by David Bacon

David Bacon is an independent writer and photographer who works on documenting issues of labor, immigration, and international politics. He was a labor organizer for two decades and is a board member of the Northern California Coalition for Immigration Rights. He can be reached at dbacon@igc.org.
 

Cananea striker Javier Cañizares has been blacklisted by the mine's management. Photo by David Bacon.

 

Border Unrest Shows Cost of Mexican Neoliberal Policies

CANANEA, SONORA (3/22/99) -- In the mile-high mountains of the Sonora desert, just 25 miles south of the border between Arizona and Mexico, over two thousand miners have been locked in a bitter industrial war since mid-November. Here Grupo México operates North America's oldest, and one of the world's largest copper mines -- Cananea -- in a town which has been a symbol of anti-government insurrection for almost 100 years.

On November 19, the Cananea mine was paralyzed by a strike over its owner's plans to eliminate the jobs of 700 of its 2070 blue-collar employees. Pushing the cuts in employment is a government policy of privatizing Mexican industry, downsizing its workforce in an effort to increase investment incentives. The strike in Cananea directly challenged this policy, defying Mexico's government and one of its wealthiest financial backers. 

In mid-February, government threats of armed intervention forced workers back to their jobs. In the strike's wake, one of Mexico's oldest unions -- Section 65 of the Miners and Metallurgical Workers Union of the Mexican Republic -- may have been broken, and its leaders blacklisted. 

On February 13, miners went to their job sites in the vast pit, to hold them against the threat of possible replacements. Meanwhile, four convoys of Mexican soldiers began moving toward the town. Over 300 heavily-armed members of the state Judicial police took over the streets. 

With violent confrontation in the air, local union president Manuel Romero, Cananea mayor Francisco García and police and army officers, entered the mine. They walked from installation to installation, appealing to the miners to leave. Fearing the prospect of armed battle, the workers finally gave up their occupation and ended the strike. 

In the days that followed, however, over 120 strike leaders were turned away at the mine gates, as they tried to report back to their old jobs. Hundreds more were permanently laid off and their jobs eliminated. 

The spark which provoked the recent strike was a company announcement that it would lay off 435 workers permanently, closing four mine departments. Grupo México's copper mines account for over ninety percent of production in Mexico, which is one of the world's ten largest producers of the metal. When the company took over the Cananea mine in 1991, in partnership with the American Smelting and Refining Co., its workforce numbered over 3300. In six years, the mine workforce was reduced by 1300 jobs. Meanwhile, production increased dramatically, from 30,000 tons of ore per day in 1979 to 80,000 tons last year. 

Striker Javier Cañizares says that these job cuts were accomplished when the company subcontracted construction and maintenence operations. "Instead of performing those jobs with its own workers, two U.S. companies, Road Machinery and Allison Parks, have brought in hundreds of workers under temporary 28-day contracts from southern Mexico," he explained. 

Subcontracting undermined the union and undercut wages. Section 65, the Cananea miners' union, has a militant reputation, and their wages have averaged among the highest of the country's industrial workers -- between $8-12 an hour. 

Gabino Páez González, a Grupo México executive in Mexico City, confirmed that subcontractors now perform many operations with contract employees. Under Mexican law, workers don't achieve permanent employment status and union rights until they have been on the job for 30 days. At Cananea, their wages are only a fraction of the permanent employees they replaced. 

While Cananea is just a small, dusty border community of 30,000 residents, it occupies an almost mythic place in the iconography of the Mexican Revolution. Copper has been mined continuously here since the days of the Spanish viceroys in the late 1600s. 

In 1906, the mine's US owners paid a lower salary to Mexican miners than they paid to white supervisors brought down from the north. Cananea miners went on strike, demanding 5 pesos for an 8-hour day, and an end to the lower Mexican wage. After they were attacked by Arizona vigilantes, workers took up arms and were bloodily put down by then-dictator Porfirio Díaz. In Mexican public schools, children learn of Cananea as the opening gun of what became the Mexican Revolution. 

For years after the 1906 conflict, the Cananea mine belonged to the U.S.-based Anaconda Copper Company. In 1971 the mine was nationalized. Two decades later, after the Mexican government began adopting economic reforms bent on attracting investment, Cananea was sold to Grupo Mexico, one of the country's largest industrial corporations. Jorge Larrea, its main shareholder, heads one of the country's wealthiest families. 

Larrea's industrial empire grew rapidly through his close friendship with past-President Carlos Salinas, who signed the NAFTA treaty in 1994. Under Salinas, the Mexican government sold Larrea the Cananea and other copper mines, as well as railroads and other heavy industrial enterprises, often at a fraction of their book value. He is presently negotiating the concession to operate the Pacific coast port of Guaymas. Thirteen Mexican financiers became billionaires during the Salinas administration. Larrea was one of them. 

The enterprises acquired by Grupo Mexico have been rocked by conflict over demands for drastic job cuts. In 1997, Larrea bought the 6,521-kilometer Pacific North railroad, in partnership with Pennsylvania-based Union Pacific. Last summer, workers throughout northern Mexico mounted a series of rolling wildcat strikes over plans to reduce its workforce of 13,000 by more than half. 

Gema López Limón, professor at the University of Baja California in nearby Mexicali, concludes that "our government and corporations are using privatization to do away with unions entirely, as they've sought to do with the railroad workers, and now the miners here in Cananea. For unions to survive here, they will have to be much better organized, and seek greater international support." 

Her conclusions reflect the worsening conditions of Mexican workers under the impact of two decades of neoliberal economic reforms. During that time, the income of workers has lost 76% of its purchasing power, and the number of Mexicans living in poverty has risen from 20 to 30 million. While the government estimates unemployment at less than 6 %, Mexico's new independent union federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), puts it at over 9 million people, or a quarter of the workforce. 

Despite the existence of a national health care system, almost half of workers are not covered by it, due to the growth of "illegal" jobs. Companies which, despite the law, pay less than minimum wage, with no taxes, health insurance or retirement benefits, are now estimated to employ over half the workers in Mexico. Meanwhile, inflation continues to rage at 20% last year, while the government offered only a 14% increase in the minimum wage to compensate for it. 

Over the last decade, the number of national enterprises sold off to private investors has grown tremendously, and their consequent job reductions have added to this problem. Cananea and the railroads are only a few among many leaner, privatized concerns, including airlines, banks, railroads, mines and extractive industries, and many industrial enterprises. 

As privatization moves from industry to industry, unions have been gutted. While three-quarters of the workforce in Mexico belonged to unions three decades ago, that percentage is now less than 30. In the the state-owned oil company, PEMEX, union membership still hovers at 72%. But when the collateral petrochemical industry was privatized over the last decade-and-a-half, the unionization rate fell to 7%. New private owners like Larrea reduced the membership of the railway workers union from 90,000 workers to 36,000 in the same period. 

The section of the Mexican economy which has grown, of course, has been the maquiladora sector, still concentrated along the Mexico/U.S. border, but spreading to zones throughout the country. Almost a million workers are now employed in over 2000 factories, owned by foreign investors interested in low wages and unenforced protections for workers and the environment.

In Tijuana, the average maquiladora daily wage is about 50 pesos, while a gallon of milk in the supermarket costs about 20. In other words, a worker has to work almost half her shift for just the milk needed by her children. Under the impact of price decontrol, the prices of all basic necessities, including gasoline, electricity, buses and taxicabs, tortillas and milk are rising drastically. 

These increases were augmented this past year when the government dissolved the food supply monopoly, CONASUPO. The enterprise had operated food stores throughout the country, offering milk, tortillas and other staples at low, subsidized prices, while paying farmers a subsidy on their crops, especially corn, at the same time. Without CONASUPO, millions of poor Mexicans will pay much more for much less food, while farmers go broke and migrate to the cities. 

But poverty along the border is not going unchallenged. From Matamoros on the Atlantic to Tijuana on the Pacific, labor unrest is increasing. One of the highpoints has been the two-year battle by workers at Tijuana's Han Young factory, who have challenged the system of low-wage, protection contracts operated by an alliance of government-affiliated unions and the maquiladora owners associations. They launched the first legal strike by an independent maquiladora union last May 14. 

Since then, government authorities have been unrelenting in their efforts to declare the strike illegal, remove the bargaining authority of the October 6 Union for Industry and Commerce, and have repeatedly arrested its general secretary Enrique Hernández and his lawyer José Peñaflor Barrón. 

But despite efforts by city authorities to keep the independent union effort from spreading, workers at other Tijuana factories have begun to join it. Increased labor turmoil is also changing the city's political landscape, benefiting primarily the leftwing opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). 

____________
 

Tijuana Police Defy Court Protection of the 
Han Young Maquiladora Strike 
 
 
 

A SWAT team arrives at the Han Young maquiladora to intimidate strikers. Photo by David Bacon.

TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA (5/16/99) -- Police and state authorities are accused of attempting to suppress a strike at the Han Young maquiladora, as the conflict which has rocked labor relations on the border here for two years flares up yet again.

On April 6, the First Collegial Court of the Fifteenth District, the highest judicial authority in Baja California Norte, issued a ruling which shocked the state's political establishment. The court held that Tijuana authorities had violated the law last June in suppressing a strike at Han Young, the first strike by an independent union in the history of the maquiladoras.

"The justice system of the republic protects [the independent union] against acts of the authorities [in declaring the strike illegal]," the court said. The opinion, granting the strike legal status, was signed by all three sitting judges.

Gerardo Medel Torres, the new chief of the local labor board, which last year called the strike "nonexistent," has also publicly conceded that it is legal. Following the court's ruling, on May 3 the independent October 6 Union for Industry and Commerce once again tied red and black strike flags across the gate into the Han Young factory, bringing production to a halt. In a legal strike in Mexico, when strike flags are put up, the struck
establishment must be closed and remain so until the dispute is resolved.

Instead of respecting the high court decision, however, city and state police have continued trying to bring strikebreakers into the facility to resume work, even after the union obtained further court orders protecting its strike.

On May 5, a patriotic holiday in Mexico, two attorneys arrived at the struck factory accompanied by ten trucks of Tijuana municipal police. The attorneys refused to identify themselves publicly, but police commandant Armando Rascón later identified them as Marcantonio Mejia and Jesús Ibarra Estrada, lawyers for the state employers' association, COPARMEX.

The two demanded that police take down the strike banners, and permit 20 workers, assembled a short distance away, to enter. At first Rascón announced he would comply. When asked if this action wouldn't violate the state court's decision, he declared "that doesn't matter." Rascón said he had no idea whether the attorneys had a valid court order telling him to break the strike. "My orders come from the state," he said.

After television crews from local stations arrived and began filming the action, and representatives of the federal Labor Department and the local opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) began taking notes, Rascón made an aboutface and told the strikebreakers to go home. Six days later, however, over 100 members of Tijuana's Special Forces police detachment, joined by state Judicial Police, did tear down the strike flags, and escorted 70 people into the plant. Production, however, didn't resume since, according to the union, few of the new workers knew how to operate the factory's welding equipment.

The next day, Enrique Hernández, general secretary of the October 6 union, tied the strike flags once more across the closed factory gates. "I don't care how many times they take the flags down," he declared. "We will just put them up again."

Police action hasn't been confined to the streets in front of the plant. Silvestre Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Sánchez, and other members of the strike committee say that state Judicial Police have come to their homes, telling their families that they intend to arrest them. Rodríguez has been a Han Young employee since 1993, and Sánchez since 1995.

Arrest orders were sworn out against Hernández and union attorney José Peñaflor last December, accusing them of holding the plant's owner hostage in the factory for an hour during last year's strike. Both men deny the charge, saying it was a pretext used to detain them. "They want to use these charges to keep us under constant threat of arrest," Peñaflor says, "hoping it will stop the union."

New charges have been made against Hernández, Reyes, and Sánchez, accusing them of illegally depriving the company of the use of its factory. The union has obtained injunctions blocking all of the arrests. Even after the court prohibition, however, city police last Friday issued new arrest warrants against Hernández.

The Baja California courts seem reluctant to enforce their own decisions. Pedro Fernández Reyes Colin, the lead judge who signed the state high court decision, said that although he had the power to enforce it, he was taking no action. "I'm not aware that any violations are occuring," he stated.

On May 13, October 6 attorney Peñaflor filed criminal charges against state officials for failure to obey the court decisions and injunctions. Dodging police sent to detain them, Peñaflor and Hernández flew to Mexico City, where the federal Senate set up a commission to investigate the situation in Tijuana. The Congress is about to take similar action.

Tijuana and Baja California police defiance of court rulings has been encouraged by the state chapter of the Mexican Employers Council (COPARMEX). On May 5, COPARMEX director Pedro Martínez and Maquiladora Industry Association head José Calleros Rivera called the resumption of the Han Young strike a threat to investment all along the border. Martínez said the strike was a "breeding ground" for links to U.S. unions and the leftwing opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution.

In a Tijuana press conference May 5, Martínez and Calleros warned that independent unions could spread to other factories on the border in the wake of a union victory at Han Young. Of Mexico's 10 million permanently-employed workers, one million work in the border factories, and 200,000 in Tijuana alone. At present, most Tijuana maquiladoras have contracts with government-affiliated unions that, according to critics, guarantee labor peace despite low wages and often-dangerous working conditions.

Fueling COPARMEX fears are the demands of Han Young strikers for a 35% salary increase, government-mandated profit-sharing, and wage scales rewarding seniority and job experience.

The Han Young factory produces truck chassis for the huge Hyundai Corp. manufacturing facility, one of Tijuana's largest. Two years ago, Han Young workers began efforts to replace their government-affiliated union with an independent one.

In December, 1997, they won an historic decision granting their union legal status, following a hunger strike at the city hall and several weeks during which supporters in 25 U.S. and Canadian cities picketed Hyundai car dealerships. The Han Young situation also was used by U.S. Congressional opponents of President Clinton's free trade policies to derail the proposal to grant the administration fast track authority to negotiate further trade agreements.

The October 6 union then launched the first legal strike by an independent union in the history of the maquiladoras on May 22, 1998. After striking for two weeks, police moved in, tore down and burned the strike flags in the street in front of the factory, and escorted strikebreakers inside.

It was this action that Baja California's high court declared illegal, setting the stage for the resumption of the industrial conflict. Representatives of Han Young were unavailable for comment. Last week Tijuana newspapers reported that Ted Chung, president of Hyundai Precision America, Inc., had publicly called on Tijuana's mayor, Francisco Vega de la Madrid, to request federal troops to provide security in the maquiladoras.

Peter Ahn, spokesperson for Hyundai Precision America, denied that Chung had made such a request. "It seems he was misquoted," Ahn said, adding that any such suggestion had come from the mayor during a visit to Hyundai's Tijuana facility. Ahn said he had never been informed of the court decision declaring the Han Young strike legal. "I've been told that there is no strike, and that the plant entrance is being blocked by outsiders who never worked there," he said.

As the conflict escalates, it is becoming the spark of political changes in Tijuana. Last summer, after the suppression of the Han Young strike, PRD candidates campaigned for the votes of maquiladora workers. The party called for raising factory wages, for child care for the mostly-female workforce, and for free transportation to and from work. It also demanded basic city services in the barrios, including housing, water, electricity, paved streets and sewers.

PRD support increased dramatically. While the party won only 10,000 votes in Tijuana in 1992 and 1995, on June 28 last year it received 25,800, or 9.5% of the total votes cast. Previously that would have entitled the party to 3 seats on the city council, but a recent electoral reform sponsored by the ruling National Action Party (PAN) denied the PRD any of the council's 14 seats.

Mexico's national elections are a year away, however, and growth in PRD support is an open threat to the political establishment which has protected maquiladora investment. After the strike resumed May 3, PRD leaders issued a statement holding the conservative PAN state government responsible for any moves to suppress it, and demanded that it respect the right of workers to form independent unions.

Both the Han Young strike and the election effectively increased the popularity of the independent October 6 union. Last year workers at the factory of Pennsylvania-based Axiohm Transaction Solutions Corp. asked the independent union for help. The plant makes printer heads for bank ATM and Lotto ticket machines.

Inocencia Hernández, a supervisor at the factory for 11 years, says that she and five coworkers were fired after asking for wage raises. "A lawyer in the human relations department called me in," she said, "and told me the company didn't need my services any longer. A policeman escorted me out of the plant, pointing a gun at my head. We were accused of planning to assassinate the plant manager and burn the factory."

Mark Basla, Axiohm's director of corporate communications, wouldn't comment on the allegations, and stated that "Axiohm is an ethical company in its relations with all its employees."

After the firings, the independent union then filed a notice of its intent to strike Axiohm with the city's labor board. So far, the board has refused to recognize October 6 as the workers' union.

Last fall Mexico's new national independent labor federation, the National Union of Workers, organized a chapter in Baja California. Enrique Hernández became one of the group's three presidents. The local federation has a combined membership of over 25, 000 workers.

The new federation is campaigning for a daily wage of 100 pesos ($10), double the present average maquiladora salary. On May 31, October 6 members plan to conduct a formal balloting, or consulta, by maquiladora workers at 100 sites throughout the state. The consulta will ask them whether they will support a general work stoppage to win a 100 peso minimum daily wage. Current maquiladora wages average between 50 and 75 pesos daily, according to the union.

These developments threaten increased labor costs for U.S.- and other foreign-owned factories along the border. "We are rejecting government policies which use low wages to attract foreign investment," Hernández said.
 

For more David Bacon articles and photos, visit his web site at http://www.igc.org/dbacon/