BUILDING A CULTURE OF CROSS BORDER SOLIDARITY
By David Bacon
In the period since the North American Free Trade Agreement has come into effect, the economies of the United States and Mexico have become more integrated than ever. Through Plan Puebla-Panama and partnerships on security, the military and the drug war, the political and economic policies pursued by the U.S. and Mexican governments are also more coordinated than they’ve ever been.
Working people on both sides of the border are not only affected by this integration. Workers and their unions in many ways are its object. These policies seek to maximize profits and push wages and benefits to the bottom, manage the flow of people displaced as a result, roll back the rights and social benefits achieved over decades, and weaken working class movements in both countries.
All this makes cooperation and solidarity across the U.S./Mexico border more important than ever. And after a quarter century in which the development of solidarity relationships was interrupted, unions and workers are once again searching out their counterparts and finding effective and appropriate ways to support each other in this new period.
The working class movements of the U.S. and Mexico both began in the decades after the seizure of Mexican territory in the War of 1848, its incorporation into the territory of the U.S., and the unequal relationship cemented by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The roots of the cross-border solidarity movement are very deep, and go back more than a century. They are part of the labor culture of workers and unions on both sides, and have been almost since the beginning of our two labor movements.
During the period of the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 40s, most solidarity activity was organized by Mexican workers and unions in support of workers in the U.S. In part, this was due to a point of view among those unions that saw Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, especially along the border, and part of their own constituency. Bert Corona, a leftist born in Juarez, became president of ILWU Local 26 in Los Angeles, and later Humberto Camacho, a Mexican organizer for the United Electrical Workers, helped establish UE Local 1421.
Both Corona and Camacho became the two most influential leaders of the immigrant rights movement through the 1970s, and their militant program called for defending the rights of undocumented workers. Corona, Camacho, and their generation of solidarity and labor activists saw that unions in both countries had a common interest. Labor, they believed, should try to raise the standard of living in both countries, and stop the use of immigrants as a vulnerable labor supply for employers.
A deportation wave marked the rise of cold war hysteria. In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, the combination of enforcement and bracero contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year. As a political weapon, deportations were part of a general wave of repression that included firings, and even prison for leftwing and labor activists.
The movement for solidarity among workers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico didn’t begin just with NAFTA. Solidarity is an integral and indispensable part of the history of the labor movement in both countries, and has always been a two-way street. Mexican unions especially played a key role in the organization of US unions, some of which would not exist today without that early support.
Those early efforts met success through by concentrating on the key role of Mexican workers in the U.S. Today’s circumstances are different, but the migration of people is just as important to solidarity today as it was eighty years ago.
Solidarity has always been a project of the left in each country. A strong leftproduced a base for developing common action, and popularized political ideas that helped workers understand why internationalism was necessary to confront transnational corporations, and the governments and their policies that supported them. Conversely, the cold war, nationalism, and anti-immigrant hysteria in the U.S., and repression on both sides of the border, were tools used to break those bonds and proscribe those ideas. Today those threats are growing again. Ties between workers and union in the U.S. and Mexico must grow stronger and become an effective weapon to defeat them.
The growth of cross-border solidarity today is taking place at a time when U.S. penetration of Mexico is growing – economically, politically, and even militarily. While the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has it’s own special characteristics, it is also part of the creation of a global system of production, distribution and consumption. It is not just a bilateral relationship.
Jobs go from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico in order to cut labor costs. But from Mexico those same jobs go China or Bangladesh or dozens of other countries, where labor costs are even lower. As important, the threat to move those jobs, experienced by workers in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards, are now common in Mexico as well. Those threats force concessions on wages, and in Sony’s huge Nuevo Laredo factory, for instance, were used to make workers agree to an indefinite temporary employment status, even though Mexican law prohibited it.
Multiple production locations undermine unions’ bargaining leverage, since action by workers in a single workplace can’t shut down production for the entire corporation. The UAW, for instance, was beaten by Caterpillar in large part because even though the union could stop production in the U.S., production in Mexico continued. Companies like Grupo Mexico can use profits gained in mining operations in Peru to subsidize the costs of a strike in Cananea.
The privatization of electricity in Mexico will not just affect Mexicans. Already plants built by Sempra Energy and Enron in Mexico are like maquiladoras, selling electricity into the grid across the border. If privatization grows, that will have an impact on US unions and jobs, giving even utility unions in the U.S. a reason to help Mexican workers resist it. This requires more than just solidarity between unions facing the same employer. It requires solidarity in resisting the imposition of neoliberal reforms like privatization and labor law reform as well.
At the same time, the concentration of wealth has created a new political situation in both countries. In Mexico, the old governing party, the PRI, functioned as a mediator between organized workers and business. PRI governments used repression to stop the growth of social movements outside the system it controlled. But the government also used negotiations in interest of long-term stability. The interests of the wealthy were protected, but some sections of the population also received social benefits and unions had recognized rights. In 1994, for instance, the government put leaders of Mexico City’s bus union SUTAUR in prison. But then it proceeded to negotiate with them while they were in jail.
The victory of Vicente Fox and the PAN in 2000 created a new situation, in which the corporate class, grown rich and powerful because of earlier reforms, no longer desired the same kind of social pact or its political intermediaries. The old corporatist social construct, in which unions had a role, was no longer necessary. Meanwhile employers and the government have been more willing to use force. Unions like SME and miners face, not just repression, but destruction.
In the U.S. a similar process took place during the years after the Vietnam War, when corporations made similar decisions. After the PATCO strike was broken by the Federal government, the use of strikebreakers became widespread. Corporations increasingly saw even business unions as unnecessary for maintaining social peace and continued profits. Union organizing became a kind of labor warfare. A whole industry of union busters appeared, and the process set up by U.S. labor law in the 1930s became virtually unusable by workers seeking to organize.
Labor law reform, national healthcare, and other basic pro-worker reforms became politically impossible in the post-Vietnam era, even under Democratic presidents whom unions helped elect. Public workers did succeed in organizing during this period, however, and eventually U.S. union strength became more and more concentrated in that sector. But much as the public sector in Mexico came under attack, the U.S. public sector became the target for the U.S. right, for much the same reasons. This too changed the landscape for solidarity, giving the most politically powerful section of the U.S. labor movement, at least potentially, a greater interest in solidarity with Mexican labor.
In both countries, the main union battles are now ones to preserve what workers have previously achieved, rather than to make new gains. Mexican unions are enmeshed in the state labor process, in which the government still certifies unions’ existence, and to a large degree controls their bargaining. In the U.S. labor is endangered by economic crisis, falling density, and an increasingly hostile political system. This leads to a rise in nationalism and protectionism, creating new obstacles for solidarity.
But as the attacks against unions are growing stronger, solidarity is becoming even more a question of survival. Unions face a basic question on both sides of the border — can they win the battles they face today, especially political ones, without joining their efforts together?
Ddespite the flight of many jobs to China, a U.S. economic recession that has caused massive layoffs in border plants, and extreme levels of violence in many border communities, the maquiladora industry in north Mexico is still enormous, with 3000 plants employing over 1.3 million workers. They’ve been the laboratory for the rightwing shift in labor law and labor relations, now being applied to workers across Mexico. The states are a stronghold still of political conservatism and corporate power, because of the disenfranchisement of the working population. A vibrant and strong labor movement on the border would change Mexico’s politics.
The influence of the maquiladoras on U.S. employment and runaway production over the years is undeniable. The growth of labor solidarity in the last two decades between the U.S. and Mexico owes a lot to the border, where U.S. unions first acquired a clear vision of the importance of their relations with Mexican workers.
The decline in activity in border factories over the last few years, and in the support from major unions and institutions in both countries for it, is an important weakness in the efforts to build a culture of labor solidarity.
In Mexico, the NAFTA debate led to the organization of the Action Network Opposing Free Trade (RMALC), which in turn helped to spark the relationship between the U.E. and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT). That relationship is a model for solidarity between two unions, based on equality and mutual interest, preserving each union’s ability to make its own decisions autonomously. Most importantly, it has been a relationship based on real campaigns on the ground – organizing drives, strikes, and resistance to proposals like the PRI labor law reform. Rank and file workers in both unions have played an important part in those efforts.
Frustrated with the slow pace of union organizing in Mexico, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center assisted the formation of the Workers Support Center (CAT) in Puebla, which led to pitched battles in the state’s maquiladoras, and some important victories. The first came at Mex Mode (Kuk Dong), where the CAT helped set up an independent union, and United Students Against Sweatshops then successfully pressured Nike Corporation into forcing the sweatshop’s management to recognize it and bargain. Recently, the CAT helped workers at a Johnson Controls plant to organize. The UAW in the U.S., which had earlier organized plants of the same company, pressured it into recognizing the union in Puebla.
The Mexican miners union, “los mineros”, have begun a process of merging with the United Steel Workers. The mineros are locked in an all-out conflict with the Mexican government and Grupo Mexico in a strike in Cananea, which has gone on for four years.
The decision by the mineros and USW to draw together rises from their joint struggles in the mines along the U.S./Mexico border. Workers in U.S. and Mexican mines have a long history of mutual support, even family relationships. While the cold war restrained such support activity for some years, the Cananea strike in 1998 restarted their relationship.
After three years the government and Grupo Mexico finally used armed force to reopen the Cananea mine, but they had to do it in the face of numerous decisions declaring such action unconstitutional and illegal. Reopening the mine is one of the clearest examples of the unwillingness of the Mexican government and large corporations to respect the rule of law.
“We don’t want to live in a country that’s attracting jobs from other countries like the US and Canada, using the competitive advantage of low wages, the lack of enforcement of labor laws, and even ecological damage,” says telephone union leader Francisco Hernandez Juarez. “These jobs are bound to be temporary anyway, they don’t give us any permanent benefit, and eventually when there’s some unfavorable event, they move to countries where the labor is even cheaper. The majority of Mexicans are being plunged into poverty. It will get worse if we continue depending exclusively on producing for foreign markets, especially the United States, and if we ignore our domestic market. We won’t accept turning into a maquiladora country that’s attractive simply because of its cheap labor. Through our unions, we want to establish more complex and complete labor relations, that permit us to be competitive in making more sophisticated products.”
The fight over that political direction is at the heart of the Mexican government’s attack on the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME). Here solidarity efforts from the U.S. are not based on a fight against a common employer, but instead challenge the free trade and free market reforms behind the attack on the Mexican union.
President Calderon declared Mexico’s oldest and most progressive major union “non-existent” in October of 2009. He dissolved the state-owned Power and Light Company for central Mexico, and fired all of the SME’s 44,000 members who worked there. Most Mexicans believe this is a prelude to privatizing the electrical industry. Already, despite the Constitutional prohibition, almost half of the electricity generated in the country comes from private producers. Despite the attacks, the union has been able to win back its legal recognition, and is fighting for the rights and jobs of the 16,000 members who have refused to accept their termination.
US unions stayed out of previous fights over privatization, especially around electrical generation, in part because the SME is still affiliated to the World Federation of Trade Unions. The WFTU was organized when the UN was founded, originally with CIO participation. But almost all US unions later abandoned it at the beginning of the cold war. The WFTU became the rival of the AFL-dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
In Mexico, however, that cold war barrier began to soften after the leadership of the AFL-CIO changed, and John Sweeney became president. As the Mexico/U.S. labor solidarity movement grew, so did the number of U.S. activists who saw the important role the SME plays in Mexican politics. They respected its democratic structure and strong contract. In earlier confrontations with Mexican administrations, unions like the U.E., whose relationship with the SME goes back decades, mobilized U.S. support
Delegations of SME leaders came to the U.S., hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and local labor councils. Their efforts led eventually to press conferences and meetings between SME and AFL-CIO leaders in Washington DC, and complaints at the ILO and under NAFTA’s labor side agreement. In February five international union bodies, the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), UNI Global Union, and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), cooperated in organizing actions in 40 countries. Over 50,000 workers, students and human rights activists demonstrated at Mexican consulates or otherwise showed their public opposition to the reform. Twenty-seven actions took place in Mexico itself.
When many U.S. workers think about Mexico, they envision it as the place their jobs have gone. If they lost those jobs, then Mexican workers must have gotten them. Ross Perot captured their imagination by referring to Mexico as “the giant sucking sound.” The message is that Mexican workers are the enemy, the ones who “stole your job.” In the U.S., most workers don’t understand the enormous impact NAFTA and neoliberal policies have had on Mexicans. When Mexicans, as a result, cross the border looking for work, many U.S. workers often don’t understand who they are or why they’ve come.
One indispensable part of their education is greater contact between Mexican union organizers and their U.S. counterparts. The base for that contact already exists, in the massive movement of people between the two countries.
Miners fired in Cananea, or electrical workers fired in Mexico City, become workers in Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York. Twelve million Mexican workers in the U.S. are a natural base of support for Mexican unions. They bring with them the experience of the battles waged by those unions.
The displacement and potential activity of these displaced union members is just one small part of the link between solidarity and the migration of people. The economic crisis in Mexico is getting much worse, with no upturn in sight. Six million Mexicans left for the U.S. in the NAFTA period, a flow of people that now affects almost every family, even in the most remote parts of country. Migration is becoming a much more important safety valve for the Mexican economy, relieving pressure on its government. It uses the tens of billions of dollars in remittances to take the place of social investment it has cut under pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Teachers’ strikes, like the one in Oaxaca in 2006, mushroom into insurrections, when there is no alternative to migration and an economic system increasingly dependent on remittances.
Economic reforms and displacement create unemployed workers – for border factories, or for U.S. agriculture and meatpacking plants. Displacement creates a reserve army of workers available to corporations as low wage labor. If demand rises, employers don’t have to raise wages. In a time of economic crisis, unemployed people are used to pressure employed workers, making them less demanding, and more fearful of losing their jobs.
Displacement and migration aren’t a byproduct of the global economy. The economic system in both Mexico and the U.S. is dependent on the labor that displacement produces. Mexican President Felipe Calderon said on a recent visit to California, “You have two economies. One economy is intensive in capital, which is the American economy. One economy is intensive in labor, which is the Mexican economy. We are two complementary economies, and that phenomenon is impossible to stop.”
To employers, migration is a labor supply system. The U.S. Congress isn’t deciding what can stop migration, because in the present system, nothing can. U.S. immigration policy is not intended to keep people from crossing the border. It determines the status of people once they’re in the U.S. It is designed to supply labor to employers at a manageable cost, imposed by employers. It makes the laborers themselves vulnerable, especially those who come through guest worker programs where employers can withdraw their ability to stay in the country by firing them.
The economic pressure that produces migration has a big impact on relations between U.S. and Mexican labor. Today, for instance, governments and employers on both sides of the border tell unions that support for these labor supply programs is part of a beneficial relationship. Any movement for solidarity has to address this corporate pressure for guest worker programs. An union alliance with employers on immigration policy, based on helping them use migration as a labor supply system, creates a large obstacle to any effort to defend the rights of migrants.
Instead, U.S. and Mexican unions need a common program on trade, displacement and investment, which calls for increasing the security of workers and farmers, and reducing displacement and forced migration.
U.S. unions trying to organize and grow have begun to see immigrants as potential members — workers who will strike and organize. They therefore oppose the idea of pushing Mexicans back across border, because they want them to become active in the U.S. They see immigrants, not just as a force on the job, but in politics. As people gain legal status and then become citizens, they also vote and elect public officials who act in workers’ interests.
For that reason, unions criticize the racial profiling law SB 1070 in Arizona — not just that it leads to discrimination, but that it’s wrong to make workers leave.
In 1999 the AFL-CIO reversed support for employer sanctions, that makes is a crime for undocumented people to work or for employers to hire them. It called for their repeal, for amnesty for the undocumented, for protecting the organizing rights of all workers, for family reunification. The federation already had a longstanding position calling for ending guest worker programs.
Gradually, unions have begun seeing the importance of workers who have feet planted on both sides of the border. This is an important parts of building a culture of solidarity.
The interests of workers in the U.S. and Mexico are tied together. Millions of people are a bridge between the two countries, and their labor movements. The historic slogan of the ILWU (and of many unionists beyond its ranks) is “an injury to one is an injury to all. Today, an updated version of it might say, “An attack on a union in Mexico is an attack on unions in the U.S.” Or it could say, “An attack on Mexican workers in Arizona is an attack on workers in Mexico.” Or it could say, “Organizing Mexican workers at carwashes in Los Angeles will help unions in Mexico, by increasing the power of those willing to fight for the mineros and SME.”
See also: Building a Culture of Cross Border Solidarity, David Bacon, Institute for Transnational Social Change – UCLA
Illegal People — How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
-An edited version of this post is in Democratic Left, the Labor Edition, Fall, 2011
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Leo Casey is vice president of academic higher schools for the United Federation of Teachers. He is a New York City native and the son of two New York City public college teachers. He continues to educate a class in international studies each day at Bard Large School Early College in Manhattan. He is a normal contributor to Dissent’s Arguing the Planet weblog. This post initially appeared on Edwize, the UFT’s blog.
