May 1993

Energy Policy Under NAFTA

by David Lapp

The Hard Sell

Mexico Lobbies for NAFTA

by Nadav Savio

Editorial

Side Tracked

The Front

Challenging Guatamala’s Labor Abuses

Interview

The Power of Organizing: Securing Farmworkers’ Rights

An Interview with Baldemar Velasquez

Labor

Manufacturing Poverty: The Maquiladorization of Mexico

by Dan LaBotz

Guest Column

NAFTA’s Grim Harvest: Free Trade and Sustainable Agriculture

by Mark Ritchie

Video Review

Stepan Chemical: The Poisoning of a Mexican Community

by Holley Knaus

Names in the News

Resources

Remembering Cesar Chavez

THE DEATH OF CESAR CHAVEZ is a devastating loss for those who loved and worked with him, for the millions who labor on U.S. farms and vineyards, and for millions more whose lives were changed by his example.

He leaves behind a profound legacy. For Chavez, La Causa was a life- long commitment to which he gave his last ounce of energy every day. The movement for farm worker justice and the United Farm Workers Union that he built stand as a testament to his dedication. Through the work of Cesar Chavez, entire generations of farm workers have been taught how to stand up for their rights.

Thirty-one years ago, when Chavez first started organizing farmworkers, he knew the struggle would be arduous. Many farmworker supporters and advocates were beaten, jailed and killed while speaking out for justice in the 1960s and 1970s. But the movement won fair pay and living conditions for many farmworkers and their families and medical and pension benefits for many migrant workers. Its efforts also led to bans on the use of many toxic pesticides, including DDT.

Tragically, over the past 12 years, many of the gains farmworker activists struggled so hard to achieve have been reversed. Workers have suffered an outrageous decline in agricultural law enforcement and safety and health. A new group of cancer- causing pesticides threaten not only consumer health, but farmworkers’ lives.

Despite the protracted campaign by Chavez and the United Farm Workers to bring the plight of U.S. farmworkers to the attention of the media, there is still widespread public disbelief as to the extent of exploitation suffered by farmworkers. Workers toil for poverty wages. Farmwork includes the largest single child labor force in the United States, with children as young as seven and eight working full days alongside their parents. Pesticides endanger the lives of farmworker families.

These obstacles failed to destroy the spirit of Cesar Chavez and the movement for farmworker justice. His vision, guided by an unflagging belief in the dignity of all people, remains. That principle, which has guided the work of the United Farm Workers in the past, will continue to feed the union’s commitment to farmworkers.

As Chavez said in 1984, "Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. ... And [as] you cannot do away with an entire people, you cannot stamp out a people’s cause. Regardless of what the future holds for our union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone."

IP Lies Exposed

The ruling finds in favor of the United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU), affirming federal district court judge Charles Brieant’s August 1992 ruling that IP management had lied to stockholders in order to defeat a resolution calling on the company to comply with the Valdez Principles, a set of environmental standards intended to be independently and externally monitored.

In recommending that shareholders vote against the proposal, which was put forth by the Presbyterian Church at a May 1992 meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, IP wrote in its proxy that the company has "a longstanding commitment to the protection of the environment" and that "environmental stewardship has always been an important part of IP’s business."

The union sued IP in federal court to force another vote on the resolution and to make certain shareholders receive accurate information, explains Mark Brooks, UPIU special projects director. In its complaint, the UPIU cited a history of environmental infractions committed by IP, including five felony convictions in July 1991 for lying to federal and state regulators and for unlawful hazardous waste disposal at IP’s Androscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine.

Brieant wrote in his decision, "The total impression conveyed by the board’s glib response to the proposal is that the company is a model of environmental rectitude. Nowhere in any of these materials is there even bare acknowledgement that the company has had its share of difficulties in this area."

The judge concluded that IP management’s response to the Valdez proposal was a "calculated attempt to mislead the shareholders and induce them to cast a negative vote; rather than portraying [the company’s environmental] record accurately, or remaining silent, it chose to engage in flowery corporate happy-talk in order to defeat the proposal."

"It’s amazing that IP would try to mislead both its shareholders and the federal courts," says Brooks. "The Second Circuit has now made certain IP’s shareholders will know management lied to them last year."

International Paper failed to answer Multinational Monitor’s questions regarding the court’s decision.

Demanding Justice

The letters’ 79 signatories requested input into the formulation of policy and appointments of regional staff of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Energy, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, Education and Agriculture.

"Justice demands an end to the poisoning of our communities," appeal the letter’s signers, who point out that 60 percent of all U.S. hazardous waste or toxic-emitting facilities are located in or adjacent to communities of color, and that 65 percent of U.S. commercial hazardous waste is dumped in the South.

"Medical care and life-time health monitoring for those who are sick and dying, compensation from those who poisoned us, and relocation to clean communities when needed, must be a significant part of the Administration’s environmental agenda. ... Anything less would be immoral," the letter states.

"People in our communities are suffering from cancers. Children along the Mexican border are being born with no brains. Mexican communities in California are located on top of pesticide dumps," says Richard Moore, director of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. "Clearly these are urgent problems that cannot wait months or years to be addressed. We believe that not only do we have a right to meet with the administration, but that President Clinton has a responsibility to meet with leaders of our choice."

Remembering the Massacre

The Bangladeshi army carried out the massacre as part of a protracted government attempt to force the Buddhist peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to convert to Islam. Over the last 20 years, government policies of moving settlers from the Bangladeshi plains has robbed thousands of Jummas of their lands, where 50,000 military personnel are stationed. Jumma villages are tightly controlled by the military, who, according to Aditi Sharma, Asia campaigns officer for Survival International, rape, murder and torture villagers almost daily.

"The pressure in beginning to have an effect," says Sharma, who has led the monthly vigils at the High Commission in coalition with other human rights, indigenous and Buddhist advocacy activists to foster public awareness of the tragedy. Although Bangladeshi High Commissioner Dr. A.F.M. Yusuf continues to "reiterate the official death toll of only 13 people, he met with us for over an hour" at the April 8 memorial vigil, Sharma says. "He even began referring to the massacre, rather than calling it an ‘incident’ as he had previously."

The Bangladeshi Embassy did not respond to questions about the massacre or Jumma land rights.n

- Julie Gozan

Since the Clinton administration has refused to re-open the NAFTA negotiations to allow standards protections to be incorporated into the actual protocol, the agreement’s critics are focusing their efforts on strengthening supplemental or "side" agreements to the pact as a means of protecting workers, consumers and the environment. This is a serious strategic error.

The NAFTA critics have pegged the key problems with the trade pact, pointing out that it will:

o cost 500,000 U.S. jobs, as U.S. corporations move plants south to take advantage of low-wage Mexican labor;

o hurt Mexican workers, whose jobs will be contingent on their acceptance of low wages (currently set at about 50 cents an hour), dangerous working conditions and repression of independent trade unions;

o encourage U.S. and Canadian companies to relocate to Mexico to evade the stricter environmental regulation and enforcement of their home countries;

o exacerbate the problems of the extremely polluted U.S.-Mexico border region, which is already thoroughly contaminated as a result of the contempt U.S. companies participating in the Mexican maquiladora (export assembly plant) program have shown for the environment; and

o enable national governments to challenge other countries’ stringent local and national environment, health, worker safety and food purity standards as "non-tariff barriers to trade."

Instead of fighting the trade agreement, however, many environmental and labor advocates are directing their efforts to putting some teeth into the side agreements.

In a May 5 letter to U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, a coalition of major U.S. environmental organizations detailed their demands for the environmental side agreement: the establishment of a North American Commission on the Environment (NACE); assurances that NACE decisions would be backed up by government dispute settlement procedures, possibly including trade sanctions; funding for border clean-up; and substantive public participation in debating environmental issues under NAFTA. The coalition, made up of Defenders of Wildlife, the World Wildlife Fund, the Audobon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Council, went so far as to pledge its support for NAFTA if its proposals are incorporated into the environmental side agreement.

By pushing for stronger side agreements, NAFTA critics are setting the stage for ultimately accepting a fundamentally flawed trade strategy.

First, it is not enough to include progressive labor and environmental standards either in the trade pact or in side agreements. Mexico already has tough standards, but they are widely ignored, and the Mexican government does not make any serious effort to enforce them.

Second, it is essentially a foregone conclusion that the would-be enforcers of side agreements - trilateral environmental and labor commissions made up of government officials from all three countries - will hold little power. Although negotiators have not yet released working drafts of the supplemental agreements, the Mexican government has already made it clear that it opposes the creation of any commission that would challenge national sovereignty.

Third, lobbying for side agreements is a serious tactical error. It sends a message to the Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress that NAFTA opponents accept the basic elements of a U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade deal, but that they want some changes made along the margin. That sets up NAFTA supporters to make some minor concessions to critics and thereby buy off their opposition.

Fourth, and more broadly, there are inherent problems with the concept of free trade that cannot be cured - by side agreements or otherwise. Free trade inevitably exerts a sharp downward pressure on social standards by enabling companies to pit country against country in a race to set the lowest wage levels or the lowest environmental standards.

This is especially true for free trade between countries at vastly different levels of industrial development. There is simply no way, for example, to raise Mexican wages to the level of the United States in even the medium term - and that guarantees corporations will shift production to Mexico or demand that U.S. wage levels drop to the Mexican level.

Additionally, the notion of promoting trade implies a global centralization of commerce that is environmentally and democratically unsound. No one denies the necessity of international trade and commerce. But societies need to focus their attention on fostering community-oriented production. Smaller-scale operations are more flexible and adaptable to environmentally sustainable production methods; production for local rather than distant markets saves significant amounts of energy spent on transportation; and locally rooted firms are more susceptible to democratic controls - they are less likely to threaten to migrate and they may perceive an overlap between their interests and those of the general community.

NAFTA’s critics should call for an outright rejection of the trade pact. If the coalition of citizen groups critical of NAFTA worked to tap into the deep public opposition to the agreement, it might be able to persuade the U.S. Congress to vote it down. In focusing attention on the side agreements, NAFTA critics are putting themselves on the sidelines for the critical debate over the trade deal.

IF ANY COUNTRY IN THE HEMISPHERE were to be held up as a model of economic inequity and social injustice, Guatemala would surely fit the bill. Seventy percent of Guatemala’s arable land is owned by 2 percent of the population. A substantial portion of the country’s population does not own enough land to subsist without migrating to Guatemala’s southern coast to pick cotton or cut sugar cane. These workers at Guatemala’s fincas, or plantations, are forced to labor under unbearable conditions. Union organizing is met with layoffs, "disappearances" and death squad killings. It is common practice for land owners to spray fields with dangerous pesticides as they are being worked. And the average wage is only $1-2 a day, far below the $56 a week necessary to keep the average family of five just above the poverty level. Most finca workers come from Guatemala’s indigenous communities, which lose approximately 20 percent of their children to hunger or disease before the age of five.

While the U.S. government has long overlooked the country’s labor rights abuses, international workers’ rights advocates hope that the United States will finally sanction Guatemala for its record: in August 1992, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) placed the country’s eligibility to receive U.S. trade benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) under review, meaning that those benefits could soon be suspended. Established under the 1974 U.S. Trade and Tariff Act, the GSP program grants developing countries the right to export certain goods to the United States duty-free. Congress amended the Act in 1984 to require that countries receiving GSP benefits respect international labor standards - the right to association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, prohibition against compulsory labor, minimum wage for the employment of children and regulations governing minimum wages, hours of work and occupational safety and health.

The United States is Guatemala’s largest export market. In 1991, Guatemala exported approximately $900 million worth of goods to the United States; a substantial portion of those exports, $220 million, received preferential treatment under the GSP. According to Stephen Coats, executive director of the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project (U.S./GLEP), the decision to place Guatemala under review, or ultimately to suspend GSP benefits, is an important step in pressuring the government and private sector to respect labor rights: "U.S. companies are increasingly being held accountable for the working conditions in the factories and on the plantations from which they purchase goods for the U.S. market. ... If Guatemala fails to respect basic worker rights, it will increasingly find U.S. investment going elsewhere and will find ever-increasing efforts to deny Guatemala access to the U.S. market."

GSP regulation allows any interested party to petition the USTR’s GSP subcommittee to review the status of any country eligible for benefits on the basis of the country’s labor rights record. Once a country is selected for review, the subcommittee then conducts its own investigation of labor conditions and decides whether or not the country will continue to receive GSP privileges. In the past, the subcommittee has suspended the Central African Republic , Chile , Nicaragua , Paraguay and Romania from the program. Guatemala’s atrocious human rights record, probably the worst in the hemisphere, has made that country an obvious candidate for cutoff of benefits, but the subcommittee has refused to investigate Guatemala’s labor rights abuses for six consecutive years despite repeated appeals by labor and human rights organizations.

Since the late 1980s, petitioners have been rebuffed by the GSP subcommittee with arguments that made a mockery of the hearing process. In 1991, for example, the International Labor Rights and Education Fund (ILRERF), along with other labor and human rights organizations, filed a petition. The subcommittee refused to acknowledge that Guatemalan trade unionists were being targeted with death threats, torture and assassinations as a result of their labor activity, facts which were well documented by human rights organizations.

According to the Guatemala Bulletin, a quarterly human rights report put out by the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/U.S.A., government-sponsored violence remained staggeringly high in 1991. The Bulletin notes that 1991 was "unquestionably the bloodiest [year] since the start of civilian rule in 1986. ... Tensions increased between the government and labor and popular movements, when several thousand state workers were laid off and other unpopular measures were taken to restructure the economy according to a neo-liberal model. When unions resisted, several of their leaders were killed or arrested. Others were forced into hiding or exile."

Even the U.S. State Department, in its 1990 Human Rights Report, was critical of the Guatemalan government. But the GSP subcommittee, in justifying its decision to deny the 1991 petition, used this report selectively, quoting that "the motive behind many of the abuses seems to be the belief that the victims were somehow supportive of or sympathetic to the guerillas." The Guatemalan government has for years attempted to discredit social activists by claiming they are somehow tied to Central America’s rebel movement.

A key factor in the subcommittee’s failure to recognize Guatemala’s terrible labor rights record was the role of the former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, Thomas Strook. In 1991, Strook urged the GSP subcommittee not to place Guatemala under review. He told the subcommittee and labor representatives that he wanted to give the newly installed administration of President Elias Serrano a year to show improvements in labor rights. Serrano is closely linked to the former president General Rios Montt, whose regime massacred tens of thousands of civilians in the early 1980s. Predictably, the Serrano regime did nothing in 1991 to make improvements.

In August 1992, however, the GSP subcommittee made a dramatic about face, agreeing to place the country under review. The process usually takes one year, at which time the country is either removed from review and further scrutiny, placed under extended review for additional investigation or has its trade benefits revoked.

The subcommittee made the decision to review Guatemala’s labor rights record following a highly successful congressional lobbying campaign by human rights groups, including U.S./GLEP, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/U.S.A., the Central America Working Group and ILRERF. Seventy-one House members signed on to a July 1992 letter from Representatives Jim Moody, D-Wisconsin, and the late Representative Ted Weiss, D-New York, to then-USTR Carla Hills, urging action on Guatemala; eight senators signed on to a similar letter from Senator James Jeffords, R-Vermont, and three more senators wrote letters of their own.

The House letter states that the 1992 petition, co-filed by 10 labor organizations, "amply documents violations of the internationally recognized worker rights defined in U.S. law, including freedom of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the prohibition against child labor and the right to acceptable conditions with respect to a fair wage and adequate worker safety standards. It also raises concerns about the complicity of U.S. companies in these violations. ... The repression is so effective that there is not a single active union in the maquila [factories which manufacture solely for export] sector." [See Made in Guatemala: Union Busting in the Maquiladoras," Multinational Monitor, November 1991 and Zones of Exploitation: Korean Investment in Guatemala," Multinational Monitor, December 1992 ].

When the GSP subcommittee accepted the 1992 petition for review in June, the Guatemalan government took action on a few high-profile labor disputes. For the first time in 40 years, the Guatemalan Congress made some changes in the national labor code, including the authorization of slightly higher fines for breaking labor laws and the imposition of a requirement that the Ministry of Labor respond to petitions for the formation of labor unions within 30 days as opposed to the previous time-frame of 60 days. But these changes are largely meaningless since the original regulations have never been respected by the private sector or the government.

More significant were concessions to workers who have sought to organize unions at two textile factories. Unionists who were illegally fired at the U.S.-owned Inexport textile maquila in 1988 were finally reinstated in 1992. The workers - all of whom were women - were fired for their union activities and then fought back publicly to assert their legal rights. They held regular vigils and set up a shack in front of the plant to draw attention to their cause. The police destroyed the shack, and police and company managers physically attacked union activists. The company rehired 27 women after the subcommittee decided to go forward with the review process.

And, for the first time in six years, a union in the maquila sector, at Phillips-Van Heusen (PVH), was legally recognized by the Guatemalan government. Workers at two PVH textile maquilas have been fighting to gain union recognition since 1991. U.S./GLEP has been leading an international effort on behalf of the PVH workers, and has documented PVH’s tactics: these have included attempts to bribe union leaders, firings, threats to close the plants and personal harassment, as well as the attempted murder of one of the union organizers. Only weeks after the GSP subcommittee put Guatemala under review, the government legally recognized the union at PVH. Currently there are 400 maquila factories with a workforce of 60,000. Only two of these factories are unionized.

Nevertheless, Phillips-Van Heusen continues its tactics of intimidation. According to U.S./GLEP, union members at one factor were recently branded as "communists" by the plant director, personnel manager and two line supervisors. Union members were reportedly told that "communists sometimes have to go into exile." U.S./GLEP’s Coats says, "Such charges are extremely dangerous in Guatemala, and are interpreted by right- wing forces as a license to kill." According to Coats, in September 1991 a PVH union leader was shot by unknown assailants following a summer of alleged death threats by a PVH supervisor. PVH has also been threatening to leave Guatemala altogether because the workforce has been unionized.

Yet the possible cutoff of GSP benefits has forced the Guatemalan government to address labor and human rights issues in a public forum. The tariff issue has struck a sensitive nerve in the Guatemalan business community and has exerted considerable pressure on the government to demonstrate some regard for the lives of Guatemalan workers.

Labor rights petitioners are pushing for a six-month extension of the review process to pressure the Guatemalan government and the private sector to make substantial improvements. The subcommittee is expected to reach a decision concerning Guatemala’s status in May.

Pharis Harvey, executive director of ILRERF, pointed out in October 1992 testimony before the GSP subcommittee that "there has been progress of sorts. What is most noticeable however, is that it has been directly and proportionately in response to the possibility, the threat, and then the actuality of a review of the country’s GSP status. One can only speculate what the labor rights situation in Guatemala might be today if this committee had accepted the petitions we first filed seven years ago."

Energy Policy under NAFTA

by David Lapp

ALTHOUGH THEY COMPRISE ONLY 12 of more than 2,000 pages of text, the energy provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represent a serious threat to the environment and energy security of Mexico , Canada and the United States. To the benefit of multinational energy companies, implementation of NAFTA’s energy chapter will stifle the development of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency. Multinational energy companies will be able to exploit Mexican and Canadian natural resources to satisfy the unsustainable energy appetite of the United States, while the governments of Mexico and Canada will be prevented from limiting or placing levies on energy exports to protect the interests of their citizens.

"The continent’s energy resources have immense strategic importance for the United States," explains John Dillon of the Toronto-based Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice. "U.S. geopolitical interests demand that Mexico and Canada concede substantial control over energy as a price for a broad trade agreement."

When the agreement was announced last August, then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins declared that "the agreement will promote the rapid deployment of new, more efficient energy technologies that promise to enhance environmental quality." The words "energy efficiency" are found nowhere in the text of the NAFTA agreement, however. "There is no recognition that energy savings is a resource on par with new generation," says Ken Stump, a Greenpeace consultant. "There is no recognition or acknowledgment of the huge economic as well as environmental benefits of developing the demand-side resource [efficiency] over the supply-side resource."

Instead, NAFTA is skewed to protect the big energy companies’ interest in expanding energy production. If the agreement lives up to its drafters’ expectations, it will certainly hinder the expansion of efficiency and conservation.

"NAFTA will encourage growth in fuels trade and will expand opportunities for U.S. investment in electricity generation. Sweeping reform in petrochemicals offers access to a range of world-scale petrochemical investments," says an August 1992 Bush administration statement. "While crude oil represents the largest component of our trinational energy trade, refined oil products, petrochemicals, natural gas, electricity and coal trade are also significant and are expected to expand."

"The implications [of NAFTA] are for the U.S. to continue to consume the huge quantities of fossil fuels it has in the past," says Carol Alexander, a consultant to Greenpeace, and co-author with Stump of A Greenpeace Report: The North American Free Trade Agreement and Energy Trade. The agreement will "shoulder out efficiency and renewables from the global marketplace, create resource colonies out of Mexico and Canada and inflict our habits on their energy marketplace," she says. Further, the environmental costs of exploration and development of fossil fuels to be consumed in the United States will be shifted to Canada and to Mexico, where environmental regulations are weak and enforcement is lax.

Eyeing Mexico

U.S. companies have eyed Mexico’s rich energy reserves for a long time - since March 18, 1938, when Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, capitalizing on widespread disenchantment with foreign oil companies, nationalized the country’s electricity and petroleum assets and expelled foreign companies. Cárdenas’s constitutional reforms established that foreign "concessions and contracts [for petroleum and hydrocarbons] will not be granted, and those that have been granted will no longer subsist, and the Nation will carry out the development of these products."

To this day, oil remains a sensitive area of U.S./Mexico relations, and March 18 is still celebrated as a national "Day of Dignity." While there is considerable debate over the amount of oil reserves that exist in Mexico, a January 1991 Mexican government estimate put the figure at 45 billion barrels of crude oil that would last for 50 years. TheOil and Gas Journal says that Mexico has the eighth largest amount of oil reserves in the world.

NAFTA appears to set the stage for the return of U.S. companies to a prominent, and maybe preeminent, position in the Mexican energy industry. U.S. oil companies "were asking for access to the upstream, in terms of being able to invest in oil and gas resources in Mexico," says Ed Porter of the American Petroleum Institute. Porter calls NAFTA’s energy provisions "very vague" but says they "could mean essentially what we had hoped for."

In anticipation of the free trade agreement, the Salinas government has already undertaken a series of reforms to make Mexico more attractive to foreign investors. In 1992, for example, Salinas announced that 70,000 workers would be laid off as part of a reorganization of Mexico's national oil company PEMEX into a holding company with four semi- autonomous divisions. The government will have less control over each division, which will be freer to enter into contracts with foreign interests.

"The restructuring of PEMEX is certainly a move in a positive direction," says API’s Porter. "It will give the operating units a little bit more flexibility to do things that are in cooperation with some of the international companies."

The Mexican government has also opened its petrochemical industry to foreign investment. "We think the agreement will be a boon to our industry," says Owen Kean of the Chemical Manufacturers Association, characterizing the trade association’s support for NAFTA as "very active."

Under Mexican law, petrochemicals are categorized either as "basics," which cannot be owned by foreign investors, or "secondaries," which are restricted to 40 percent ownership by foreign investors. Last year the Salinas government reduced the number of "basic" petrochemicals from 16 to eight (a decade ago the number was over 100). Some of the basics were recategorized as secondaries, the total of which has been reduced to 13 petrochemicals. "None of the products that are now in the list of basics were reported as exports by PEMEX in 1990; all [petrochemical exports] are now secondaries or deregulated," explains Antonio Gerhenson, a Mexican academic and a former official of the nuclear electrical workers union.

NAFTA will further loosen restrictions related to investment and contracts with the state-owned electric and petroleum companies. Under the agreement, U.S. and Canadian companies will be able to bid on Mexican service contracts for electricity (with the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, or CFE) and petroleum services. When the agreement goes into effect on January 1, 1994, 50 percent of the contracts are reserved for Mexican companies, but this percentage decreases incrementally to zero in 2003.

Mexican environmentalists and critics of the conservative Salinas government argue that NAFTA’s energy provisions violate the public interest as well as the Mexican constitution. "NAFTA tends to liberalize and open to foreign investment areas that our Constitution categorizes as strategic, like petroleum and electricity," Gerhenson asserts. Gerhenson rejects the argument that the Mexican energy industry needs private and foreign investment to increase exploration or to modernize its equipment.

"The technological arguments are only pretexts because in fact petrochemical technology requires only more equipment, which PEMEX has bought time and time again, of its own power and through the Mexican Institute of Petroleum," he contends. "The other pretext, the need for investment, is also more than questionable. Past privatizations have given place to marginal private investment, the equivalent of 3 percent of PEMEX’s petrochemical production."

NAFTA will also loosen restrictions on foreign investment in electricity generation in Mexico. It explicitly allows U.S. companies to build generating facilities in Mexico and transmit that power across the border. A separate provision allows U.S. companies to build power plants in Mexico to meet their own power needs or to sell electricity in Mexico through CFE. Gerhenson says this provision "violates Mexican law, since the object of the generation is providing electricity, although it is through the intermediate of CFE."

Energy vs. the environment

Continental free trade in energy is likely to interfere seriously with the efforts of environmentalists to promote energy efficiency and cleaner energy production. First, despite the alleged "free trade" goal of eliminating government interventions in the marketplace, NAFTA specifically authorizes governments to subsidize oil and gas exploration and development. Government subsidies to fossil fuel development make fossil fuels artificially more attractive to energy investors and consumers and divert funds away from energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. Moreover, most new oil and gas exploration and development will occur in Mexico and Canada, meaning Mexican and Canadian citizens will be subsidizing the price of energy for U.S. consumers.

Second, the lack of any mention of energy conservation or efficiency could affect efforts already underway to reduce power consumption in the United States. Since NAFTA proposes that Canada, Mexico and the United States "make compatible their respective standards-related measures, so as to facilitate trade in a good or service," any party that perceives any regulation to be a trade barrier can challenge that regulation before a dispute resolution panel that operates in tight secrecy, without public input.

"I’m particularly concerned about the potential threat of the free trade agreements to the least-cost planning reform and environmental cost initiatives because they conceivably could be perceived as trade barriers," says Greenpeace’s Stump.

For example, if Massachusetts passes proposed legislation that would apply U.S. environmental standards to all power purchases, including Hydro-Quebec’s massive James Bay hydroproject [see The James Bay Disaster," Multinational Monitor, December 1991 ], Canada might challenge that law as a non-tariff trade barrier. Further, under a clause called "non-violation impairments," NAFTA allows challenges to environmental and consumer protection standards even if they do not violate NAFTA rules, provided the country believes that it has missed an economic "benefit it could reasonably have expected to accrue to it."

"There is so much gray area here that it’s really hard to know what the outcome will be," explains Stump.

Third, environmentalists fear that unrestricted trade and investment will enable companies to circumvent U.S. environmental standards by producing energy in Mexico for sale in the United States.

So while Doug Turner, a program advisor for international trade with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, says the improved opportunities for cross-border electricity trade under NAFTA will bring "environmental advantages because we generally produce cleaner electricity," environmentalists believe these advantages will prove elusive.

Environmentalists say U.S. companies operating south of the border will have little incentive to follow U.S. environmental regulations. For example, a company that builds a coal plant in Mexico would accrue substantial savings by not having to abide by U.S. emissions standards, allowing it to sell its power more cheaply than if it generated electricity within the United States.

Further, a U.S. utility could conceivably buy power from its own subsidiary operating in Mexico and reap huge profits or pass down the savings to ratepayers in the United States. "The losers would be the people who have to breathe the air in Mexico - and the global climate," says Lynn Fischer of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Fourth, NAFTA may encourage the Mexican government to foster increased use of nuclear energy. Jose Arias Chavez, a professor at the National University of Mexico and the communications and energy coordinator for the Pacto de Grupos Ecologistas, notes that the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora has suggested building a nuclear power plant "in the desert" to generate electricity for export to the United States. The agreement also "leaves the possibility of harm from the traffic and business of dangerous nuclear wastes like those from nuclear power plants, with Mexico acting as the repository," Chavez warns.

Undermining environment and society

NAFTA’s short energy section exemplifies the dangers posed by the treaty: the undermining of national environmental and social standards and the infringement of national sovereignty. Limitations on multinational corporate power are defined as impediments to free trade, but government interventions that benefit these companies are allowed.

The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement provides insights into what can be expected to result from NAFTA. The evisceration of Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) due to the U.S.-Canada trade deal encapsulates NAFTA’s broad reach. After examining a number of natural gas projects being developed by several U.S. companies, the NEB determined the projects would provide no net benefit to Canada and rejected the companies’ applications for export licenses. The companies appealed the ruling, arguing that the NEB’s cost-benefit analysis was, in effect, a price test that violated the free- market intent of the Free Trade Agreement. In the end, the NEB conceded that its cost/benefit analysis might violate the Free Trade Agreement, and, rather than risking potential arbitration, it backed down.

Dillon explains in an upcoming book entitled The Political Economy of North American Free Trade that before the deregulatory measures of the free trade agreement were implemented, "the NEB applied a ‘surplus test’ requiring that minimum supplies of nonrenewable hydrocarbons be available for Canadians before sanctioning exports. However, under [the trade agreement] the NEB has been reduced to a monitoring agency with limited ability to restrict exports."

Opponents of NAFTA argue that the energy industry plays too central a role in the economies of all three signatory countries - the United States, Mexico and Canada - for governments to substantially forfeit their rights to regulate it. Chavez recommends that the proposed agreement be rejected: "The compromises constitute a certain obstacle to the future energy independence and to exercising our energy sovereignty."

Mexico Lobbies for NAFTA

by Nadav Savio

SUPPORTERS OF THE PROPOSED U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement promise that the treaty will be a boon to U.S. companies. The only discernable increase in business so far, however, has taken place in the U.S. public relations and lobbying industry, in which the Mexican government has invested millions in a campaign to push the free trade agreement past popular opposition.

Over the past several years, as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has made its way through a negotiation process marked by controversy and secrecy, and has faced an increasingly skeptical and hostile U.S. public, the Mexican government has joined U.S. corporate proponents of the treaty in waging a massive public relations and lobbying campaign in U.S. history. A Multinational Monitor review of records on file at the Department of Justice reveal the Mexican government has added at least $10 million to a pro-NAFTA corporate war chest of tens of millions of dollars.

The effort by the Mexican government and its corporate allies to control the terms of U.S. public debate over NAFTA is all the more significant because of the "fast-track" procedure by which the U.S. Congress will vote on the trade pact. Under fast-track, adopted in 1991, Congress must vote up or down on the voluminous agreement and its implementing legislation - with no amendments permitted - within 60 to 90 days of their legislative introduction. Formal floor debate is limited to 20 hours. Because Congress has precluded itself from engaging in a critical and thorough analysis and investigation of the likely effects of NAFTA, only an outraged and mobilized U.S. public is likely to be able to derail the trade deal.

Free trade pushers

Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), firms and individuals representing foreign parties, such as corporations or governments, must register with the United States Department of Justice. They must include copies of their contracts, descriptions of services to be performed and copies of any information which is disseminated on behalf of the clients, including letters, news releases, pamphlets, videotapes and press kits. FARA records are public documents, and form the basis of this article; unidentified quotations are from FARA documents.

Unfortunately, the act is so weakly worded and enforced that FARA records are far from exhaustive. "Those records are a joke," laments Charles Lewis, founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a group which monitors ethics in government. As a result, it is only possible to estimate the minimum amount the Mexican government has paid public relations, lobbying and law firms. Even so, the amount is staggering, easily topping $5 million per year since 1991. Mexican Embassy officials declined to provide Multinational Monitor with an official tally.

At the center of the Mexican government’s network of hired guns is the public relations (PR) giant Burson-Marsteller . The firm earned fees of $3,989,320 in 1991 and $3,855,996 last year from the Mexican Ministry of Commerce and Industrial Development (SECOFI) alone. Its current SECOFI contract runs through the end of 1993, but has yet to be filed with the Justice Department. Burson-Marsteller also has two separate accounts with the Mexican government, earning well over a total of $1 million from the Office of the President and the Ministry of Fisheries for NAFTA-related work. To secure passage of the agreement, Burson- Marsteller has prepared numerous reports, press releases and video news releases. When officials of the global General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) upheld Mexico’s challenge to the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act in August 1991, sparking public outrage, Burson-Marsteller immediately issued press and video releases proclaiming Mexico’s commitment to dolphin protection. Generally, the company’s public relations transmissions have focused on jobs, the environment and support for NAFTA among Latino Americans. Burson-Marsteller has targeted newspapers, radio and TV stations, civic groups, public officials, press services, educational institutions and industry groups for dissemination of pro-NAFTA information.

The Mexican government hired Burson-Marsteller "basically to help get their [the Mexican government’s pro-NAFTA] message out," the firm’s senior vice president Richard Moore told Multinational Monitor. Critics, however, see the coordinated public relations campaign as more a distortion than a simple "message."

"There should not be a need to have an elaborate construction of smoke and mirrors and grassroots fifty-state campaigns," warns Lewis. "There becomes a political question ... [about] the process itself and whether it’s being distorted."

In addition to Burson-Marsteller, SECOFI has hired several regional public relations firms, targeting key border states in the U.S. Southwest. Campos Communications, Inc. , which operates out of Houston, has worked closely with Burson-Marsteller in disseminating prepared pamphlets and news releases throughout Texas, as well as "discuss[ing] the Free Trade Agreement with various civic, political and business groups." SECOFI paid Campos Communications approximately $278,000 in fees and expenses in 1992. Moya, Villanueva & Associates has performed a similar role in California. Employing seven public relations workers to "Contact business re: voicing NAFTA support to Congressional representatives," "Position NAFTA with media," "Coordinate speaking opportunities for supporters of NAFTA," and "Produce and distribute news releases and prepare briefing packages," among other activities, Moya, Villanueva earned at least $600,000 from the Mexican government in 1992. SECOFI has also hired two former governors of New Mexico, Toney Anaya and Jerry Apodaca, to hold meetings and seminars with "ethnic and racial minority groups, workers, environmentalists and other interest groups ... and help mobilize the support of those interests in Congress for the passage of a final Free Trade Agreement."

Distorting the debate

Citizens’ groups maintain that the Mexican government’s vast lobbying campaign distorts the debate on the agreement. A case in point involves a Princeton University study examining the relationship between different countries’ per-capita income and their relative levels of air pollution. Cited by both Burson-Marsteller officials and the Mexican government’s press kits as evidence that NAFTA will raise - not lower - environmental standards in Mexico, the study has been cited in major newspaper articles. A February 25, 1992 San Francisco Chronicle article, (included in a separate Mexican government press kit on the environment), for example, reported that the study by economists Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger "indicates that by enriching Mexico, the regional free-trade zone would heighten that country’s sensitivity to the environment and give it the resources to manage critical pollution problems." The study was cited three months later in a May 2 Chronicle opinion piece by California Governor Pete Wilson as strong evidence that "free trade is simply the best way to ensure sustainable development for developing nations."

No mention in news reports is made of the conditions under which the study was commissioned and presented. The study appears to be an independent, academic assessment of the probable effects of a NAFTA on environmental conditions in Mexico.

The Monitor learned, however, that the study was commissioned for a conference on NAFTA held at Brown University and funded by SECOFI. "If you trace it back, that’s where the money came from," Grossman acknowledges. Peter Garber, the Brown University professor of economics who first proposed the conference to SECOFI, told the Monitor that SECOFI paid participating academics’ transportation costs to Brown as well as giving them stipends. According to Garber, the conference was held and participants selected as "simply a way of getting at a lot of [hemispheric trade] issues that had not yet really been studied." Burson-Marsteller’s Moore ridiculed suggestions that SECOFI may have influenced the studies, telling the Monitor that direct interference is unneccessary. "It’s more a matter of wading through the studies that are already out there," said Moore. "You name it, and you can find your study going in any direction you want it to go," he said. Mexican trade officials declined to comment either on the conference or on SECOFI funding of academic projects in general.

Similarly, Burson-Marsteller has prepared a slick press kit entitled "A Better Mexico; a Better Environment," which includes fact sheets, favorable press clippings (including mention of the Grossman/Krueger study), and an attractive brochure proclaiming Mexico’s commitment to cleaning up the border maquiladora zone. Such cosmetic attention to the very real environmental problems facing Mexico, critics say, typifies the country’s approach to such issues. Despite the Mexican government’s assurances of increasing enforcement, compliance with Mexico’s relatively strict environmental regulations remains low. Even by the government’s own estimate, highlighted in its press kit, only slightly more than half of all maquiladora facilities "comply with [their] operating licenses." (The maquilas are manufacturing plants located along the U.S.-Mexico border which produce solely for export; they have been widely cited by NAFTA critics as examples of the environmental and labor problems which would accompany the proposed free trade agreement.) Primitivo Rodriguez, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Mexico - U.S. Border Program, put the percentage of complying factories much lower. "At least 80 percent of the maquilas do not comply with labor and environmental standards," Rodriquez told the Monitor.

Defusing critics

The lobbyists themselves characterize their work as simply an attempt on the part of the Mexican Government to consider the concerns of a wide range of citizen interests in the United States in planning the agreement. Says Anaya, "It’s been an outreach effort to do two things: one, to get Mexico more familiar with the political climate in this country and to respond to that in a positive fashion; secondly, to increase knowledge about Mexico - and the changes in Mexico over the last several years - in all sectors of the United States."

But critics describe the campaign as a deliberate attempt to defuse popular criticism. Even some supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement agree that the Mexican government should devote its resources to doing "outreach" in Mexico rather than in the United States. Stewart Hudson, of the National Wildlife Federation, one of only five environmental advocacy groups allowed to take part as an official advisor in the negotiations, says, "I’m sorry to see that the Mexican government spent as much as it did on public relations as opposed to ... opening up to listening to their own NGOs [Non- Governmental Organizations]."

Critics charge that the Mexican government is extremely closed to NGOs and other dissenting voices, often resorting to harsh measures to silence unwanted voices. "Always from the government you will find the bad cop and the good cop," Rodriguez says. "Most of the time what the government wants to do is to be able to deal with NGOs in order to coopt [them] or in order to undermine their effectiveness....The other option - that is always there, and [which] can be used at any time - is the stick, from repression to suppression to arrest."

The lack of access for dissenting voices both in Mexico and the United States emphasizes the potential for distortion which critics see in the Mexican government’s public relations effort. "The dimension of it becomes an issue," insists Lewis. "I have all the early signs that this is a major, major, possibly unprecedented effort," he says.

Hard to sell

Mexico’s lobbyists defend their work by pointing to the outspokenness of their opponents. "There’s a pretty good amount being spent on the other side," Moore contends. "I certainly don’t think the other side has had any problem getting their message out."

The amount of money being spent in opposition to the NAFTA is comparatively low, however. The Citizen Trade Campaign, the central coalition opposed to the agreement, has a budget of only several hundred thousand dollars.

The ultimate question is the effect efforts on both sides will have on the pending trade agreement. The Mexican government is banking on the ability of the firms it has hired to overcome popular opposition to the agreement in the United States.

NAFTA’s critics, on the other hand, hope that the effects of the Mexican effort will be neutralized once enough people in the United States become aware of the amount of money involved in the attempt to convince them to support the agreement. "If this thing has enough merit and substance on its own through sheer logic and weight of the ideas," wonders Lewis, "why is it that hard to sell?"

Sidebar

Firm Function Fees/expenses

Burson-Marsteller Public Relations 1992: $3,855,996

Moya, Villanueva & Ass. Public Relations 1992: $600,000

Apodaca, Sosa & Ass. Public Relations 1992: $174,000

Guerra & Ass. Public Relations/Lobbying 1992: $90,000

Campos communications Public Relations 1992: $240,000

Abelardo Valdez Law/consulting 1991/92: $444,000

Toney Anaya Public Relations. 1992: $60,500

Charls Walker Ass. Lobbying 12/90-12/92:$606,000

Manchester Trade Consulting 1991: $98,000

Pantin Partnership Law 1991: $642,124.70

Sidebar

In fact, according to the USTR, only six environmentalists (including one Environmental Protection Agency representative) have been included in the negotiation process among the 270 official outside advisors. The Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations, the most influential of the U.S. advisory committees in these negotiations, includes only one environmentalist, one farm representative and one labor representative along with 42 corporate executives. The negotiation process "was never designed to actually incorporate any of the positions or proposals of the environmental community," says Greenpeace’s Cam Duncan. "All the way around, this was a trade deal negotiated in secret."n

- N.S.

The Power of Organizing

Securing Farmworkers’ Rights

An interview with Baldemar Velasquez

Baldemar Velasquez is president and founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) based in Toledo, Ohio, which has organized migrant farmworkers since 1967. Since 1971, FLOC has directed programs for worker education, food and fuel cooperatives and a legal clinic for workers, and has focused its campaigns not on the individual farms that employ migrant workers, but on the huge canneries which set the prices for crops. The Committee organizes over 5,000 workers on 120 separate family farms that are contracted with five major companies, including Campbell’s Soup and its subsidiary, Vlasic. Velasquez is the son of farmworkers who migrated to Ohio in 1953. He began working in the fields with his family at the age of six. Velasquez was recognized by the Agricultural Missions of the National Council of Churches in 1986 for the unprecedented accomplishment of establishing multiparty collective bargaining agreements for migrant workers. He was given the Development of People Award by the Campaign for Human Development and U.S. Catholic Church in 1992 and the Hispanic Leadership Award by the National Council of La Raza in 1991.

Multinational Monitor: What are some of the obstacles that you face in organizing farmworkers?

Baldemar Velasquez: The farmworkers we organize are migrant workers. As you can imagine, organizing migrant workers is extremely difficult. They work in Ohio for only six to 10 weeks, and then go back to their home bases in Florida and Texas. What FLOC did was follow them back after the harvest. We went down to South Texas and Florida every winter since 1968 to build an organizing base.

MM: Could you describe your campaign to organize Campbell’s Soup workers?

Velasquez: We successfully organized all the farms that were contracted with the Campbell’s Soup company and demanded company-wide recognition. It was difficult because every one of those farms are small, private, family farms that are contracted to grow the crop for Campbell’s . Campbell’s Soup does not employ the migrant workers, the farmers do. But Campbell’s is responsible for dictating crop prices to the farmers through very restrictive contracts that are signed before the crop is even planted. The farmers, in effect, don’t even harvest their own tomatoes; they are harvesting a crop that has already been 100 percent bought.

In 1979 we demanded that the company recognize us, and that it sit down at the same negotiating table with the growers and ourselves and sign a three-party collective bargaining agreement.

We fought them on that issue for eight years. The company said it would never do it, that it was not the employer, that it should not have anything to say about what its suppliers’ employees do or don’t do. In 1979 we launched a national boycott of Campbell’s Soup products, and in 1986 they did what they said they would never do: they signed a three-party collective bargaining agreement. There is an explicit commitment on the part of the company to cover the cost of the collective bargaining agreement.

That campaign opened the door to negotiations in the pickle industry, and very quickly Vlasic, Heinz, Aunt Jane, Green Bay Foods and Dean Foods all signed in. At this moment we have all of the processors involved in buying pickling cucumbers in northwest Ohio and southeastern Michigan signed under union contract.

MM: What organization governs your relations with Campbell’s Soup?

Velasquez: Since the National Labor Relations Act does not cover agricultural workers, we have our own commission, chaired by former Secretary of Labor John Dunlap, that basically acts as a National Labor Relations Board. Campbell’s Soup agreed to recognize the authority of that commission in some way, either directly or indirectly, so that the commission can be used as a mediation and arbitration service when a contract is negotiated. That has worked very well for us.

MM: What working conditions do migrant workers face?

Velasquez: Migrant farmworkers suffer probably the worst living and working conditions of any workers in the United States. Not only are you talking substandard wages, but you are talking about essentially a plantation arrangement. Workers live in housing provided by the growers. They have the status of indentured servants; they are obligated to do anything the farmer tells them to, or else lose their homes. Often they go into debt to the same grower. They have to work off the cost of transportation to and from the plot where they work. It is a situation where it is almost impossible to get any worker’s voice heard. A worker cannot raise any complaint without the threat of getting thrown off of the job, or sometimes getting physically injured.

It is particularly difficult for migrant workers to stand up for their rights because they have their whole families with them. Sometimes it is a little easier to take a stand when you are there by yourself, but when you have got little children living on the employer’s property, it is definitely a lot more intimidating to try and take a stand on an issue than if you went by yourself.

Stoop labor is very difficult. It takes great physical strength, it takes a lot of endurance, and not everybody can do it. Even at the height of all the unemployment in the northwest Ohio auto industry, where there are hundreds of auto workers losing their benefits, you didn’t see auto workers running out to the fields to get these jobs. It is a very arduous lifestyle whether or not we have a contract.

We have been able to improve the working and living conditions under our agreements. For example, we have created committees to pressure the industry to invest money in upgrading workers’ housing, so instead of one-room shanties for entire families, we now have multi-bedroom units with their own self-contained showers and cooking facilities as opposed to the common-use facilities that they had before. We are beginning to see this new housing pop up all over northwest Ohio. But the housing project alone has taken us five years and over $5 million in investment so far. We are making some progress, but there is still a long way to go.

MM: What protections are in place to address the particular health and safety issues involved in the process of picking crops?

Velasquez: There are none. Workers have been categorized here in Ohio and Michigan as sharecroppers. That means that the Fair Labor Standards Act is not applicable. Migrant farmworkers do not benefit from protection of minimum wage, child labor provisions, workers’ compensation or unemployment compensation, and they are forced to pay the self-employed share of social security. So you are talking about no rights, no health and no safety. If someone gets injured on the job, that’s too bad. That worker’s only option is to sue the farmer on an independent claim, and even if he could afford to do that, it wouldn’t be worth his while, because it takes so long that he is out of the area before anything is settled.

Under our agreement, however, we have demanded to be recognized as employees. We are going to phase out this sharecropping, independent contracting arrangement. This year, 1993, is our target. This is the year when farmworkers will all be categorized as employees for the first time.

MM: Are there any other implications of the farmworkers being classified as independent contractors?

Velasquez: For the purpose of social security, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has its own guidelines. But as an independent contractor and a sharecropper, a worker has to pay his own social security. In a situation where a worker does not pay social security, the IRS nails him for back taxes that he hasn’t paid. So what does the worker do? He makes an arrangement to pay $50 a month, and at the end of the year, including interest and penalties, he owes more to the IRS than he did before.

For a worker to appeal that fine, he has to find someone to advocate for him in the legal system, to walk him through the regulations that define what is an independent contractor as opposed to an employee, through the IRS regulations, and by the time you do that, it is a year, two years down the road. In the meantime, you have got to keep making those payments, or else you get even more interest and penalties tacked on. Beginning to tackle this tremendous problem for the workers is an important victory.

MM: Does the company have the ability recategorize you as employees rather than independent contractors, or is that a government decision?

Velasquez: It is a government decision, but the government never enforces anything anyway, so the farmers do anything they want to the workers. As a matter of fact, there have been advocates who have fought to secure the rights of workers as employees, and some victories have been won, in Wisconsin and California, for example. Even in those states, however, unless the law is enforced, the growers continue treating migrant workers as they always did. In Ohio and Michigan we mandated in our collective bargaining agreement that we would be given the rights of employees.

MM: Do you have provisions in the contract governing the use of pesticides?

Velasquez: Absolutely. We have standards that go far beyond Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

For example, when a field is sprayed, either by plane or by ground rig, we specify that workers must be notified in advance - including workers on the field that is sprayed and on adjacent fields, and workers living in labor camps adjacent to the sprayed field. The growers must notify them in person, regardless of whether or not those workers are employed on the farm that has sprayed.

We also require that workers on the mechanical harvesters be equipped with goggles, breathing masks and plastic gloves while sorting. Even though they don’t come in contact with the sprayed crop, it is a precaution that we take.

MM: Is there any precedent for the multiparty agreements you have worked out?

Velasquez: No, not at all. Not anywhere. As a matter of fact, when we began, organized labor said it was a ridiculous thing that we were attempting.

MM: Can these type of multiparty agreements be accomplished in the other food industries?

Velasquez: Absolutely. I think probably we will be seeing a great deal more of it in the future, because most agricultural crops are sold as piece rate harvests in Florida, Texas and other places. Most of these crops have labor contractors, independent suppliers and independent contracts signed to grow the crop, all part of a deal with a large corporation.

For example, look at the Florida citrus industry: you have a company, you have a broker, you have a labor contractor, you have a grower. Apart from the labor force, you have got four or five parties involved. I think that multiparty agreements are probably the only way that farmworkers can negotiate with the appropriate people, make appropriate financial decisions and win.

MM: How have the three-party agreements affected your relationship with the growers?

Velasquez: We are actually winning them over to our side, because in effect, we are protecting them as well. When the growers and the company sign a three-year agreement, that farmer has a guaranteed contract for those three years as well.

So after six years of collective bargaining, the grower association that we forced the company to create to sign as third parties in this agreement is beginning to act more and more like a union and is collaborating with us in terms of strategy against the company. So we’ve in fact done a lot to win them over to our side. Because although there are still big differences between us in terms of power, economically, they are not the enemy. They are not the ones who make the financial decisions. It is the processors who do that.

MM: How does international competition play into the equation, at a time when companies are scrambling to relocate production to low-wage havens across the border?

Velasquez: That is precisely the problem. The companies can bring the product in. That is where Mexico and California enter the picture. They don’t have to grow and harvest here in northwest Ohio. They can bring the crop in, package it in barrels and ship it to the Midwest for processing.

So it is imperative to organize those workers so that companies can’t pit Mexican workers’ low wages against ours. We have to raise the wages of workers who are in the competing areas and make them participants in the same collective bargaining struggles that we have. We do that, just as some other unions have coordinated bargaining with the national producer here in the United States. They coordinate their union contracts - they call it pattern bargaining - in the auto industry. Why can’t we do that with agricultural workers internationally? We have to open ourselves up to collaboration with other unions. We must be unselfish with respect to helping another union get a better deal, so that we’re in a strong position to get a better deal ourselves.

MM: What are some of the arrangements you have developed with the agricultural workers’ union in Mexico?

Velasquez: We have worked with the Campbell’s Soup workers in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, with whom we have a very good relationship. We compare negotiating strategies. If Mexican workers tell us that they are working too cheaply in Mexico, we tell them that they can afford to ask for more. And they do. And they are getting it.

We are going to extend that relationship to three other Mexican states, Queretaro, Guanajuato and Michoacan, with pickle and cucumber workers. Vlasic Pickle and Dean Foods are major buyers of pickles from those states.

We are meeting with the union leaders in those three states to set out the same relationship we have with the Culiacan workers. We are looking forward to coordinating not only our negotiating, but in this case, actual joint organizing because the crop is harvested in Mexico and shipped to south Texas, where there is another crop harvested by Texas farmworkers. So to organize those workers in Texas, we have to be organized simultaneously with the workers in those three states in Mexico so that the company does not have a way out of getting its pickles and using that against workers that may want to start an organizing drive.

MM: Are you undertaking other organizing drives outside of the Midwest?

Velasquez: Absolutely. We’re going to start one next year in North Carolina, which has a pickle and cucumber crop that is competitive with Ohio and Michigan.

MM: What are your relations with the United Farm Workers (UFW) and other farm labor organizations?

Velasquez: We don’t have any formal relationship with the UFW, although we know them and worked with them in Texas, where they have had a staff for quite some time. We have encouraged our members to join their efforts down there. And they have been very helpful to us with strategies up here and in south Texas. Other than that, they have been isolated in California; and we have been isolated out here.

MM: How are your relations with the rest of the labor movement?

Velasquez: The AFL-CIO has given us a charter as a directly affiliated union, which is unusual since the organization does not issue those charters any more. We did not want to be under the wing of another big union; we wanted to leave ourselves open to merge with other farmworker unions that may spring up in the future, and/or with the UFW if the union leadership were interested.

MM: Can you discuss the absence of a legal structure protecting farmworkers? What would you like to see developed?

Velasquez: Absolutely nothing. I’ve seen that laws overall do more damage to the farmworkers than good.

It is very difficult for an established union to succeed at collective bargaining, much less a politically powerless group like the farmworkers. The politicians would eat us alive, and might put us in a worse situation than we are in with no legislation.

For example, a collective bargaining law that was passed in Arizona made it almost impossible to organize farmworkers for 10 years or so in that state. And in Washington state, farmworkers killed a bill for collective bargaining legislation that would have put the issue into the hands of politicians who know absolutely nothing about agriculture. They would not have the passion to fight for the farmworkers: for them, it would be a political deal to make them look like liberals to earn votes from urban communities. But they would not be accountable to the farmworkers.

So I suggest staying away from legislative reform: go by the law of the jungle out here, win some contracts, and maybe down the road, as collective bargaining relationships are established, we can legislate that relationship into some kind of bill.

The Maquiladorization of Mexico

by Dan LaBotz

IN JUAREZ, THE WORKERS, most of them young women, leave their homes at six in the morning to go to work. The best of these homes are three or four rooms made of concrete block and adobe; the worst are one or two rooms made of discarded lumber and tar paper. Many have no running water or toilets. The workers walk unpaved side streets which, depending on the season, are dusty, muddy or occasionally snowy to wait for the city bus or company van to pick them up and carry them to work.

Many of these workers labor in modern factories owned and operated by U.S. corporations. Equipped with the latest combination of electronic controls and robotic machines, these factories are located in well-paved and well-lit industrial parks served by superhighways and railroad lines. The plant managers and supervisors are usually U.S. men earning six-figure salaries who live in El Paso, Texas and drive their BMWs across the border to work. The lower-level supervisors are Mexicans who translate the employers’ instructions into Spanish. In other cases, the workplace may be some subcontractor’s hole-in-the-wall facility. There, conditions are worse: wages may be as low as $3.75 per day, and workers may not be covered by the national health program for workers.

This is life in Mexican towns and cities along the U.S.-Mexican border, where multinational corporations, drawn by low wages, have set up maquiladoras, or manufacturing and assembly plants, bringing dangerous environmental pollution and a host of social problems into desperately poor neighborhoods.

"There are a whole series of problems which are linked to the maquiladora," says Teresa Almada, a social worker with the Independent Popular Organization in Juarez. "There are problems with the urban infrastructure, such as the lack of water, sewers, electric light." Other problems, she says, include low wages, industrial pollution and pervasive sexual harassment of women workers. "The issue of the maquiladora isn’t just the factory which comes here," she says, "but rather that in cities along the border in Mexico, the size of the maquiladora industry is so great in relation to the city, that the maquiladora limits and determines the entire social reality of the city."

Conditions in the maquiladora communities in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, Reynosa or Matamoros provide an insight to the frightening future, for, as Mexican Secretary of Commerce Jaime Serra Puche has stated, in many respects NAFTA is Mexico’s maquiladora - or border industry - program, writ large. Mexico’s maquiladora program allows foreign companies to set up factories that produce for export; NAFTA would allow foreign businesses to invest freely throughout Mexico. Just as multinational corporations have shifted production to Mexico’s maquiladoras in order to take advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations, so it can be anticipated that U.S. and Canadian corporations will find the main attraction of investing in Mexico to be the country’s low social standards, some of which are dramatically inferior to those of its industrialized Northern neighbors.

The new frontier

In 1965, the Mexican government established a limited free trade zone along the U.S.-Mexican border through the Border Industrialization Program, which encouraged foreign corporations to build factories and create jobs in Mexico. Many U.S. corporations, including General Motors and Zenith , moved factories to Mexico to take advantage of low wages or to escape U.S. environmental or workplace safety regulations. The program mushroomed in the 1980s when repeated devaluations of the peso dramatically lowered Mexican wage rates. Today, 850 U.S. corporations operate one or more maquiladora plants, and more than 80 percent of the maquiladora companies are U.S.-owned. About 68 percent of all investment in the maquiladora zone comes from the United States.

The maquiladoras have drawn hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to live in border towns and cities. Over half a million workers, two-thirds of them women, labor in over 2,000 such factories, for about 50 cents an hour or $4.50 a day. Cities like Tijuana and Juarez grew at the spectacular rate of over 7 percent a year, burgeoning to a population of over one million inhabitants today. Juarez now has about 340 maquiladoras employing 150,000 workers in a city of 1.3 million inhabitants. Many of these cities’ residents live in shacks and hovels in neighborhoods without sewers, running water, electricity or paved streets.

"The maquiladora is the axis of the economy in cities like these," explains Almada. Local politics have come to be dominated by business consortiums, such as the Bermudes group or the Fuentes group, which build industrial parks for the multinational corporations. These Mexican business interests, closely tied to multinationals, become important forces not only in the local economy, but also at city hall and in the state legislature.

Given this sort of power structure, the city’s economic resources are frequently diverted from the needs of the working class inhabitants to those of the Mexican and multinational industrialists. The domination of multinational corporations and Mexican real estate interests leads to the construction of highways, rail spurs, airports and other facilities, rather than to the building of homes or the paving of streets in working class neighborhoods. For example, according to Almada, Juarez officials are placing a budgetary priority on paving the streets and highways which connect the industrial parks. "Pavement is the priority," she says, "in a city where half the people have no sewer system."

Hazards of the maquilas

Work in the maquiladoras involves tasks such as assembling wire harnesses for automobiles or electronic circuit boards for computers, putting together stereo systems or sewing shirts and blouses. The pace of work is usually rapid and intense, lasting for nine-hour days, 45 hours per week. The turn-over of the workforce is extremely high.

Virtually all maquiladora supervisors and technicians are men, while more than three-quarters of the operatives are girls and women. In this situation - where most workers have no labor unions and the government does not protect workers’ rights - sexual harassment is endemic. "Many of the girls are between 14 and 20 years old," says Almada, and, "[as] they leave the factories they are in a lot of danger. Rapes occur frequently, many of which go unreported. Many young women become pregnant with no possibility of a stable family life." Attorneys, social workers and women activists report that sexual harassment and rape often go unreported either because women fear reprisals in the form of firing or because a lack of resources to deal with rape and harrassment lead to a climate of shame and humiliation for the victims of these crimes.

"The majority of women workers in Mexico are not protected by the legal system as established by federal labor law," according to Patricio Mercado, a leader of Women in Labor Union Action (Mujeres de Accion Sindical). There are many reasons why women are not protected by the law. Young women workers, some coming from the countryside, may not know their rights, or may be afraid to assert those rights in the face of male authorities who represent employers, the government and unions. Simply put: they fear losing their jobs if they complain. Some have gone to work illegally at the age of 14 using forged documents and may be reluctant to attempt to exercise their rights. Others work in small shops or factories which have an ephemeral existence; Mexican workers call them golondrinas or swallows because they may fly away at any moment. These run-away shops often do not pay the aguinaldo or annual bonus, and they do not make the annual distribution of profits under the constitutionally mandated profit-sharing law. In other cases, the exhausting pace of work forces some women to leave the workplace before they are entitled to any benefits.

In the factory itself there are many threats to worker health and safety. A 1991 study of the Matamoros-Reynosa area by the Work Environment Program of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell concluded that "the working conditions identified in this study are reminiscent of the nineteenth century sweatshops of the U.S. industrial town." The study found "clear evidence that maquiladora workers are suffering from musculoskeletal disorders related to working conditions, including rapid pace of work, poor workplace design and other ergonomic hazards. Acute health effects compatible with chemical exposures were also identified, indicating the potential for the future development of chronic diseases in the workforce."

According to the Mexican Secretary of Commerce, almost 40 percent of the maquiladora plants produce electronic equipment. While there are few good studies of occupational illness in the Mexican maquiladora industry, studies of electronic plants in North America and Europe have revealed problems among workers including increased rates of miscarriages and high rates of muscle skeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Some solvents used in these plants may cause peripheral neuropathy, that is, numbness and tingling in the hands and feet. One Mexican study reported that some Mexican plants use benzene, a known carcinogen. Over 80 chemical plants operate on the border, including Stepan Chemical of Chicago, which has been accused of toxic dumping. In addition, metalworking plants use lead and zinc, both of which are also potential health hazards. Lead can cause reproductive and kidney problems and hypertension.

Mexican occupational health professionals such as Asa Christina Laurel, the author of several studies of Mexican health and safety laws, have long criticized the Mexican government for its failure to enforce occupational health and safety laws. In general, Mexican authorities have failed to collect information or carry out studies on workers’ health problems.

The rapid industrialization and urbanization of cities like Juarez has also resulted in severe social problems. For example, neither the employers nor the government provides child care for workers’ children. "Child care is a real issue now because both parents have to work" in order to earn a subsistence income, says Lilia Reyes, a labor lawyer who works with the Workers Center (Centro Obrero) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. She notes that single working mothers "may have to wait months before they can get a place. There just aren’t enough child care centers."

The maquiladoras are also a factor leading to the proliferation of child labor, with children from desperately poor families often using forged birth certificates to begin working in the maquiladoras at 14 or 15 years of age.

Employers, social workers, women’s groups and academics all agree that there are significant numbers of children working in the maquiladoras, although there are no concrete figures on their actual number. One employer speculates that 5 percent of maquiladora workers are underage.

Repressing unionists

Mexican workers who have attempted to organize to address some of these maquiladora-created problems have met with harsh repression. A strong upsurge of labor activity occurred during the late 1970s among a youthful, militant workforce which joined labor unions, organized strikes and attempted to negotiate contracts for improved wages and benefits.

But the combined efforts of multinational employers, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and the one-party-state’s labor unions, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) and the Revolutionary of Workers and Peasants (CROC), soon succeeded in crushing the labor upsurge [see "Mexican Labor: The Old, the New and the Democratic," Multinational Monitor, January/February 1991].

Employers fire and blacklist union activists and other outspoken workers. These practices have gone on for years and continue today. Consequently, most maquiladoras are unorganized, and state-controlled unions represent workers in those that are organized.

These unions are of little use in improving conditions for the workers. Some are "ghost unions," that is, unions unknown to the workers. These phantom unions negotiate "protection contracts" that protect the employers by giving workers contractual wages and conditions inferior to those guaranteed by labor law. Others are what Professor Jorge Carrillo Viveros of the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana calls "low profile unions," or unions with no presence on the shop floor.

In April 1993, workers at the BESA plant in Juarez petitioned for the right to form a "coalition" which under Mexican labor law would give them the right to bargain with their employers. All 113 workers who signed the petition were immediately fired, the employer preferring to pay them their severance rather than have a union in the plant. One worker, who must remain anonymous, explains that because the labor authorities give the activists’ names to the employers, those who sign such coalition petitions are always fired.

Union dissidents who demand democracy and insist that their unions fight for economic and social justice are fired with the collusion of management, the union and the government. The Mexican Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration and the labor courts are notoriously worthless in the defense of workers’ rights. Activists are blacklisted by the employers and the unions, and in some cases threatened and beaten. Today workers and independent unions like the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), and some leftist parties like the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) are forced to organize by building secret union cell structures within plants and corporations.

Sidebar

Workers’ Loss in Watsonville

I live and work in the community of Watsonville, California, where I represent the 4,000 members of Teamsters Local 912. Watsonville is located between Monterey and Santa Cruz at the head of the great Salinas valley which has provided much of the United States with vegetables for many years. It was the setting for John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle.

Our community’s agricultural base has made it the home of many ethnic groups: Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, Italians and Yugoslavs, among others. These people all came to work the land, and, since World War II, to work in plants that process the fruits and vegetables that don’t go to fresh market. This work is now leaving. Our community is being hurt by decisions being made in corporate board rooms thousands of miles from here. Small companies are closing or being taken over by huge transnational corporations that are running away.

Green Giant was first to head to Mexico. In 1983, Pillsbury bought the company and opened a vegetable processing facility in Irapuato, Mexico, eliminating 800 jobs in Watsonville. In 1989 Pillsbury was taken over by Grand Metropolitan, a giant English holding company which decided to use broccoli and cauliflower grown in Mexico. This eliminated another 380 Watsonville workers. Other companies have followed Green Giant’s example. Today, about 9,000 fewer people in the Watsonville area are working in the food and related industries.

While the private sector has benefited from running away from our town, the public is paying for it. Workers pay with their livelihoods. Taxpayers pay to retrain them and provide them with extended unemployment benefits, medical care, food stamps and other forms of aid. More of the local tax burden is taken up by individual taxpayers as the corporations flee. The residents and the remaining food processors (who aren’t big enough to move) pay an increased share of costs, for instance, for the $20 million sewage- treatment plant that was mandated by the EPA to clean waste water from Green Giant’s and the other departing employers’ former operations.

People in Irapuato pay in another way. Clean water there is in short supply. The rivers running through town are severely polluted by the untreated sewage of 500,000 inhabitants and by industrial wastes from factories and a nearby oil refinery. Green Giant, free of local regulation, is drilling more than 450 feet deep to pump out about a million gallons a day of potable water in order to clean and wash exported vegetables. They currently discharge the dirty water, untreated, back into the polluted river.

The children of Irapuato pay too. Because of their parents’ declining wages, more of them are entering the workforce at an early age. Indeed, the Mexican public has seen a vast reduction in its standard of living since 1982, when foreign investment was liberalized. Foreign companies actually pay less in annual wages to their workers than Mexican employers do. To get around a constitutional requirement to pay their workers a share of the profits, multinational corporations juggle their books to show no profitability form Mexican operations.

This story is not unique to Watsonville, Irapuato or the food processing industry. We are seeing our communities throughout the United States and the world being degraded by private-sector decision-making. Given the diversification and resources of the corporate giants, it is difficult for isolated local struggles to be effective in combatting their abuse. It is becoming increasingly clear to those of us who have fought this kind of fight, that the tactics of taking on one employer at a time will not be effective in this "New World Order." To have some control over our communities, we must be able to change laws.

Now, just as this realization is being made, the transnational corporations with the help of their friends in government want to change the rules of the game. This is what free trade with Mexico is about. This is what the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is about. Corporations want governments to make it easier for them to run away from environmental standards, worker protections, and any but the lowest standards of community responsibility. By virtue of trade agreements, they want the right to ignore the rules of fair conduct established by local, state and even national governments. They want a system, for instance, that would overrule Californians who pass tougher environmental initiatives.

I would suggest that anyone who is interested in maintaining or improving our standard of living or protecting the planet needs to understand what we are up against. To fight this "free trade" menace, we need a broad vision of community improvement that involves workers, environmentalists, human rights activists and other public-spirited persons in the United States, Mexico, Canada and everywhere else. The globalization of capital makes necessary a corresponding globalization of labor, whose "solidarity," however, must now include almost everyone. The transnational corporations are in a better position than before to take advantage of narrow self-interests and play us off against each other. We must resist those manipulations in concert with our brothers and sisters throughout the world. Economic forces seem to be creating a situation where, in order to change our communities, we now have to change the entire world!n

Joe Fahey is president of Teamsters Local 912 in Watsonville, California.

Sidebar

Another important nascent coalition is the North American Worker-to-Worker Network, which involves teamsters, autoworkers, electrical workers and service employees in making direct contacts between U.S., Mexican and Canadian workers. The goal of the program is to eventually build coalitions to use their economic and political power to counterbalance the power of multinational corporations, while protecting the rights and working conditions of workers.

Mexican and U.S. trade negotiators alike contend that NAFTA would improve workplace and community conditions in the maquiladora zones and throughout Mexico. But the evidence to support that assertion is weak. Mexican wages have plummeted during the period of the maquiladoras’ rapid growth, falling from $1.38 per hour in 1982 to $0.69 per hour in 1988 to an estimated $0.51 per hour in 1991. And labor rights have been substantially restricted since the mid-1970s. Mexican officials tout these low wage levels in courting foreign investment, and it is undisputed that cheap, non-unionized labor and lax regulatory enforcement are the reasons foreign investors look to Mexico. Because foreign investors in the maquiladoras or in Mexico generally under NAFTA would overwhelmingly be export-oriented and relatively unconcerned with Mexican domestic consumption, guaranteeing labor rights, raising wages or enforcing environmental and health standards would undermine the basis of their investment: low costs.n

by Mark Ritchie

THE U.S.-CANADA-MEXICO FREE TRADE AGREEMENT threatens to be a disaster for sustainable agriculture, harming the well-being of farmers, consumers and the environment in all three countries. On the one hand, the agreement encourages both increased corporate concentration in the food processing sector and the further expansion of large- scale "factory farms" in all three countries. On the other hand, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would restrict local, state and national governments’ ability to regulate the flow of goods across their borders, making it difficult for sustainable farmers to compete in the continental market and impossible for consumer safety to be adequately protected.

Threat to farm families

NAFTA would give multinational grain companies based in the United States unlimited access for their exports of corn and other grains to Mexico. At present, almost three million Mexican peasants sell corn at price levels set high enough by their government to secure farmers sufficient cash income to survive. This system requires the Mexican government to strictly regulate imports so that this price level is not undermined by subsidized corn imports.

Economists in both Mexico and the United States predict that if the grain companies succeed in using NAFTA to open the Mexican corn market, the price paid to Mexican peasants for corn will fall dramatically, forcing one million or more families off their land. Most of these families are expected to migrate to the United States in search of either farmworker jobs in the countryside or service sector work in the major cities. Others will head to Mexico’s urban areas, such as Mexico City and Guadalajara, increasing social, economic and environmental pressure on these already vastly overpopulated areas.

Abolition of import restrictions will have additional effects channeled through the U.S. market, since the U.S. government has long used import regulations to sustain a domestic agricultural sector. For example, the Meat Import Act of 1979 established strict controls on the level of beef imports allowed into the United States. But fast-food hamburger retailers have pushed to ensure that NAFTA will abolish or weaken these controls, allowing them to import more hamburger meat.

Beef can be produced most cheaply in North America on cleared rainforest land in southern Mexico; a sharp increase in U.S. beef imports from this region would accelerate rainforest destruction. Another worry is that Mexico would ship ship domestically produced beef to the United States and substitute beef grown on destroyed rainforest regions in Central and South America for Mexican consumption - a practice that has already begun.

Unlimited beef imports would also lower the income of family-sized cattle producers in the United States, since these producers would have to sell at prices low enough to compete with rainforest beef. If NAFTA is accepted as currently proposed, an increasing share of the U.S. beef supply would be imported and small U.S. cattle farmers would be forced out of business. With more beef coming from overseas, there would also be a smaller market for U.S.-grown hay, corn and other feedstuffs, devastating those farmers who produce these grains for U.S. cattle.

Unregulated beef exports into the United States would also result in serious environmental problems in the United States. Currently, many U.S. beef cattle graze on the hillsides and meadows of the upper Midwest. The northern region of the state of Minnesota, with the exception of the Red River Valley, for example, generally has poor soil conditions. The region is hilly with thin topsoil, and the land is quite fragile. The only agriculture production suited for this land - and indeed needed to maintain this land - is livestock grazing. If beef imports from the Mexican rainforest are permitted, they will drive down U.S. beef prices and put Minnesota’s diversified, small, family beef operations out of business. These farmers would most likely plant their fragile land with row crops, soybeans or corn, in hopes of earning enough income to at least pay taxes and expenses. It would only take one or two growing seasons before these crops would cause the topsoil to wash away at a non-sustainable rate, ultimately destroying the productivity of the land.

Exploiting low wages

U.S. food and agricultural producers currently operate under substantial regulations concerning chemical use and worker rights. They also pay higher taxes than producers in Mexico. NAFTA poses serious threats to U.S. farmworkers and farming communities by making them compete with Mexican production costs, and to Mexican agricultural laborers who will suffer from low wages and exposure to intensified chemical farming methods.

Edward Angstead, president of the Growers and Shippers Association of Central California, says that total production costs for frozen broccoli in Mexico are less than pre- harvest costs in California. The difference comes primarily from the cost of labor. Angstead estimates the cost of farm labor in Mexico at $3 per day, compared with $5 to $15 per hour in California. U.S. producers are well aware of the short-term economic advantages of Mexico’s low wages and lack of workplace safety regulation, along with weaker environmental laws. Pillsbury Company ’s Green Giant division, for example, moved a frozen-food packing factory from Watsonville, California to Mexico in anticipation of the adoption of NAFTA, with the idea of importing products back into the United States without tariffs and with few food safety controls.

For the community of Watsonville, the loss of the Green Giant factory means that the farmers in the area who grew crops for the plant lost their market, farmworkers who picked those crops lost their jobs and the workers in the cannery were put out of work.

The U.S. meatpacking industry, already hit by plummeting wages, is experiencing similar problems. Beef and pork slaughterers are moving to Mexico to take advantage of lower wages, weaker occupational health regulations and weaker environmental standards. Cargill Corporation , for example, has already relocated part of its meatpacking operations to Mexico in anticipation of NAFTA. Over time, cattle and hog production will move closer to these meatpacking facilities, since livestock cannot be shipped over long distances without serious loss. Again, workers, their communities and the environment will suffer.

A similar shift is taking place in the textile and apparel industry, with factories closing and moving to Mexico, reducing markets for U.S.- produced cotton. The closing of textile mills has secondary impacts on rural populations, too, as the mills are often a source of off-farm employment for many farm families, providing additional income to supplement low farm prices. Their loss will further harm rural communities.

Reducing consumer confidence

Increased food trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada will likely have a negative impact on consumer confidence in the safety and quality of food. Food processors will need to genetically alter, over-process and over-package their products for them to survive long trips and periods of storage, meaning that quality, taste and nutritional value will diminish.

In the absence of uniform food-safety laws or country-of-origin labeling regulations, consumers cannot be sure about their food. Efforts to "harmonize" - or make uniform - such regulations will likely involve underhanded corporate attempts to weaken them, as has been the case in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations [See Food Fight: How GATT Undermines Food Safety Regulations," Multinational Monitor, November 1990 ].

For example, some Mexican milk now comes from cows treated with Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), a milk-production drug currently banned in the United States in response to consumer and dairy farmer demands. Consumers have expressed grave concerns about this product’s potential human health effects, especially when they found out that experimental milk from BGH test herds in the United States was being mixed with commercial milk. Over a dozen surveys have shown that consumers will buy less milk and fewer dairy products if the products might contain BGH, according to the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board. U.S. dairy farmers face the potential loss of markets and lower prices if Mexican milk containing BGH is allowed into the country.

Unrestricted trade will also impact negatively on U.S winter fruit and vegetable production, with a resulting effect on U.S. food safety standards. If farmers in Florida, Texas and California are to take the enormous risks inherent in wintertime crop production, they must be confident of steady markets, profitable enough in good years to cover the occasional crop failures due to weather, crop disease and pests. Unlimited imports would make markets and profits unpredictable, creating unacceptably high risks for farmers.

Eventually, domestic winter fruit and vegetable production in the United States could disappear, with the consequent dependence on imported fruits and vegetables threatening U.S. food safety and security.

These risks are intensified by the lack of enforcement of food standards in the United States - the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects only 2 percent of food coming across the border from Mexico. Violators of food safety regulations are therefore free to act with relative impunity in importing food that does not meet U.S. standards.

Another disturbing implication of free trade between the United States and Mexico is the double blow it will deliver to organic farmers on both sides of the border. First, the general lowering of prices on commercially grown fruits and vegetables will make it hard to charge the prices needed to cover organic growers’ additional costs.

Second, expansion of fruit and vegetable production in Mexico will increase the overall use of chemicals, further disrupting and interfering with natural pest-control patterns. Organic farmers cannot apply pesticides to control pests driven to their fields by their neighbors’ spray.

And since they are dependent on natural predators for their own biological pest management, any increase in chemical spraying on neighboring farms will impact negatively on their efforts to use biological pest management.

Draining resources

The agreement will also have serious environmental implications outside of its effect on sustainable agriculture. For example, three NAFTA-induced changes in the continental agricultural market will lead to increased petroleum use, thereby intensifying global warming and other oil-related environmental problems.

First, producers and shippers will transport food products over longer distances - even though the average U.S. chicken already travels 2,000 miles before it is consumed, requiring enormous amounts of fuel and contributing to global climate change. Second, processing and packaging foods for long-distance shipping and long-term storage requires more energy and the use of sometimes hazardous chemicals. Third, farmers will be forced to intensify their production methods to boost yields in response to lower prices, leading to increased petrochemical fertilizer and pesticide use and increased use of petroleum- fueled machinery.

The U.S., Mexican and Canadian governments have begun laying plans for accommodating the sharp increase in truck and rail shipping to be spurred by NAFTA. Some of these plans could significantly raise the costs of farming. At a meeting of transportation ministers from all three countries, for example, then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Samuel Skinner praised Mexico’s recent moves to encourage private ownership of formerly public roads. Calling tollroads "the way of the future," Skinner predicted that they would become more common in the United States, too, substantially raising farmers’ costs for transporting food products.

Another concern is the impact the expanded North American Free Trade Agreement poses to biological resource conservation and genetic diversity. Modern agricultural production depends on the continued evolution of crop varieties that not only yield high output but also resist diseases, pests and drought. NAFTA - with its emphasis on increased production - may threaten the survival of diverse genetic resource pools, leaving society without the genetic raw materials needed to protect food security.

Dividing citizens

Allowing imported products to escape domestic standards can create antagonism and division between farmers and consumers in the United States. If U.S. farmers are prohibited from using pesticides like DDT or Alar, while imports with residues of these chemicals are allowed, the farmers’ competitiveness, and thus survival, will be threatened, forcing them to support a weakening of domestic standards. At a time when serious cooperation is needed to solve major environmental problems, the North American Free Trade Agreement appears likely to create new and unnecessary conflict between farmers, environmentalists and consumers.

Video Review

Poisoning Mexican Communities

by Holley Knaus

Stepan Chemical:The Poisoning of a Mexican Community

Produced and directed by Mark R. Day

San Antonio, TX: Center for Justice in the Maquiladoras, 1992

18 minutes

IRENEO SANCHEZ COMPLAINS OF CHRONIC HEADACHES, nausea and stomach cramps. His daughter describes a 1991 explosion at a chemical plant near their home that occurred when workers improperly mixed chemicals together and sent debris flying across their land. The Sanchez family lives in Colonia Privada Uniones, a community in Matamoros, Mexico . The colonia was built about 30 years ago in an area made up of a cluster of small cotton fields. That area is now home to Matamoros’s infamous "Chemical Row," a string of chemical plants spewing poisons into the air and water of the surrounding communities. Chemical Row is a distressing symbol of Mexico’s maquiladora program, which allows U.S. companies to relocate to towns like Matamoros to escape stricter U.S. environmental regulation.

Matamoros lies directly across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The region has suffered a dramatic rise in the birth of anencephalic babies (infants born without brains). In the Brownsville/Matomoros area, confirmed cases of anencephalic births now stand at 50 since January 1989 - the largest cluster of anencephalic babies ever documented, and four times the U.S. national average. Physicians and health activists believe the industrial chemical xylene - used at the Matamoros facility of the Chicago- based Stepan Chemical and also known to cause liver and kidney damage - are linked to the birth defects. Samples taken from a drainage ditch at Stepan’s Matamoros facility contained xylene at 53,000 times the allowable U.S. level, according to the National Toxics Campaign.

Stepan Chemical: The Poisoning of a Mexican Community is a short video documenting the appalling environmental history of Stepan Chemical. The video, produced by the San Antonio-based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), chronicles the efforts of the Sanchezes and their neighbors to demand an end to the contamination of their community and a full environmental accounting from Stepan and environmental agencies in the United States and Mexico. Stepan Chemical is a grim account of the massive chemical buildup along the maquila zone on the U.S.-Mexico border, and a frightening indication of the potential human costs of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Stepan’s Matamoros plant produces chemical agents used in detergents and pesticides. Community residents have long borne witness to the company’s practice of dumping chemicals into open, unlined canals that run through the colonia; they claim that contaminated soil samples can be found just a few feet below ground level.

Stepan’s owners have repeatedly denied responsibilty for poisoning the water and ground around the plant, claiming that the area around the facility was already contaminated when they bought it in 1988. Yet the CJM video contains 1990 footage of Stepan workers dumping wheelbarrow loads of contaminants into open drainage ditches. At that time, Stepan faced a proliferation of community complaints and unfavorable local press coverage; yet rather than clean up its mess, or even undertake an environmental assessment of the site, Stepan bulldozed the drainage ditches in an apparent attempt to cover up the toxic sludge pools it had created.

The video traces the efforts of Privada Uniones residents to force Stepan to account for its toxic build-up in Matamoros, as well as to simply obtain information on what chemicals the company used, and by what methods Stepan disposed of them. This type of information would be accessible through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency if the facility were located in the United States.

While Stepan officials met with community activists and CJM members a number of times between 1990 and 1992, the company has steadfastly refused to provide the requested information. Recently, pressure from the community and the CJM has had some effect on Stepan. According to the CJM’s annual report, the company presented proposals for a site assessment in late February 1993. Colonia leaders are now examining these proposals to determine whether they will contribute to resolving the contamination problems around the facility.

The video is most effective in showing the brutal human cost of the maquila system, which will expand across Mexico under NAFTA. Maquila workers and their families, attempting to get by on paltry wages, live in shanties in border communities. There is no running water or sewers in the colonias. Stepan’s waste canal runs through the center of Colonia Privada Uniones.

According to the video, residents bathe and do their washing in the canal’s water, which is rarely boiled. A particularly disturbing image shows children playing and washing in the waste water. Another segment contains an interview with a colonia resident who says that pigs which fall into the canal invariably become sick - so their owners frequently kill and eat them before they die of disease.

This video has played an effective role in the joint community/CJM pressure campaign against Stepan, and is a valuable resource for activists fighting the maquiladorization of Mexico or working to raise awareness of the issue in the United States. Its hardhitting images of conditions in the colonias, and its depiction of appalling corporate indifference provide a strong counter to U.S. policymakers’ arguments that the North American Free Trade Agreement will improve conditions for Mexcian workers and their families. For the vast majority of the people of Matamoros, this video makes shockingly clear, free trade has meant nothing less than the devastation of their community.

GE’s Deadly Medicine

According to Phyllis Piano, spokesperson for GE Medical Systems in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the equipment - a Sagittaire linear accelerator - was designed, manufactured, sold and installed by companies affiliated with Thomas CGR, a French company acquired by GE in 1988.

Although new Sagittaire units have not been manufactured since 1984, the Zaragoza machine was serviced by GE-CGR Espana, a GE subsidiary, GE said. According to Piano, there are approximately 25 Sagittaire units operating worldwide, including the unit in Zaragoza.

Dr. James Schwade, chair of the department of radiation oncology at the University of Miami School of Medicine, visited Zaragoza in May 1991 at the request of victims’ attorneys. "The injuries I saw were very severe," Schwade says. "This is the worst radiation therapy accident that I am aware of in terms of severity of injuries and the number of patients involved."

According to GE, the court found both Mariano Conte, the company’s service technician, and GE-CGR Espana civilly liable for the $3.7 million award to the accident victims. Although Conte was found guilty of criminal negligence, GE-CGR Espana was not the subject of any criminal charges.

Michael Repiso, a Miami lawyer advising some of the victims in the case, said that other charges are being pursued against officers and directors of GE. According to Repiso, provincial authorities in Zaragoza are investigating GE officials for possible criminal wrongdoing.

Piano says that there is no criminal complaint currently pending against directors of GE CGR Espana. "There have been repeated attempts by parties in Spain to initiate an investigation by the appropriate authorities as to whether charges should be brought against GE CGR Espana directors," says Piano. "They have been rejected by both instruction and trial judges."

The Litter Lobby

Pat Franklin, executive director of Container Recycling Institute, a public interest group that serves as a clearinghouse for information on deposit legislation, charged that KAB’s primary mission between 1970 and 1990 was to defeat bottle recycling legislation at the state and federal levels.

According to Franklin, in 1976, KAB’s members included the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Wildlife Federation, the Audobon Society and the Sierra Club, but those groups and more than a dozen others left the organization that year when KAB openly opposed bottle bills on the ballot in four states.

In the 1970s, KAB’s promotional slogan was "People Start Pollution - People Can Stop It." KAB’s new advertising will instruct viewers that "recycling alone just can’t do it."

"[KAB is] still putting the blame for waste generation and the responsibility for waste management on the public sector, when the real polluters are the industries that manufacture, sell, bury and burn the waste," says Rick Hind of Greenpeace’s toxics campaign.

"KAB’s promotional materials are silent on policies such as elimination of tax credits [for manufacturing with virgin materials], requirements for recycled content, mandatory recycling rates, bottle bills, requirements for reuse or moratoriums on unsafe disposal methods that would shift the burden for waste management from the public to the private sector," Hind asserts.

"We are not a trade group," says Roger Powers, KAB’s president. "We have a grassroots constituency. Our members are a good cross-section of the Fortune 500 corporations. We are helping to educate 495 American communities on what the [waste management] options are. I don’t go hat in hand seeking out environmental groups."

Toxic Traffickers Busted

According to federal prosecutors Stephen A. Mansfield and Nathan Hochman, the evidence at trial showed that Ahmad illegally transported and exported hazardous chemical waste to Pakistan for disposal after he and his co-defendant, Rafat Asrar, 38, of Irvine, California, intentionally set fire to Shankman Laboratories as part of a fraudulent scheme to collect over $205,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Shankman Laboratories, in Chatsworth, California, was a chemical laboratory owned by Ahmad.

The jury also returned verdicts against Ahmad and Asrar on charges of arson, conspiracy to commit arson, mail fraud and perjury. Ahmad was also convicted of money laundering.

The cost of legally disposing of the hazardous chemical waste that remained in the lab after the fire was approximately $80,000. In contrast, the cost of exporting the hazardous waste to Pakistan for illegal disposal cost only $1,800. Ahmad intended to dump the 27 55-gallon drums of hazardous waste down mine shafts in Pakistan ; the mines are owned by Ahmad and his family.

The hazardous waste, which included cyanide, mercury and arsenic, would have severely contaminated underground drinking water supplies and seriously endangered human health, according to the federal/state task force on environmental prosecutions that investigated the case.

- Ben Lilliston

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c/o ACTWU-Chicago Joint Board

333 South Ashland

Chicago, IL 60607

3321 12th Street NE
Washington, D.C. 20017

and Economic Justice

P.O. Box 7399

Albuquerque, NM 87194

P.O. Box 701796

Tulsa, OK 74170

for Economic and Social Justice

3272 Idle Creek Lane

Decatur, GA 30034

310 Edgware Road

London W2 1DY

ENGLAND

25 Louisiana Avenue NW

Washington, D.C. 20001

P.O. Box 1475

Nashville, TN 37202

1290 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10104

22 West Frontage Road

Northfield, IL 60093

2 Manhattanville Road

Purchase, NY 10577

Publications

A Directory of Organizations in Canada, Mexico and the United States

Edited by Ricardo Hernadez

and Edith Sanchez

Albuquerque, NM:Inter-Hemispheric

Education Resource Center, 1992

Labor Suppression in Mexico Today

By Dan LaBotz

Boston: South End Press, 1992

P.O. Box 6003

Durham, NC 27708-6003

Action Around the Globe

4677 30th Street

Suite 214

San Diego, CA 92116

Resource Center

Box 4506

Albuquerque, NM 87196

Documentation Exchange

P.O. Box 2327

Austin, TX 78768

Environment: Options for

Congressional Action

Texas Center for Policy Studies

P.O. Box 2618

Austin, TX 78768

By Susan Williams

Burnsville, NC:

Rural Southern Voice for Peace, 1992

A Newsletter on the North American Free Trade Agreement

c/o The Development GAP

927 15th Street, NW

Washington, D.C. 20005

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