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The weekly newsletter of the México Solidarity Project |
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Online at mexicosolidarityproject.org |
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February 1, 2023/ This week's issue/ Meizhu Lui, for the editorial team |
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Let’s Make a ‘USMCL’(US/México/Canada Labor) Deal! |
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With NAFTA in 1993 and its USMCA offspring — the US-México-Canada Agreement — in 2018, the United States, Canada, and México unified North America into one big free trade zone. What’s “free” about these agreements? Investment money can now travel freely across borders. Corporations can move production anywhere on the continent.
These two trade pacts have left North America “free” for corporate “persons,” but corporeal persons have become another matter entirely. Displaced Mexican workers can’t enter into El Norte, and displaced US Rust Belt workers have no choice but to move to lower-paying jobs in Sun Belt states. Many of those states, ironically, had once been part of México.
México entered this new “free trade” era with the lowest wages and most company-friendly unions of the three nations involved. Not surprisingly, México quickly became the landing zone of choice for a wide variety of US and Canadian corporations, all absolutely thrilled to be able to dump unions that had forced them to share some of their profits. The predictable result? In the three decades since NAFTA’s ratification, corporate profits and CEO pay have zoomed up up up, worker wages and benefits have shrunk down down down.
But we do have a no-brainer counter to this corporate capitalist new order: working class unity across borders. Unfortunately, much of the US workers movement has acted as if it had no brain. In fact, since the massive uprising against NAFTA in 1999, we’ve seen less international solidarity. Too many workers have heeded the to-hell-with-the-non-native-born strains of the “Put America First” siren song. But the core reality remains: US workers will not do well unless we “put México first”!
Toward that end, some provisions in the three-year-old USMCA can help. This trade pact, unlike its NAFTA parent, includes worker protections. And recent labor law changes in México have opened the door to independent union organizing. The Biden administration, meanwhile, is backing expanding worker rights in México. Will US trade unionists now rise to the occasion and take advantage of this new historical moment?
In our interview this week, the veteran labor activist Jeffery Hermanson has more on the opportunity now ahead. What he makes crystal clear: US and Mexican workers need to join forces now! |
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Maximizing México’s ‘CIO Moment’: Tri-National Labor Unity |
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Jeffery Hermanson has been a union organizer and officer since 1977 with several different US unions and, until recently, he directed organizing at the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in México. A resident of Atlixco, Puebla, Hermanson is currently volunteering with the International Union Educational League, a nonprofit labor support organization. This interview draws from a longer New Labor Forum analysis that includes up-to-date information on independent unionism in México.
You see our current moment as a unique opportunity for workers to gain back the ground lost since NAFTA’s enactment 30 years ago. For the first time, you note, both the US and Mexican governments are protecting independent union organizing. What can the North American labor movement do to take advantage of this opportunity? |
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As a consultant to the México Solidarity Center and as its organizing director in 2021 and 2022, you oversaw the development of a set of strategic priorities. Can you describe them? |
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We need first to better understand the North American political economy, everything from the strategy of the US, Canadian, and Mexican ruling classes to the chief features of our growing economic integration.
We need to map out the economic relationships between and among U.S., Canadian, and Mexican production, extraction, and distribution networks. |
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The Casa Obrera Potosina — funded by the Solidarity Centers, |
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US, Canadian, and Mexican scholars could carry this work out jointly, from centers like the Economic Policy Institute in the US, the Canada Labor Institute for Social and Economic Fairness, and the Institute for Labor Studies — Instituto de Estudios del Trabajo — in México. University labor centers could also participate.
Second, the US and Canadian labor movements should join forces with the existing independent and democratic unions of México. Since June 2021, the México Solidarity Center has regularly convened Mexican organizers to discuss common issues and plan out the formation of a Union Organizing Institute. US and Canadian union representatives have an open invitation to attend these meetings. I’m hoping that a national coalition of Mexican organizations can form and work in alliance with their US and Canadian counterparts.
We can compare today’s situation in México with what was going on in the United States during the New Deal era, after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and the formation of the CIO, the Committee for Industrial Organization. Those years saw a massive upsurge of worker organizing, and that created the great national industrial unions in basic industries like auto and steel.
This organizing wave doubled the size of the US labor movement in just five years, from three million union members in 1935 to six million in 1940. In contemporary México, this could be the time to replicate the successes of the CIO mass organizing drives.
Our role? US and Canadian unions could provide support in the areas of research, worker training on organizing and collective bargaining, and political action. Together with Mexican unions and workers, we could develop a strategy for a continental labor movement capable of taking on the corporations operating throughout North America. |
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Third, US and Canadian unions can use their experience to promote an industrial organizing outlook and counter the enterprise-union mentality that limits the vision of many Mexican independent unions to the shop floor of their own employer.
Many Mexican workers, given their experience with the corrupt and powerful corporatist unions like the CTM, have become deeply skeptical of the possibility of maintaining independence and democratic governance in multi-plant unions and multi-union federations and confederations. But to achieve the scope and scale necessary to transform the labor relations regime from below, Mexican workers will have to organize national industrial unions in the principal sectors of the Mexican economy, in everything from auto and aerospace to mining and export manufacturing. |
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These sectors all have enormous importance, to Mexican workers and US and Canadian workers whose employment opportunities and working conditions are threatened by the economic integration and wage-depression strategies of our corporate ruling class.
The fourth key point: US and Canadian unions must get involved with the Mexican labor organizations in their own sectors. US unions should not leave solidarity work only to the AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center, or — in Canada — to the Canadian Labor Congress. These national bodies simply do not have the direct organizing and collective bargaining experience or structural position within key industries to build the kind of movement necessary to fight multinational corporations. |
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Industry-specific organizing and bargaining remains the domain of individual unions. Who knows the auto industry better than the UAW or the aerospace industry better than the International Association of Machinists? Who’s better suited than Workers United to advise Mexican trade unionists organizing apparel subcontractors producing for Levi’s and Gap? Who has more interest in organizing Amazon and DHL than the Teamsters, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and the Amazon Labor Union? |
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US workers meet with maquila workers. Photo: Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera |
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This work also needs to involve more than union staff and top leaders. Educating rank-and-file US and Canadian union members — on why supporting Mexican labor struggles will advance their common interest — will be essential. Bringing workers together across borders will be an important way to build the kind of solidarity we need.
How much time do we have?
We’ve never had a better time to take on this fight, but the opportunity will not last forever. Just as the New Deal came to an end and US unions came under Taft-Hartley Act attack, we have no guarantee that our current pro-labor governments in the US and México will last beyond the next election. Good laws need good administration and strong enforcement. Without that, they can become a dead letter.
We need now to make the decisions that will build a North American labor movement capable of organizing and bargaining in key industries across the continent. If we do that, we can fight and we can win against corporate greed and domination. |
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Still Another Attack on Mexican Environmentalists |
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Antonio Díaz Valencia and Ricardo Lagunes. Composite: Suppied. |
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México currently rates, the Guardian notes, “as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental and land rights defenders.” Both criminal groups and corrupt government officials “threaten and attack communities with almost total impunity.” The international watchdog group Global Witness, in a 2021 tally, found 54 land rights defenders murdered and 19 others disappeared. Guardian correspondents Analy Nuño and Nina Lakhani have just covered the latest deadly assault. We excerpt their reporting here. Relatives of two missing Mexican environmentalists are pointing the finger at a transnational mining company which they claim is responsible for environmental destruction and violence in the rural community and may have links to the criminals who abducted their loved ones. Ricardo Arturo Lagunes Gasca, a renowned human rights lawyer, and Antonio Díaz Valencia, leader of the Aquila Indigenous community in the state of Michoacán, were last seen on Sunday evening after attending an anti-mining community meeting. According to witnesses, the two activists were threatened and followed by several men in cars and motorbikes after they left the meeting in Aquila. Lagunes, 41, and Díaz, 71, were traveling in a white Honda pickup truck that was later found abandoned on the side of a highway riddled with bullets but no blood. “The hitmen were waiting for the right moment. They had threatened the teacher [Díaz] and the lawyer [Lagunes] in the past, and told us that there were five of us on their list. The hitmen were there watching on Sunday, they followed them on motorcycles and in cars and took them away,” said Miguel Jiménez a community member. The sister of the missing lawyer said: “We want to emphasize the possible responsibility of the mining company Ternium in ensuring that my brother Ricardo Lagunes and Professor Antonio Díaz reappear alive. “The company is one of the most powerful actors in the region, and its operations have not only affected the environment but also the social fabric, generating conflicts and violence. The company has relations with different local groups and possibly with the perpetrators of this disappearance. We call for a full investigation, and for the company to support us to find my brother and Antonio alive,” said Lucía Lagunes Gasca... Despite the conflicts and violence, anti-mining community activists have vowed to continue their struggle amid a surge in childhood diseases, water shortages, land erosion and deforestation. Jiménez said: “We are scared in this struggle, with fear that at any time another of us could be next. We need the government to get our colleagues back, otherwise the community groups will have to act.” |
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Recent news reports and commentaries, from progressive and mainstream media,
México’s 2023 elections: What’s at stake? Bnamericas. In this year’s June 4 gubernatorial elections in México state and Coahuila, Morena could take the last strongholds of the PRI.
Obed Rosas, García Luna no la tiene fácil: tiene procesos en México como para varios años preso, Sin Embargo. Mientras Genaro García Luna, el artífice de la guerra contra el narco de Felipe Calderón, se enfrenta a una condena máxima de cadena perpetua y una mínima de 20 años de prisión en EU, en México tiene distintas causas por diferentes delitos que se castigan hasta con 30 años de cárcel.
The 'Super Rich': 3 Myths That Mexico Needs To Bust, Nation World News. México’s three largest in the country consolidated during the 1980s and 1990s as a wave of privatizations hit banking, telecommunications, airports, and highways.
Cesó la DEA a director en México ligado a defensores de 'narcos', La Jornada. La Administración para el Control de Drogas de Estados Unidos (DEA) destituyó silenciosamente a su principal funcionario en México el año pasado por sus contactos inapropiados con abogados de narcotraficantes.
Kevin Sieff, A cemetery in México for U.S. ‘invaders’ points to complicated history, Washington Post. The United States has invaded Mexico at least 10 times since 1806. In 2020, Donald Trump reportedly considered an 11th.
El INE acuerda presentar “todo recurso jurídico al alcance” en contra de la reforma electoral de AMLO, Animal Politic. El consejero presidente del instituto, Lorenzo Córdova, ordenó al secretario ejecutivo impugnar el llamado “plan B” que impulsaron el gobierno y Morena.
Alina Ramos Martin, México: 1.5 billion dollars in Peña Nieto’s government still missing, Prensa Latina. Irregularities so far revealed constitute an embezzlement of almost 30 billion pesos during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, property damages that continue without denunciation and without punishment.
José Miguel Calderón, España… ¿refugio para expresidentes mexicanos? sdpnoticias. El refugio para expresidentes mexicanos en España, podrían recrudecer las tensiones entre los gobiernos del país europeo y México.
México hails its capital's growing popularity among expats, France24. The average daily homicides in México City, home to 9 million people, have dropped from five to under two.
Ebrard pidió ocultar el acuerdo migratorio con Trump "Quédate en México", revela Mike Pompeo, Proceso. "Me importa un bledo, lo que sea que te ayude a nivel interno, eso depende de ti", dijo el secretario de Estado del gobierno de Donald Trump al canciller mexicano, de acuerdo con el libro de memorias “Never give an inch”. |
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The Mexico Solidarity Project brings together activists from various socialist and left organizations and individuals committed to worker and global justice who see the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of México as a watershed moment. AMLO and his progressive Morena party aim to end generations of corruption, impoverishment, and subservience to US interests. Our Project supports not just Morena, but all Mexicans struggling for basic rights, and opposes US efforts to undermine organizing and México’s national sovereignty.
Editorial committee: Meizhu Lui, Bruce Hobson, Bill Gallegos, Sam Pizzigati, Courtney Childs, Victoria Hamlin, Agatha Hinman, Steven Hollis, Daniel McCool, Betty Forrester. To give feedback or get involved yourself, please email us! |
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Web page and application support for the México Solidarity Project from NOVA Web Development, a democratically run, worker-owned and operated cooperative focused on developing free software tools for progressive organizations. |