A Longer EXCERPT

Chapter VII: TRIPS TO MEXICO

Lawrence McBrearty, the Canadian national director, headed a nonprofit organization in Canada called the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, established by voluntary contributions from members to support important causes throughout the world. One of its efforts was support for the independent trade union movement in Mexico. McBrearty used his contacts in Mexico to arrange a trip for Becker to view firsthand the effects of NAFTA on Mexican workers.

During the first half of January, Becker, Texas-based Director Jack Golden, McBrearty, and I visited Mexico City and the maquiladora area on the border with Texas west of San Antonio.

While in Mexico City we met with representatives of the Authentic Labor Front (the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo or FAT), a confederation of Mexican unions independent of company or political party domination committed to union democracy. FAT was fighting for survival in the face of virulent company and government hostility.

We also met with a group of courageous lawyers who represented FAT, learning about the huge obstacles they faced in organizing and their growing disillusionment with NAFTA. They confirmed what we had supposed, that many of the unions in Mexico were very weak. Worse, they described Mexican companies’ use of “paper unions,” created to advance the fiction that the company had negotiated a contract with a union. When an independent union filed a petition to organize, the company would produce a “contract” with the phony union they had created on paper. The illegitimacy of these “unions,” and the protestations of workers attempting to organize, were of little concern to willing government accomplices who would dismiss the petitions to organize.

FAT representatives and their attorneys told us that any hope they had that NAFTA would improve that situation had quickly dissipated. While we were in Mexico City, we visited a plant that had closed because of competition from NAFTA and talked to some of the workers who lost their jobs. We were also taken to a large barren area under an elevated roadway where unemployed Mexican workers had become squatters, building shacks in which to live, hoping not to be kicked out.

After Mexico City, we flew north to the Mexican side of the US-Mexican border, specifically to view conditions in and around the towns of Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuña. This area is known for its maquiladoras, factories built by foreign companies because of pre-NAFTA trade agreements designed to develop a Mexican manufacturing industry dedicated to export to the United States, incentivized by favorable tariff treatment. Before NAFTA, the operations of the maquiladoras had led to the transfer of jobs from the US to Mexico, but following NAFTA that flow dramatically increased. During our visit we held meetings with Mexicans who worked or had worked in the plants to get a sense of their working and living conditions.

We also talked to young, dedicated organizers of fledgling independent unions in the area. They told of the harsh response from companies when workers tried to unionize, including the routine firing of employee organizers. Their stories confirmed the widespread use of phony paper-union contracts, sometimes referred to as protection contracts because they were designed to protect the company from unionization.

We drove through industrial parks and talked to quite a few workers, but our requests to visit the manufacturing facilities themselves were turned down. Even Alcoa, with which the Steelworkers have had a long and largely productive relationship (including with Becker himself), refused to allow us to visit their maquiladora facilities.

Following his return to the states Becker reported on his trip. He noted that many of the workers on the Mexican-Texas border “live in shacks constructed on 20’ x 20’ lots. The shacks are constructed of scrap lumber and cardboard from packing crates that the workers had to buy from their employer. The shacks have dirt floors, no running water or plumbing, and open wood fires for cooking food and providing warmth. The temperature dropped to the 40s that night. Frequently, there is no electricity.”[i]

Most of the workers toiled nine hours a day, six days a week. Their weekly pay ranged from 200 to 330 pesos—about $26 to $42 US at a time when US manufacturing workers on average were earning $42 in three hours. With a quarter of their pay going to rent for the lot they lived on, there was scarcely enough left for material to cook with and a survival diet.

On our walk among the worker shacks we chanced to meet and talk to a fifteen-year-old girl. Her story was typical of what we heard while we were there. Her family needed more income to survive so she lied about her age to get a job. Like so many others of her generation, school was no longer an option. The hope of upward movement was gone. The future was reduced to an endless struggle to survive.

We met many workers who had been fired when they tried to organize a union in the facilities in which they worked. Their chances now of getting a job in one of the other factories were slim. These workers were trapped, with no realistic hope of improving their dire existence if they remained, and no future to go back home to. Their only hope was to cross the border illegally and look for a job in the US that paid a living wage.

In his trip report Becker pledged to find ways to help these workers. “We should do this for two reasons,” he said. “First, if we cannot bring the wages of Mexican workers up, eventually our jobs will disappear. Second, our union exists to fight injustice and exploitation suffered by workers. It would be morally and ethically wrong for us to ignore their plight. Certainly, the organization of effective unions is the best vehicle for Mexican workers to bring an end to this unconscionable exploitation.”[ii]

The trip deeply affected Becker, putting a human face on the plight of exploited workers. While he was ever mindful of NAFTA’s harmful effects on US workers, in nearly all his speeches on trade in the years to come Becker would stress the fact that Mexican workers were not the enemy. They were victims and we needed to fight for them, too.

The January trip to Mexico was not a one-off event. The following month, while attending an AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Los Angeles, Becker accompanied Dick Gephardt, then the House Democratic minority leader, House Minority Whip David Bonior, and several other international union presidents on a trip to Tijuana. Becker reported that the conditions he saw there were like those he’d witnessed in Piedras Negras but noted that the manufacturing operations in Tijuana were much more extensive and many were controlled by Japanese and South Korean concerns. “It seems clear,” he observed, “that trade legislation will have to be a key focus for our Rapid Response program this year.”[iii]

[i] A Message From Pittsburgh, Jan. 17, 1997.

[ii] A Message From Pittsburgh, Jan. 19, 1997.

[iii] A Message From Pittsburgh, Feb. 18, 1997.