While NAFTA's labor side agreement does not assign penalties for denying workers their right to form independent unions, Mexico could have been fined a percentage of its export earnings, a potentially huge amount of money, for health and safety violations. With the settlement agreements, that possibility was removed. "Nothing will actually change at ITAPSA," says FAT leader Benedicto Martínez. "The Mexican government has a long history of finding reasons not to enforce its own laws protecting workers."

As a result of all the complaints filed since 1994, only one of the many workers fired in Mexico for independent union activity has been rehired, and not a single contract has been signed. A small number of cases have been filed over the failure of US labor law to protect workers here as well, with a similar lack of concrete results. Karesh insists that because the treaty is government-to-government, "we can't get a particular worker's job back or try to resolve cases in favor of particular groups of workers."

Despite the beatings (which received almost no coverage in the US press), NAO complaints continue to be filed. A recent one, alleging violations of health and safety as well as labor rights in Breed Technology's Custom Trim/Auto Trim plants, was filed by the CJM and the Comité Fronterizo Obrera (the Border Women Workers Committee) in September. While Mexican organizations believe NAO complaints have limited value, they nevertheless feel they keep their government under pressure and provide a forum for continuing to denounce violations. The root problem with NAFTA and its side agreements, however, remains: Protecting workers' rights requires the US government to promote the very conditions that undermine the profit-making that NAFTA was designed to further, a fundamental conflict that tends to be ignored amid pressure to link trade agreements and labor rights. During the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle (and since), the Clinton Administration praised the NAFTA process, arguing that trade agreements could protect rights while boosting profits--a position intended to get US unions to accept neoliberal economic reforms and the basic trade structure.

One way out of the NAO box is for US, Canadian and Mexican unions to build longer-range relationships, going beyond individual campaigns. The UE and the FAT have a "strategic organizing alliance," in which the two unions have supported each other since their first joint campaign challenged General Electric in Ciudad Juárez in 1994. Both unions root their cross-border relationship among rank-and-file members, who visit one another's plants. The relationship respects the autonomy of each union and its decision-making process, undermining accusations that the Mexican union is simply a tool of US labor.

At ITAPSA, the UE and the FAT initiated an alliance of all the unions representing plants owned by its parent corporation, Echlin Industries, now part of the Dana auto-parts giant. Such alliances are just beginning to take shape, but they hold real promise: If workers had strong, independent unions at all the Mexican, Canadian and US plants of a given company, they could share information about contract terms and wages, and eventually assist one another in bargaining. In the event of a conflict with the parent company, simultaneous job action in all three countries could prevent it from shifting production across borders to defeat unions.

But without a level economic playing field from country to country, corporations will continue to shift production to where wages and costs are lowest. Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch says the US Labor Department has certified that more than 500,000 US workers have lost their jobs because of NAFTA--a vast undercount, in most expert opinion. Cornell professor Kate Bronfenbrenner has documented the doubling of instances, since NAFTA passed, in which employers have stifled organizing efforts of US workers by threatening to relocate production.

The post-NAFTA record in Mexico is even worse. The Mexican government admits the loss of more than a million jobs in 1995 alone. That year's peso devaluation cut the standard of living in half for most workers. Even before NAFTA's passage, the disparity between US and Mexican wages was growing. During the past two decades of economic reforms, the income of Mexican workers has lost 76 percent of its purchasing power. According to economist and former Mexican Senator Rosalbina Garavito, Mexican salaries were a third of those in the United States up to the 1970s. They are now less than an eighth--even a twelfth or fifteenth, depending on the industry.

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