Mexican Border Workers Rattle the NAFTA Economy

By KENT PATERSON

For much of the business sector and media in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, Susana Prieto is the Devil Incarnate.

Blamed by her opponents for stirring up the wildcat strikes that hit US and foreign owned factories in Matamoros — located across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas — beginning in January, the Mexican lawyer/labor activist sized up as “successful” a movement that in its first phase involved 30,000-plus workers at more than 40 assembly plants under contract with the Union of Laborers and Industrial Workers of the Maquiladora Industry (SJOIIM).

Pressured by walk outs and work stoppages, the union leadership invoked a legal strike that ended with workers winning their demands of a 20% pay hike and a 32,000 peso bonus, or approximately $1,500. A revived labor movement is also struggling to democratize unions that were important props of the former ruling PRI party and government, Prieto said in an interview.

“We are in a war. We won a battle, the historic 20/32. Now we’re going on to the second phase with the unions,” she said.

The Matamoros wildcats erupted when foreign corporations withheld annual bonuses from factory workers as new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s campaign promise of doubling the minimum wage to about nine dollars per day in the border states adjacent to the United States went into effect on New Year’s day. In return for paying a higher minimum wage, employers were promised tax cuts by Mexico’s new federal government.

For Prieto, contentions vented in the Mexican press that large corporations operating in Matamoros with minimal labor costs could not afford the workers’ 20/32 demands were “offensive.”

Prieto rebuffed charges that she was the prime outside agitator — and financial beneficiary — of labor unrest in the factories known as maquiladoras that manufacture automotive, electronic and other components for pricey products sold in the US and other nations. Instead, she denounced death threats and a campaign aimed at both “criminalizing” her and destroying a new, rank-and-file worker movement that’s shook up labor-management relations in the key assembly-for-export sector of the Mexican economy.

The attorney said Matamoros’ workers were preparing for a job action last fall and contacted her when they were ready to act in January. As the strikes spread, more workers were inspired by the demand for 20/32, which became the banner of a new movement. Matamoros workers at maquiladoras under contract with a second union soon went on strike, as did employees of a Coca Cola distributorship and employees of metal works plants in the city across the Rio Grande from Texas, among others.

Nationally, 20/32 even captured the imagination of workers at Mexico’s largest private employer, Walmart, where strike talk hung in the air but was deflated in March with a modest wage and productivity bonus agreed to by the union, Aristegui Noticias reported.

“The workers have surpassed their leaders,” Prieto said. “This is happening all over the country. You can’t live in Mexico on the minimum salary, even if it’s doubled.”

In a February solidarity resolution with the Matamoros strikers, the El Paso Central Labor Union Council stated “the worker-driven action is courageous in a country with few independent unions.”

Noting the low wages earned by Mexican workers during the NAFTA era as well as the interdependence between US and Mexican border cities, the Texas resolution asserted that narrowing “huge wage gaps” between Mexican and US workers would translate into mutual benefits.

Cipriana Jurado, a former maquiladora worker from Ciudad Juarez who’s currently a leader of Lopez Obrador’s Morena party in the US, praised the Matamoros workers. “It’s important that they’ve organized. When I was in the maquila we always dreamed about organizing at that kind of level,” Jurado said. The ex-factory worker recalled getting fired from several jobs and blacklisted for her activism.

Now, even as a new NAFTA has been signed that supposedly strengthens Mexican labor rights, estimates of blacklistings and worker firings in Matamoros- especially of activists- range from 1,500 to 4,000 workers. A petition demanding the immediate reinstatement of workers is posted on Mexico’s Left Daily (La Izquierda Diario) website.

Accompanying the reported firings have been multiple statements in the Mexican press warning that companies will relocate their factories to locales where “labor peace” prevails. Strikingly, the comments come from Mexican business sector representatives and never directly from spokespersons for the US and foreign firms that own the maquiladoras.

“They always make those threats of going to other places but stay because they make money,” Jurado said.

In a possible counterattack, Mexico’s El Economista reported that several state secretaries of labor were readying a proposal to reform Mexican labor law so unions or others who organize and engage in wildcat strikes will face sanctions.

Matamoros could prove the first test of the right of workers to truly organize under new NAFTA’s labor chapter if the agreement is ultimately approved.

President Lopez Obrador, who’s pledged a better deal for the working class, is noticeably uncomfortable with the labor unrest in Matamoros and elsewhere. Pivoting to the center, the president calls for reconciliation between capital and labor so both sides will benefit.

“We all have to participate. The union leaders have to consult their members, the workers, and the bosses have to also act in a flexible manner, understanding that it’s important to improve the workers’ pay,” Lopez Obrador said at a press conference.

Immersed in reconstructing a gutted Mexican State, and coping with grave insecurity problems across the country, Lopez Obrador seeks to avoid an economic destabilization of Mexico that would make implementing his Fourth Transformation reform program difficult if not impossible to achieve.

In mid-March, Prieto and a delegation of 30 Matamoros strikers traveled to Mexico City for meetings with university students and sympathetic labor activists, including university unions waging their own strikes for better working conditions.

At a forum in the capital city, fired Tridonex employee Luis Angel Jimenez spoke about the impact of the firings on workers and their family members in Matamoros. Coca Cola striker Javier Jaimes appealed for economic support, stressing that bills were due.

Jorge Dorantes, secretary general of the UAM university workers’ union on strike in Mexico City, summarized a rising sentiment among sectors of the Mexican working class. “We need the government to hear us,” Dorantes said. “We have to struggle for a national strike if necessary.”

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2019

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