Mobile capital and transborder labor rights mobilization

Politics and Society

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 139-166

  Williams, Heather L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033484243     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329299027001006     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Charles Bowden, The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture Press, 1997); Sabastian Rotella, Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
2. Charles Bowden, The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture Press, 1997); Sabastian Rotella, Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
3. Based on wage figures and exchange rates in September 1998.
4. Employment figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas/E1 Paso Branch. Business Frontier 3, no. 2 (1996): 4. Employment growth in the maquilas during devaluation is to be expected during domestic downturns in Mexico. While currency devaluations are generally correlated with falling employment and sales in national industries, they are correlated with upswings in export processing. If salaries are capped, then wage bills denominated in dollars will decline by the percentage fall of the national currency for a time, thereby cutting costs to investors. Export markets, however, are unaffected by the devaluation in the producing country, giving the exporter an opportunity to undercut prices of competitors and/or reap a windfall profit.
5. Estimate based on August 1996 figures cited by Rodrigo Sánchez Mejica, "Origins and Development of the In-Bond Export Industry in Mexico," El Mercado de Valores (July/August 1996): 19-26.
6. Business Frontier 3, no. 2 (1996): 2.
7. Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development: The Maquila Industry in Mexico and the United States (San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD, 1994).
8. Figure derived from dollar exchange rate and wages in September 1998 and compared to time series in Sklair, Assembling for Development, 72.
9. Both the academic literature on labor in the maquiladoras as well as common testimony among workers in border cities are fairly unequivocal about the existence of intimidation and sexual discrimination on factory shopfloors. For descriptions of individuals cases, see the index of 142 cases of conflict in maquiladoras in Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros from 1969 to 1986 in Jorge Carrillo, Dos decadas de sindicalismo en la industria maquiladora de exportacion (Mexico City: UAM-Iztapalapa Press, 1994). Also see leading works in the field: Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican-American Studies, University of Texas, 1997); Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development. See also Human Rights Watch, "No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector," Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project 8, no. 6 (August 1996).
10. Both the academic literature on labor in the maquiladoras as well as common testimony among workers in border cities are fairly unequivocal about the existence of intimidation and sexual discrimination on factory shopfloors. For descriptions of individuals cases, see the index of 142 cases of conflict in maquiladoras in Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros from 1969 to 1986 in Jorge Carrillo, Dos decadas de sindicalismo en la industria maquiladora de exportacion (Mexico City: UAM-Iztapalapa Press, 1994). Also see leading works in the field: Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican-American Studies, University of Texas, 1997); Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development. See also Human Rights Watch, "No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector," Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project 8, no. 6 (August 1996).
11. Both the academic literature on labor in the maquiladoras as well as common testimony among workers in border cities are fairly unequivocal about the existence of intimidation and sexual discrimination on factory shopfloors. For descriptions of individuals cases, see the index of 142 cases of conflict in maquiladoras in Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros from 1969 to 1986 in Jorge Carrillo, Dos decadas de sindicalismo en la industria maquiladora de exportacion (Mexico City: UAM-Iztapalapa Press, 1994). Also see leading works in the field: Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican-American Studies, University of Texas, 1997); Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development. See also Human Rights Watch, "No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector," Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project 8, no. 6 (August 1996).
12. Both the academic literature on labor in the maquiladoras as well as common testimony among workers in border cities are fairly unequivocal about the existence of intimidation and sexual discrimination on factory shopfloors. For descriptions of individuals cases, see the index of 142 cases of conflict in maquiladoras in Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros from 1969 to 1986 in Jorge Carrillo, Dos decadas de sindicalismo en la industria maquiladora de exportacion (Mexico City: UAM-Iztapalapa Press, 1994). Also see leading works in the field: Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican-American Studies, University of Texas, 1997); Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development. See also Human Rights Watch, "No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector," Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project 8, no. 6 (August 1996).
13. Both the academic literature on labor in the maquiladoras as well as common testimony among workers in border cities are fairly unequivocal about the existence of intimidation and sexual discrimination on factory shopfloors. For descriptions of individuals cases, see the index of 142 cases of conflict in maquiladoras in Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros from 1969 to 1986 in Jorge Carrillo, Dos decadas de sindicalismo en la industria maquiladora de exportacion (Mexico City: UAM-Iztapalapa Press, 1994). Also see leading works in the field: Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Devon Peña, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican-American Studies, University of Texas, 1997); Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development. See also Human Rights Watch, "No Guarantees: Sex Discrimination in Mexico's Maquiladora Sector," Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project 8, no. 6 (August 1996).
14. A recent petition before the U.S. National Administrative Office (NAO) (created by the North American Agreement of Labor Cooperation, or the labor side agreement to North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]) cited the use of official violence against protesting workers.
15. The partial-assembly sector developed quite independently from general tariff and trade trends, instead growing up under a set of dual commerce laws in the United States and Mexico. Laws allowed international investors exceptional powers to set up plants on the Mexican side of the border with majority foreign ownership and to employ Mexican workers in the partial assembly of goods. Under the specific codes for the industry, goods were imported and re-exported, and investors paid taxes only on the value added to the products assembled. The industry itself, however, came under greater public scrutiny in the years in which business and political leaders began discussing the extension of NAFTA to Mexico, in part because it represented the closest thing to a record on liberalized trade.
16. Most relevant to the discussion here, scholars have established that there is little direct relationship between economic strain and aggregate social conflict. See, for example, Anthony Oberschall, "Theories of Social Conflict," Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1978): 291-315; David Snyder and Charles Tilly, "Hardship and Collective Violence in France, 1983-1960," American Sociological Review 37 (October 1972): 520-32.
17. Most relevant to the discussion here, scholars have established that there is little direct relationship between economic strain and aggregate social conflict. See, for example, Anthony Oberschall, "Theories of Social Conflict," Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1978): 291-315; David Snyder and Charles Tilly, "Hardship and Collective Violence in France, 1983-1960," American Sociological Review 37 (October 1972): 520-32.
18. The greatest number of associations with some cross-border component have been organized along self-ascribed cultural and linguistic boundaries. Numerous recent works on the historical evolution of Mexican American politics argue that such associations were often fraught with internal contradiction, in which conflict between assimilationist and separatist pressures made forceful cross-border linkages problematic. For example, the United Farm Workers long supported immigration controls because organizers believed that the fields of the U.S. Southwest would be unorganizable if the labor pool continued to expand and turn over with new arrivals from Mexico. See David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican-Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
19. Tilly makes a number of points specific to labor discontent and the propensity to mobilize across borders. He argues that workers' groups worldwide appear unlikely to innovate transnational strategies of resistance to losses in an era of capital globalization. He points out that most distributive demands leveled by workers after 1850 in capitalist economies have been mediated by national states and associated welfare institutions. In an era of mobile manufacturing capital, he notes that many unions have continued to pressure only for regulation of capital and/or movement of migrant laborers across borders and have not confronted business directly in its new transnational forms. In an era in which national states have declining power to regulate business, he argues that workers inevitably will lose such domestic political battles. See "Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights," International Labor and Working-Class History 47 (Spring 1995): 1-23.
20. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Risse-Kappan, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble, eds., Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
21. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Risse-Kappan, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble, eds., Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
22. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Risse-Kappan, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble, eds., Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Risse-Kappan, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); G. Sidney Silliman and Lela Garner Noble, eds., Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
24. Keck and Sikkink define such associations of transnational advocates as "network(s) of activists, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formation"; Activists beyond Borders, 1.
25. High turnover in low-skill production processes is advantageous to employers because they avoid paying high severance fees that accrue under Mexican labor law when laborers have long tenures in workplaces.
26. Interview with Ed Krueger, Reynosa, Mexico, July 1997.
27. Joyce Peterson, "Defending Their Dignity: Women Maquiladora Workers Fight Oppression, Squalor," The Austin-American Statesman, 16 December 1990.
28. For an excellent study and analysis of assembly-line organization and production schedules in the maquiladoras, see chapter 3 of Peña, The Terror of the Machine.
29. From testimony from workers at the Hyundai plant in Tijuana to the Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers, San Diego, CA.
30. Report to Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO) organizers in a Zenith plant in Reynosa, Mexico.
31. CFO organizers discovered in the late 1980s, for example, that workers at the Zenith plant in Reynosa were working with lead soldering wire. Workers who met with the CFO asked organizers at one point what some English-language papers taped to the wire packages said. Workers then learned that they were warning labels that cautioned users of the product that it could cause birth defects and affect reproductive organs.
32. In a recent lawsuit against a Sony Corporation subsidiary in Nuevo Laredo, family members sued the company for negligence in the death of production inspector Nidia Lozano, who died of cancer in 1994. Before her death, Lozano testified that she was required for ten years to test semiliquid plastic resins used in the production process. Not having been informed until the end of that period that the substance was carcinogenic, she often did not take care to use protective equipment or to wash off the fine layer of dust that remained on her hands and arms after testing. Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, Annual Report (San Antonio, TX: CJM, 1994).
33. Author's interview with Sister Susan Mika, San Antonio, TX, July 16, 1997.
34. Alcoa's legal department went to the Securities and Exchange Commission, complaining that wages were "ordinary business" and thereby within the purview of management only. In this case, as in many other corporate challenges to principled-issue resolutions, they were successful in having the resolution banned. However, Sister Susan Mika explains that it may still be of use to campaigns if activist shareholders continue to file such resolutions because they are embarrassing to the company and are costly for companies to challenge. In at least ten campaigns so far, such resolutions have been used successfully to engage corporations in dialogue with concerned shareholders. In those cases, groups will agree to withdraw resolutions in exchange for meetings with management or the disclosure of information on factory operations.
35. Footage appears in the documentary, Stepan Chemical: The Poisoning of a Mexican Community, prod. and dir Mark Day, 1991, videocassette.
36. People demanded, for example, that the Química Fluor plant (owned jointly by Dupont and Carlos Slim, one of Mexico's billionaires) be moved. The plant manufactures hydrofluoric acid, a compound so deadly that a leakage of only 1,000 gallons has the power to kill all human and plant life within a five-mile radius. Farmers in the vicinity had already complained of a 70 percent loss on crops because of fumes from the plant, which scorched plant leaves and contaminated water and soil. See numbers cited in the New York Daily News, 5 June 1991, C11; see also the article from the Austin American Statesman, respectively cited in Maquiladoras: A Broken Promise (San Antonio, TX: Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 1992), 14. The company did in fact acknowledge the danger associated with its operations but instead demanded and got a state order in 1991 for the expropriation of 30,000 people who lived within a two-kilometer area around the plant.
37. A subsidiary of Asarco.
38. A subsidiary of Idacon International.
39. Jointly owned by DuPont and Carlos Slim, one of Mexico's billionaires.
40. It is no small task for organizers to become familiar with Mexico's labyrinthine federal labor law. Labor codes are very long and very specific; the dog-eared copies of the Ley Federal de Trabajo that organizers carry in their bags is several hundred pages long and contains thousands of clauses. Ed Krueger of the CFO estimates that the several dozen organizers trained by the CFO probably know labor laws better than "90 percent of Mexican attorneys."
41. Author's interview with Torres, Matamoros, Mexico, July 18, 1997.
42. Certain things, for example, that seem like outrageous violations of law to people in one situation may not seem so terrible to people in another situation. In the United States, for example, people would be outraged if they were suddenly forced to work six days a week in a factory with no overtime pay. In Mexico, a six-day week traditionally has been both legal and standard, so it might not seem like such a terrible thing. In Mexico, on the other hand, workers would be likely to walk out of the factory if a company refused to pay the sacred aguinaldo, or Christmas bonus, to workers. American audiences in this case similarly might not be deeply sympathetic upon hearing of it. While both examples represent acts that are illegal in national contexts, they might be weak candidates for cross-border campaigns because they do not immediately strike foreign counterparts as self-evidently illegitimate acts.
43. Interview with Stockard, Nashville, Tennessee, June 30, 1997.
44. The 1997-1998 Han Young case involved several court hearings over union registration and purported wrongdoings on the part of striking workers.
45. Companies, in fact, are not brought up on charges. Litigants actually sue national governments for failing to enforce their respective labor laws. In addition, the NAO has the power to issue sanctions only in very specific cases involving slavery, child labor, health and safety violations, and sexual or racial discrimination. Other cases involving obstruction of workers' rights to associate freely on the shopfloor, to unionize, to strike, or to freely elect their union representatives can only result (where such allegations are proven before the appointed NAO board) in ministerial-level consultations and recommendations on the part of the NAO.
46. There are some preliminary indications that the NAO process will spur public officials on both sides of the border to acknowledge worker rights problems. There is no question that recent NAO cases citing the Mexican government's failure to enforce laws on union representation and on sexual discrimination in a number of factories on the border had a measurable impact on the government's public sensitivity to such complaints. In addition, however, a recent petition filed by Mexican activists against the U.S. government on labor conditions among apple pickers in the Pacific Northwest region prompted U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman to prioritize employment health and safety law among rural workers.
47. Quantifying results for more than a thumbnail sketch is a dubious enterprise. The displayed cases are measured in terms of reforms in the factories, improvements to affected communities, or greater freedom for community and labor organizers to continue their work. Some cases are ambiguous. One may argue, for example, that the Sony campaign, which rendered little in terms of material reparations and political reforms for aggrieved parties in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was nonetheless a highly successful campaign. The Sony campaign involved a pioneer test case of the labor side agreement of the NAFTA. In a ruling from the NAO, it was determined that Mexican federal law had been broken and that workers' freedom of association had been violated. Political pressure on government officials and the Sony corporation on both sides of the border was so extensive that subsequent labor conflicts at different sites along the border have been handled, on average, more favorably to workers than before.
48. It is also very important to note that the nature of conflicts involved in each of the cases differs greatly. Some of the cases involve very serious violations of workers' rights or very extensive demands (e.g., that a company should close or relocate), whereas other conflicts are relatively contained (e.g., workers demand ventilation fans or gloves, or several individuals may demand full severance payment upon termination of employment). In the latter cases, obtaining results that are satisfactory to workers or communities may require less pressure. Therefore, absence of cross-border cooperation may simply mean that extensive multigroup pressure was not required.
49. Veterans of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM) have also noted that certain characteristics of conflicts themselves may lend themselves to successful transborder cooperation. Ed Feigan of the AFL-CIO, for example, argues that in cases in which conflicts emanate from shopfloors instead of from colonias (say, over safety equipment instead of over toxic waste disposal), participation from the Mexican side is more likely to fall off due to repression. "With workers' groups," he argues, "it's very difficult to sink your teeth into a campaigns because workers' demands are often squashed by firing leaders" (Ed Feigan, personal communication, 1997). With environmental abuses, on the other hand, companies cannot hide violations as easily. Water and air remain polluted and visible, even if participants at grassroots levels face repression.
50. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 12.
51. International labor issues today receive significantly more press than in recent decades. A Lexis/Nexis search using the terms international and labor and rights yielded the following results: one decade ago, fewer than 60 stories appeared annually in major print media on international labor issues; by 1997, that figure had risen to over 350.
52. This was one of the reasons the coalition chose to focus on General Motors maquiladoras.
53. Interview with Sister Susan Mika, San Antonio, TX, July 16, 1997.
54. Interview with Ansley, Knoxville, Tennessee, June 27, 1997.
55. One exception to this was in Ciudad Juárez in 1995. In that city, a number of wildcat actions emerged in response to plummeting buying power in the wake of the currency devaluation.
56. I thank Eric Myers for pointing out the connection between the Sony case and political events in Nuevo Laredo.
57. There is already some evidence of the impact of the Sony case on labor politics in Mexico For example, a 1995 conflict in the Ford/Lamosa plant in Nuevo Laredo may very well have been resolved with a fairly positive settlement for protesting workers because of the Sony case, which was still fresh in people's minds. A section from an opinion piece in a pro-PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) newspaper is notable: "the dangerous things about the wildcat strike at Lamosa isn't the fact that the workers risk losing their jobs or that the company is losing production. The danger really is the bad reputation tha this could bring, now that labor organizations from the United States are watching everything that happens in the maquiladoras in order to intervene under the terms of the NAFTA agreement, as happened in the case of the Sony . . . .That's why care needs to be taken in resolving the situation;" El Diario, 19 July 1995. Pharis Harvey of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, one of the chief counsels on the Sony petition, also believes that the Sony decision was instrumental in a recent Supreme Court Case m Mexico in which the judge used International Labor Organization Convention 87 to overturn state laws in that country, which restricted laborers from belonging to any but one union. Finally, organizers in border cities quite far removed from Nuevo Laredo see some effects of the Sony case. Mary Tong of the Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers m San Diego speculated that in a May 1997 conflict in Tijuana, labor bureaus in that city were more conciliatory than before the Nuevo Laredo case. "[The government] doesn't want another Sony," she explained.
58. Interview with Manuel Mondragón, Matamoros, Mexico, July 19 1997.
59. Author's interview with Sister Susan Mika, San Antonio, TX, July 16, 1997.