for investment. But development is a wider concept. It
includes social development, and the living conditions of the people.
Development can't exist with mass unemployment and poverty."
As the opposition gathers in Miami, these are the words that critics of
NAFTA and FTAA will put before the world.
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