Unions Without Borders (Page 5)

Mercedes Gema Lopez Limón, professor at the University of Baja California in Mexicali, argues that the worsening conditions of Mexican workers are a direct result of the impact of neoliberal economic reforms, especially the privatization of the state sector of the Mexican economy. "Our government and corporations are using privatization to do away with unions entirely," she says. While three-quarters of the Mexican work force belonged to unions three decades ago, less than 30 percent does today. In the state-owned oil company, PEMEX, for instance, union membership still hovers at 72 percent. But as the collateral petrochemical industry was privatized over the past decade and a half, the unionization rate fell to 7 percent. If US unions can't find a way to support Mexican unions battling this wave, there won't be much of a labor movement left to reform.

The cross-border solidarity movement has only begun to tackle this problem. In the early 1990s, when 10,000 Mexico City bus drivers lost their jobs in the privatization of the Route 100 transit system and their leaders were imprisoned on trumped-up fraud charges, leaders of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union visited them in jail, delivering a check for $5,000. The union also sent delegations to visit Mexican ports, looking for unions and workers interested in mounting a fight to stop port privatization.

Then, in 1999, the AFL-CIO itself supported the copper miners' strike at Cananea, just sixty miles south of the Arizona border. The workers sought to stop massive layoffs several years after the mine had been sold by the state to Grupo Mexico, in partnership with the American Smelting and Refining Company. Led by stateAFL-CIO representative Gerry Acosta, caravans of pickup trucks laden with food and supplies snaked their way from the United States to the tiny mountain town in the Sonora desert, where strikers had occupied the mine. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO's office in Mexico City tried to encourage the union's national leaders to support the fight. In the end, however, the Mexican government sent in troops and, facing the threat of bloodshed, the miners retreated. Hundreds lost their jobs.

Last year the Mexican Electrical Workers, one of the country's oldest and most democratic unions, successfully fought the privatization of the Power and Light Company of central Mexico, collecting more than 2.7 million signatures within three weeks. The new Mexican administration of Vicente Fox, however, whose National Action Party dislodged the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party for the first time in seventy-one years, supports further neoliberal reforms. Fox has already announced that electricity privatization is on his agenda.

Mexican unions, especially progressive and independent ones, perceive US pressure behind the IMF loan conditions and their government's neoliberal policies. And while US labor's solidarity work focuses on the growth of US-owned maquiladoras on the border, Mexican unions actually view privatization as a much greater threat. It would therefore be a powerful gesture of solidarity for the US labor federation to call on our government to stop pushing such measures. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney could even go to Mexico City and link arms with Mexican union leaders at the head of their next antiprivatization march. Or, even better, US unions could send delegations of their own, on a continuing basis, at the invitation of their Mexican counterparts.

In 1995, after being elected AFL-CIO secretary treasurer, Rich Trumka called for a different direction for the federation's international relationships. "The cold war has gone," he declared. "It's over. We want to be able to confront multinationals as multinationals ourselves now. If a corporation does business in fifteen countries, we'd like to be able to confront them as labor in fifteen countries. It's not that we need less international involvement, but it should be focused toward building solidarity, helping workers achieve their needs and their goals here at home."

Trumka's statement is not just an expression of good sentiments from an enlightened labor leader but a response to movement from labor's rank and file. Every time a struggle like Duro begins, US labor activists start heading south, while those from Mexico come north. Solidarity has captured the imagination of labor's activist core. It is still very difficult for border workers and their allies to muster sufficient economic pressure in the United States to force major corporations to respect workers' rights, much less change US and Mexican government policies, which deepen poverty and lend the companies political cover. But a new kind of internationalism is beginning to shape labor's political direction in both the United States and Mexico. And that has the potential to give workers the power not only to criticize the new world economic order but to change it.

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