U.S., Mexican Unionists Teaming Up on Border Dilemma

Union leaders from Mexico and the United States are struggling to find a mutually acceptable way to resolve an awful dilemma.

They want to stop the disgraceful exploitation of Mexican workers by U.S. manufacturers in their plants south of the border and to halt the exportation of American jobs to those facilities.

On the other hand, they don’t want to slow the dramatic increase in employment at the maquiladora plants because workers in Mexico still need jobs urgently.

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland is expected to name a task force of top American union leaders next week to meet soon with their counterparts in the Mexican labor federation, the CTM, to discuss the matter.

Union leaders from California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona met last month in El Paso to formulate U.S. proposals for the Mexicans, and the issue will be considered next week at the national AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Bal Harbour, Fla.

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Thomas R. Donahue said some preliminary talks in Mexico City in December between unionists from both countries produced agreement that “we must map joint plans to counter the exploitation of workers on both sides of the border.”

Achieving that admirable goal, however, won’t be easy.

Mexico is poor; its unemployment is high; underemployment is almost universal among those with jobs; its inflation rate is devastating, and the country has a huge foreign debt. But the foreign-owned plants along the border, the fastest-growing sector of the Mexican economy, provide some hope for the nation.

Maquiladoras derive their name from the fee, or maquila , Mexican millers collect for processing grain. As they operate today, maquiladoras usually take parts from the United States or Asia, assemble them in Mexico and ship them to nearby finishing plants in the United States.

There now are nearly 1,000 maquiladora plants employing almost 300,000 Mexicans, up a whopping 40% from a year ago. The current numbers are even more astonishing when compared to the 57 plants with 4,000 workers that were included in the maquiladora system when it began in 1965 under a Mexican program designed to attract foreign capital.

The plants generate an estimated $2 billion in foreign currency, which means they are Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign money after petroleum sales. If the maquiladora expansion continues at its present rate, the plants will employ as many as 3 million workers in a dozen years.

So why then are Mexican union leaders unhappy about the foreign-owned plants?

For one thing, most of them are subsidiaries of giant multinational companies including General Electric, with 16 plants, RCA, Rockwell, Zenith, Hughes Aircraft, Eastman Kodak and others that can afford to offer good wages, especially by Mexico’s standards.

While U.S. companies still have by far the most plants, more and more firms from other countries are opening plants in Mexico too. Such Japanese giants as Sanyo, Sony, Matsushita and Hitachi also want the cheap labor.

Mexican unionists are justifiably disgusted that the maquiladoras pay workers from 40 cents to 70 cents an hour, relying heavily on women, particularly young women, who are willing to accept the low pay.

The U.S. companies pay 10 times more than that to workers in this country and up to three times more in such notoriously low-wage countries as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The unionists of both countries must step up efforts to stop such exploitation.

The maquiladora system also weakens the Mexican unions.

Foreign owners of maquiladoras vigorously and usually successfully oppose efforts to unionize their Mexican workers. Fewer than 10% of the maquiladora plant workers are union members, compared to about 25% in Mexico’s overall work force.

The U.S. and Mexican governments encourage the maquiladoras with everything from special breaks on taxes and tariffs to massive aid to the multinational corporations in the form low rent for land and buildings in Mexico.

For American workers, the impact is clear: Americans are losing jobs because U.S. companies are closing plants or failing to expand plants here so that they instead can operate maquiladoras and take advantage of the shockingly low labor costs.

Cooperation between the U.S and Mexican union leaders can help relieve the maquiladora dilemma, one part of America’s vast complex of international trade problems. Ultimately, they must bring into their talks unions from Japan and other nations using the border plants.

For starters, the American and Mexican unionists should listen to the ideas of the AFL-CIO’s Donahue. He calls for implementation of the original concept of the maquiladoras, meaning that each plant on the Mexican side of the border would have a sister plant on the U.S. side, providing jobs for American workers.

And together, the unions in the United States and Mexico can exert pressure on unionized U.S. firms to stop exploiting Mexican workers. These and other steps will not solve the problem entirely. But at last the unions on both sides of the border are going to work on it together.

International Labor Accords Win Support

The Senate last week finally ratified two labor standards issued by the Geneva-based International Labor Organization after refusing to approve any for the past 36 years.

It ratified, 84-0, an unimportant measure that establishes minimum safety and health conditions for merchant seamen. That drew no opposition because U.S. seamen are already protected by federal laws.

The Senate, however, also approved, by a 71-2 vote, the ILO’s potentially significant Convention 144, which has a secondary meaning that infuriates anti-union organizations like the National Right to Work Committee.

It was opposed by Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Steve Symms (R-Idaho). The convention establishes a board of government, union and business representatives to review the reasons why the United States has adopted only seven out of the 162 conventions issued by the ILO since the organization was founded in 1919.

This is important because after such reviews, the Senate may approve other ILO conventions that have been ignored for so many years. The conventions not only call for such things as an end to child labor and the right of workers in totalitarian countries like Poland to have a union, but also endorse giving government employees the right to strike, even in the United States.

ILO conventions are simply recommendations. The Senate action doesn’t mean Poland must allow free unions or that the U.S. must allow government workers here to strike.

But the conventions tell the world what the majority of ILO member nations believe are fair labor standards. It has been foolish for the Senate to fail to ratify any of ILO conventions since 1953 because the United States already is in compliance with almost every one anyway.

The campaign for Convention 144 was led by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and even supported by such foes of organized labor as President Reagan and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

Stephen I. Schlossberg, who is a former deputy assistant secretary of labor, the current head of the ILO Washington office and a man hated by anti-union forces, said that by ratifying the conventions, “the U.S. sends a clear signal that it intends to play a central role in ILO efforts to raise living and working standards worldwide.”

But Helms, echoing the view of the Right to Work Committee, opposed Convention 144 because it continues the designation of the AFL-CIO as the official voice of American workers when government, management and labor representatives of this country meet to review the international labor standards. The U.S. Council for International Business speaks for employers.

Since there is no voice more representative of workers than the AFL-CIO, a federation of almost all U.S. unions, it was the only real choice the Senate had. It hardly could have designated corporate executives or the Right to Work Committee for the job.