Chapter 1 - Organizing the working poor in Mexico and the U.S.

The challenge of organizing low-wage workers in the U.S. and Mexico is different in some respects but remarkably similar in its basics. 

This became apparent in the panels and workshops held on the first day of the convention as garment workers, high school teachers, and meat-packing workers from Washington state to Mexico described their struggles against transnationals like the Sara Lee corporation, Adidas, the Forever 21 clothing chain, and food giant Tyson.

“What we face are employers who violate the law with virtual impunity, firing activist workers, ignoring court judgments and finally abandoning the plant and shifting production to other facilities,” said Gilberto Piñeda Bañuelos, an advisor to the independent SINTTIM union that represents workers fighting for their legal severance pay from the Adidas contractor Pung Kook in La Paz, Mexico. SINTTIM also represents workers in other maquiladoras in the state of Baja California del Sur. 

In both the U.S. and Mexico, transnational companies come and go in constant search of the most exploitable labor they can find. Over the past two years more than 500 maquila plants have abandoned Mexico for lower wage countries in Asia and elsewhere.

It is difficult but by no means impossible to organize workers employed by these powerful and highly mobile corporations. That was the message from workers now in the fourth year of their campaign at Sara Lee plants in Monclova, Mexico, which produce the company’s Hanes brand of clothing. Several current and former Sara Lee workers, as well as Betty Robles of SEDEPAC, a worker center organizing at the Sara Lee factories, provided a vivid account of a campaign that has involved allies around the globe. Despite the firing of more than a dozen leaders, the campaign has succeeded in eliminating forced overtime and gaining some legal benefits that had been previously denied, but health and safety conditions remain unacceptable and the pay is not close to a living wage. The workers here, as is the case throughout Mexico, also have to deal with an “official” union that functions more like an arm of management than a representative of the workers.

A lively theatrical performance by the Worker Center from Puebla, Mexico (CAT) at the end of the first day of deliberations reinforced many of the themes discussed during the day. A funny and biting piece of street theater, it reminded everyone of the harm caused by the stereotyping of women workers and their power to shatter the oppressive myths that hold back the struggle of all workers.

Even in the very rare instances when workers in Mexico succeed in gaining legal recognition for an independent union, they can find themselves the target of a concerted attack by employer, government and official union. That’s what has happened with the SITESABES union of high school teachers in Guanajuato, who are challenging the suspension of their charter in court. Here the employer is not a transnational corporation but a state government.

“The rules of the game have been rigged against workers across the board and it is those rules—laws and the enforcement of those laws—that we must also work to change if these organizing campaigns are to succeed,” commented Arturo Alcalde, a prominent labor attorney. 

Cindy Cho and Guadalupe Hernandez march in a joint protest organized by KIWA and the Garment Worker Center to boycott Assi and Forever 21.

As discussion shifted to the campaign of the Garment Workers Center in Los Angeles against the Forever 21 clothing company, both the differences and similarities in organizing low-wage workers in Mexico and the U.S. were thrown into sharp relief. Forever 21 is a retailer with 145 stores in the U.S. and Canada and most of its production in Los Angeles sweatshops. The workers, most of them undocumented Latina immigrants, face the same hazardous conditions and poverty wages that prevail throughout the industry. “We are dealing with a huge and powerful industry in which these abuses can only be stopped through the power of organized workers,” said Joann Lo of the GWC. Lo pointed out that GWC is organizing workers, not creating a union, but the question was raised again of what could be done about unresponsive unions that left workers vulnerable to the unrelenting pressures of their employers, resulting in the notorious “race to the bottom.”

The experience of meat packing workers in eastern Washington illustrates one course of action that has proven effective. A rank-and-file movement elected new leadership in this small Teamsters local, who unified the ethnically diverse base of workers, strengthened the union on the shop floor by building one-on-one networks and pressed demands for better working conditions and wages. The local represents 1700 workers at a Tyson plant in which immigrant workers are a large proportion of the workforce. “There are 21 languages spoken in the plant,” said Lorene Scheer, the local’s organizing director, “and for many years the employer successfully used divide-and-conquer tactics to weaken the union.”

Chito Cuellar, HERE Local 2, and Lorene Scheer, Teamsters Local 556, lead a workshop on building relationships and working with charro (company) unions.

Tyson, the world’s largest meat producer, is attempting to crush the local, which has no support from its own national union. This group has become a model of what can be accomplished by drawing its strength from the active and democratic participation of its own rank and file. “What we have to do now is link up with a broader strategy,” said Scheer, “which is why meetings like this are so valuable for us.”

Indeed, much of the discussion during the convention probed for answers to this central question of how these many struggles fit into a common strategy. Everyone understood that no single organization or single campaign in a single country by itself could break the stranglehold that transnational corporations have on working people around the world. But there was a sense that all of these efforts were whittling away at corporate power, creating a little more space for low-income workers to maneuver and fight for their rights. There were no simple answers, however, to how and on what basis these efforts can be coordinated to bring maximum pressure to bear on a system that elevates corporate profits above the most elementary human needs.