Revenge-Closing -- Cross-Border Organizing Brings Trouble on All Sides

By David Bacon

<dbacon@igc.apc.org>

Date: 09-29-98

As the U.S. auto industry relies increasingly on parts made in Mexico's maquiladoras, unions are focusing on cross-border organizing. Late in August, workers at a California factory who spearheaded one such drive paid for their efforts by losing their jobs. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues.

IRVINE, CA -- Late last month, the gate into the Friction auto brake plant here swung shut for the last time, leaving 110 production workers to move on.

It's not unknown for factories in the U.S. to close as production moves south, but this Orange County plant closed in part because its workers reached across the border to help coworkers at a plant in Mexico belonging to the same company.

The story of the two factories shows a new level of union resolve to cross borders in the era of free trade. It is also a stark reminder of the obstacles to these efforts.

Friction belongs to a Connecticut-based transnational auto parts manufacturer, Echlin, Inc. Throughout 1996 and 1997, workers at Echlin's ITAPSA brake plant in Mexico City tried to form an independent union. Last summer, three ITAPSA workers visited their Irvine counterparts to find out about conditions in U.S. plants. They met informally, at lunch time in the street outside the boxy facility.

The workers at Friction, largely immigrants from Mexico, identified with the effort. "We wanted to help the workers there win their rights," says Maria Villela, president of Local 1090 of the United Electrical Workers, the union at the Irvine plant.

The Mexican workers needed all the help they could get. When they tried to join the independent union called STIMAHCS, dozens were fired. An election at the plant last September was won by the government-affiliated union Echlin supported.

After that election, a new tri-national alliance of unions filed a complaint over the violation of workers' rights before the administrative body set up to enforce NAFTA's labor agreement, the National Administrative Office of the U.S. Department of Labor. In March more than two dozen ITAPSA workers and other union officials submitted testimony. Echlin never showed up.

On July 31, that office issued a report, declaring that workers "were subjected to retaliation by their employer and the established union in the workplace, including threats of physical harm and dismissal."

Friction workers in Irvine signed a petition, demanding that Echlin rehire the fired workers and recognize the independent union. Their plant manager, Mark Levy, responded angrily. "He told us we had drawn a line between the union and the company," Vilella recalls.

In February, Echlin formally notified the union it was closing the Irvine plant. The move came as a shock to Friction workers, who have an average of 11 years on the job. "We think it's revenge," says Villela. "We work like crazy here, and make the best product in the industry."

Echlin spokesperson Paul Ryder says the work is being moved to other U.S. factories. "We have over capacity for that product line," he says. "The closure is just the normal course of business."

The company may have other reasons to feel hostility toward the Irvine workers. When they organized there in 1994, Echlin's senior vice-president Milton Makoski commented in a letter to another union, "We are opposed to union organization of our current non-union locations.... We will fight every effort to unionize Echlin employees..."

He noted that despite "60 years of determined and relentless efforts" by unions, a majority of the firm's employees were unorganized -- except for one operation "where the employees, while they were part of the Echlin organization, have elected to be represented by a union." That operation was the Friction plant.

Once organized, the Irvine workers became the spark plug of a NAFTA-zone alliance of unions with contracts in Echlin's factories, including the Teamsters, the United Electrical Workers (UE), the Paperworkers and UNITE in the U.S., and the Canadian Steelworkers and Auto Workers. "Our primary purpose," says Bob Kingsley, UE Director of Organizing, "is to achieve a situation where we're all sitting down at the table with the same company, and bargaining together."

As the U.S. auto industry relies increasingly on parts made in Mexico's maquiladoras, an increased union focus on struggles such as those at ITAPSA may just be beginning. Unfortunately, NAFTA contains no penalties for companies or governments that violate workers' rights. Nor does it provide any protection for workers who take cross-border action to support their coworkers in other countries.

Mexico's labor law is "very advanced and progressive," according to STIMAHCS attorney Eduardo Diaz. But the government, he says, is afraid to enforce it, as its economic policy depends on foreign investment.

U.S. trade policy also seeks favorable conditions for U.S. investment. Corporations like Echlin reap the benefits. According to University of California Professor Harley Shaiken, "in Mexican plants U.S. investors get first-world rates of productivity, and a work force with a third-world standard of living."

To meet this challenge, "a growing number of unions are trying to deal with each other across borders," observes Robin Alexander, the UE's director of international solidarity. "Maybe there is no single answer to their problems, but we won't find any answers at all without looking for them."

Perhaps that was the error of the Friction workers. They looked.