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Welcome To Nafta!
A native of Tijuana and
her grandaughter pose in front of the Cardboard
Village that many of
the workers in Mexico's Maquiladoras call their home.
On April 5, 2000, a group
of 60 - 70 Canadian Union activists from the Machinists Union - hosted
by University of California (Berkeley) Professor of Latin American Studies
Harley Shaiken - visited the people in Tijuana, Mexico who are living the
NAFTA experience. We saw the plants where exploited people work for pennies
per hour and we visited one of the squatters villages where many are forced
to make their homes. And then we met with CUPAC (the Popular Urban
Committee), a group that struggles to fight against the corporate and political
agenda that keeps their people enslaved to a standard of living that is
unacceptable by anyone's terms.
What follows is a summary
of that visit, though it cannot possibly describe the actual experience
of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling what it is like to live
as these people are forced to live.
________________________________________
| "Welcome
to NAFTA!"
These are the words with
which Cesar Luna, legal counsel and policy associate of the Environmental
Health Coalition welcomes Canadian Staff of the International Association
of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to Tijuana, Mexico.
Luna is here to explain to
our group of sixty or seventy Canadian Trade Unionists the impact of how
NAFTA has been implemented by Governments and Corporations who have no
concern for the people who work in the Mexican Maquiladoras. The Maquiladoras
include transnational corporations such as Panasonic, Sanyo, General Electric,
General Motors, and Sony Corporation. They operate without limits in this
free trade zone, with virtually no regulation by the Government of Mexico. |
Cesar Luna speaks to
IAM Staff about the consequences brought upon Mexican workers by the North
American Free Trade Agreement. |
| Our day in Tijuana is just
beginning.
The two buses have toured
past numerous high-tech industrial assembly plants where the employees
earn only 80 cents per hour in abhorrent working conditions. Many of these
workers live as squatters in shanty towns that have sprung up in the communities
adjacent to the Maquiladoras. Before our day is done, we will visit an
illegal toxic waste dump; a shanty town where many of the corporations'
workers live; and a community centre built by Comite Urbano Popular Asociacion
Civil -CUPAC (The Popular Urban Committee). CUPAC is an activist group
that struggles to bring dignity and fairness to the lives of these workers.
Metales y Derivados: abandoned
lead smelter at Mesa de Otay Industrial Park.
This abandoned lead smelter
is now one of Tijuana's largest illegal toxic waste dumps. More than 10,000
tons of heavy metals contaminate the site.
Signs such as this
one warn Tijuana residents in this area to stay out of the compound, which
is filled with toxic wastes. The Company that left beihind the waste has
refused to clean up the site, and the Mexican Government has done nothing
about the issue. It is left to social democracy groups such as the Environmental
Health Coalition to do what they can to make the area safer for citizens.
|
Our first stop:
one of Tijuana's largest illegal toxic waste dumps, where more than 10,000
tons of hazardous waste at the company's lead smeltering operation. Waste
lead and a host of other heavy metals contaminate the site, which was operated
from 1980 - 1994, when its U.S. owners abruptly returned to San Diego where
they are currently doing business and shielding themselves from any liability.
The toxic waste is so corrosive
and poisonous that the brick and mortar wall that encloses the waste dump
is deteriorating from acids that leach out of the slag mound. (When one
wall collapsed last year, it was left to the community to rebuild it.)
The site is located above
a residential community - Colonia Chilpancingo - where, during the rainy
season, toxic waste compounds leach into the groundwater, following creeks
and streams that flow through the community. Since their abandonment of
this site, the parent Company - New Frontier - continues to operate a profitable
business out of San Diego, CA. They have flatly refused to participate
in the cleanup of this site. Likewise, the government has done nothing
to clean it up.
Indeed, it is only community
activists like Cesar Luna of the Environmental
Health Coalition who have taken any interest whatsoever in even warning
the people in this neighborhood about the health hazards posed by this
toxic waste: ominous signs painted on the walls warn locals not to enter
the premises.
|
Says Luna: "We require an international
solution to the problems here in the Maquiladoras zone. It is only by putting
pressure on all of our governments across North America that we can begin
to effect change and force Corporations to comply with environmental and
other regulations."
Where the Workers Live:
A Cardboard Village in Tijuana
There's one image I can't
get out of my mind: a small boy - he can't be more than three or four years
old - standing barefoot in a dirt street overflowing with garbage. Where
he stands, the ground underfoot is strewn with broken glass and metal fragments,
gone unnoticed by a people for whom such a life is the norm. They are squatters
here beside a filthy river that flows with the effluent of unregulated
corporations. As I look at the boy, it occurs to me that the only thing
that separates him from my own children is that mine have had the fortune
to be born Canadians. His parents do not love him less, but are helpless
to provide for him as they would prefer. |
These boys, who live
in the cardboard village, do not attend
school. On the day that
we visited, they had been playing in the polluted river that runs alongside
the land where their parents have built homes from packing crates and castoffs
from the plants where they work. |
The boy jostles
for position in front of the camera - hamming it up alongside brothers
and friends who are filthy with mud that is black and oily as tar. They
have been wrestling at the riverside. Many of the boys are much older,
and in any other society would be in school on this Wednesday morning.
But here the parents cannot afford to send their children to school - the
price of books and lunches and school clothing is too great. And so these
children's destinies are to lead the same lives of poverty as their parents.
This is the Cardboard Village
- where the homeless live as they try to build new lives on the outskirts
of the communities adjacent to the Maquiladoras. Their homes are built
of packing crates, cardboard boxes and wooden shipping pallets - castoffs
from the plants where they work. If they are fortunate, the Company gives
them these scraps as a kind of bonus; those who are less than fortunate
must pay for the privilege of taking away such discards. |
| They have no running water
and no electricity, unless they can poach these from residents in homes
adjacent to the cardboard village. Where these services can be poached,
often they must pay their advantaged neighbors for the privilege.
It is a stark contrast: to
see such abject poverty within a stone's throw of such gross wealth and
greed. And to realize that that poverty is created as a direct result of
such wealth and greed. These people will never have the opportunity to
watch a program on the colour televisions they manufacture. The price of
the products they make is beyond their reach. Indeed, the price of most
consumer products has not dropped significantly since they commenced manufacture
outside of Canada and the U.S. - but the profit margin for the corporations
has increased significantly.
One year ago, the IAM
Executive Council visited the people who are living with the fallout of
NAFTA. These people work and live in horrendous conditions, paid only 80
cents per hour. According to General Vice President Bob Thayer, conditions
for the residents in Cardboard Village have gotten worse. "I would never
have thought that the situation could get worse. But it did get worse."
Says Thayer.
For all the despair in the
cardboard village, many of these employees of the Maquiladoras say this
is an improvement over the lives they lived before they came to Tijuana.
They hold out a small hope that things will get better, and that somehow
they will be able to build a life out of the slim prospects offered by
the Corporations they work for.
In reality, however, standards
of living have gotten worse for these people.
Says Machinists Union General
Vice President Bob Thayer: "We took the Executive Council and their executive
assistants to visit these people a year ago, and I would never have thought
that the situation could get worse. But it did get worse." |
| Thayer adds that
IAM members and workers in Mexico and around the world are stakeholders
in the corporations that they work for - and are entitled to a share of
the success they enjoy.
Thayer is particularly offended
by the performance of General Electric, whose CEO Jack Welch made over
$69 Million in salary and stock options last year. Says Thayer: "At our
next round of bargaining with them, the IAM is going to be taking on GE
and we are going to expose them for what they are doing to people in the
Maquiladoras."
The IAM maintains that it's
time for the corporations to share some of their wealth with those at the
bottom of the food chain. It's time for a corporate conscience.
At the bargaining table,
we will be pressing them to develop such a conscience. |
Our interpreter and
guide, Isaac, speaks with this family who live in the squatters village
on the outskirts of Industrial area where many of the Maquiladoras are
located. Many women work full time night shift jobs after their husbands
return home, earning just 80 cents per hour.
|
| Thayer is particularly offended
by the performance of General Electric, whose CEO Jack Welch made over
$69 Million in salary and stock options last year. Says Thayer: "At our
next round of bargaining with them, the IAM is going to be taking on GE
and we are going to expose them for what they are doing to people in the
Maquiladoras."
It's time for the corporations
to share some of their wealth with those at the bottom of the food chain.
It's time for a corporate conscience.
Comite Urbano Popular
Asociacion Civil - CUPAC (The Popular Urban Committee): A Struggle for
Dignity and Fairness in Worker's Lives |
| In the afternoon, we meet
with Eduardo Martinez (President) and Aurora Pelayo (General Coordinator)
of CUPAC. Our meeting is in the Community building that they have built
as an office within which to have headquarters for their civil action group.
Martinez and Pelayo speak of a twenty-year struggle to build a community
and real homes from the squatter shacks of the 70's and 80's. Over the
course of this time, Ms. Pelayo was jailed for her role as an activist
- an action that ultimately rallied the community to increase support for
CUPAC. |
Leaders of CUPAC
discuss their role as activists representing workers
|
| Today that same community
is a growing neighborhood with block and mortar houses, a main street of
concrete, and a small school where their children are taught. It is a tribute
to their ongoing struggle that some now own and drive cars. However, many
(mostly women) still work for the Maquiladoras in offensive conditions.
Wages and working standards are set by concerted action of the corporations
- so there is little hope for finding a job that pays higher rates.
Their homes are unacceptable
by our standards, but a significant improvement over the cardboard village
we have just seen. And CUPAC is working to continually improve the lives
of the people they represent. They speak of a legal struggle with a Black-and-Decker-owned
subsidiary named Pricefister, who fired several employees for daring to
ask why their profit share was so low. CUPAC is representing the fired
employees where the Company-run Unions will not. It is an uphill battle,
and Martinez appeals for support where the IAM has Union locals dealing
with Black-and-Decker.
Martinez notes that the NAFTA
promise of shared wealth through abolition of economic borders is the big
lie: "History has vindicated those of us who opposed NAFTA. The Free Trade
Agreement should more appropriately be named the Agreement for Free Slavery."
When asked about the State-sanctioned
Unions, Martinez describes them as follows: "The Company, the Government,
and the Union are just companies within companies: they are one and the
same Son of a Bitch!" He adds that it is extremely difficult to organize
an independent Trade Union in practice, due to Company and Government bureaucrats
working in concert to keep real Unions out.
 .. 
In the pictures above,
at left Representatives Bruce Richards, Ron Jordan, and Al Cyr are pictured
inside the CUPAC community office headquarters. At right, Richards and
other are seen leaving the CUPAC building after the meeting with community
leaders.
Although the laws are nominally
designed to encourage the development of true Unions within a workplace,
in practice this can rarely be achieved. As a result, there are only one
or two actual Trade Unions working within the Maquiladoras found in Mexico.
The Company Unions that are in place in virtually every plant are tools
of the employer, and so the onerous working conditions in those plants
must be continuously endured. The people in the plants cannot afford to
quit; because of the need to keep the job, they must tolerate conditions
that they would not otherwise accept.
The struggle by CUPAC continues,
and they welcome any pressure that we in Canada, and our sisters and brothers
in the United States, can bring to bear upon our respective governments
to make change a reality for the working people of the Maquiladoras. We
must demand that our governments take action to stop further "Free Trade"
agreements, whether it is the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI),
the World Trade Organization (WTO), or whatever international trade agreement
comes down the road next. Free Trade is about increasing profitability
for the Companies, not about better job opportunities for working people.
|
Following visit to Tijuana,
Canadian General Vice President Dave Ritchie (left) discusses with Professor
Harley Shaiken the impact of our experience. Says Ritchie: "We have seen
first hand the whole reason why we exist as a labour movement. We exist
to bring dignity and social democracy to the lives of working people." |
At the end of
our visit, everyone has seen first hand the impact Free Trade has had upon
the people we visited in Tijuana.
In the words of Dave Ritchie,
Canadian General Vice President for the Machinists Union: "We have seen
first hand the whole reason why we exist as a Labour movement. We exist
to bring dignity and social democracy to the lives of working people."
It is not the Mexican people
who are our enemies in these Trade Agreements, but the governments and
corporations who exploit workers in the name of Profit. In the long run,
it is only the actions of our free Labour movement in Canada and the United
States that keeps us from living in the same conditions as the workers
of the Maquiladoras.
And in the end, if we do
nothing, then our standard of living can only deteriorate further as we
continue along the "race to the bottom". |
| I urge everyone to contact
your Member of Parliament and Prime Minister Jean Chretien to let them
know how you feel about the deplorable living and working conditions in
the Maquiladoras. Demand that the government bring pressure to bear upon
the Mexican government in order to improve the situation for these working
families.
I would like to thank Professor
Harley Shaiken and the others who assisted in putting together this trip
to the Maquiladoras in order that the Canadian Machinists Staff could witness
first hand the conditions that we have heard and read about for so many
years. I know that my attempt to relate this experience in words and pictures
is sorely inadequate - it does not come even close to the actual experience.
And, finally: I pray that
the activists at CUPAC may have great success in their struggles, in order
that the small boy in the Cardboard Village shall have a better future
than his forebears.
Stan Pickthall
Business Representative
International Association
of Machinists and
Aerospace Workers
- Northwest District 250
7418 6th Street, Burnaby,
B.C. Canada V3N 3L6
tel: (604) 522-3991
fax: (604) 522-7844
iam250@istar.ca
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