Worker Vote Tests Rights in Mexico : Labor: Election at <i> maquiladora</i> goes the company’s way. But for the first time in 13 years, a rival union takes part.

The election took place in the street.

Supervisors ushered employees, most of them young women, to a makeshift voting area at white patio tables outside the gates of the factory. There was no secret ballot; instead the workers declared their votes in front of an array of company officials and company-union activists dressed in cowboy hats and leather jackets. A secretary, bundled in a coat against a cold wind sweeping the hilltop industrial park, pounded out the results on a typewriter.

Despite its improvised appearance, the scene was historic. The Plasticos Bajacal company was holding Tijuana’s first union election in 13 years at a maquiladora , one of the low-wage, foreign-owned assembly plants that dominate the border economy. The Dec. 15 election was also the first in Mexico since the approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to labor experts in both nations.

By afternoon, the results were clear: The company-sponsored union triumphed over a competing union seeking to represent laborers at a plant torn by labor disputes.

But the participants emerged with starkly different interpretations. Company officials said employees expressed satisfaction with their workplace in a free vote, rejecting outside agitators.

“The will of these people was recognized,” said Cliff Deupree, an executive with Boston-based Carlisle Plastics, the parent company of Plasticos Bajacal. “They spoke and they spoke loud and clear.”

On the other hand, a visiting delegation of international unionists and human rights officials--mostly supporters of the upstart union--said they witnessed an undemocratic travesty.

“It’s a joke,” said John Gibson, a carpenters’ union representative from Los Angeles. “I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no way it can be fair.”

Though the election demonstrated progress, it also served as a reminder that Mexican workers have yet to achieve rights that U.S. workers take for granted--a central argument by NAFTA opponents in last month’s congressional debate.

For more than a half a century in Mexico, organized labor has functioned as one of the engines in the mainstream political machinery that has kept the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party in power. Without the prodding of strong independent unions, a triumvirate of government, employers and organized labor has been slow to raise wages and improve work conditions in Mexico.

Even the NAFTA side agreement on labor issues, which introduced international monitoring of health and safety standards, has been criticized for failing to strengthen unions.

Since the passage of the trade pact earlier this month, workers have been fired for organizing attempts at two U.S-owned plants in the Mexican state of Chihuahua on the Texas border. Border-area maquiladora businesses have long been targeted by critics for low wages and grim working conditions.

“Along the length of the border, unions respond to the company rather than the worker,” said Antonio Garcia of the Baja California human rights ombudsman’s office, a neutral election observer. “This hurts the rights of the worker. . . . There must be an evolution of labor reform in Mexico.”

The running dispute at Plasticos Bajacal has brought public attention to these issues in recent months.

The company, which produces plastic clothes hangers, shifted its operations from facilities in Southern California and Asia, starting in 1989. Bajacal employs about 520 workers at three locations in Tijuana, paying between $60 and $100 a week.

Eight disgruntled employees were fired in March, accused of recruiting for the semi-independent Revolutionary Workers Confederation, known by the Spanish acronym COR. They were seeking to gain wage increases, and alleged abuse by managers and unsafe working conditions.

Only when they began the organizing drive, workers said, did they learn that Mexico Moderno, a government-affiliated union of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), had already signed a contract with the company--standard practice in Mexico. The activists pressured the company and the state labor board into holding the election in an attempt to unseat CROM.

One of the fired workers, Jorge Barron, lost an eye in 1992 after being hit by a flying drill bit in the factory.

With San Diego labor organizers, Barron was among the COR supporters on hand during the election. He argued with a CROM representative, Magdaleno Reyes, dismissing the company union as a front.

“I lost my eye,” Barron said. “For eight days I was in the clinic with that thing in my eye, and they told me we can’t do anything to transfer you. A relative had to pay my air fare to Ciudad Juarez for the surgery. The union never said: ‘We are going to help you.’ Where was the union?”

Saying he had no involvement in the case, Reyes responded: “The important thing isn’t the result of the election; it’s supporting the worker. We have nothing against you.”

Bajacal lawyer Jovita Chavez, basing her interpretation on statutes and legal precedents, said Mexican law requires workers to declare their vote publicly in labor elections. But human rights official Garcia and lawyers for the fired workers disagreed, asserting that the law does not preclude a secret ballot.