The growth of cross-border solidarity today is taking place at a time when U.S. penetration of Mexico is growing – economically, politically, and even militarily. While the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has its own special characteristics, it is also part of a global system of production, distribution and consumption. It is not just a bilateral relationship.

    Jobs go from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico in order to cut labor costs. But from Mexico those same jobs go to China or Bangladesh or dozens of other countries, where labor costs are even lower. As important, the threat to move those jobs, experienced by workers in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards, are now common in Mexico. Those threats force concessions on wages. In Sony’s huge Nuevo Laredo factory, for instance, that threat was used to make workers agree to an indefinite temporary employment status, even though Mexican law prohibited it.

    Multiple production locations undermine unions’ bargaining leverage, since action by workers in a single workplace can’t shut down production for the entire corporation. The UAW, for instance, was beaten during a strike at Caterpillar in large part because even though the union could stop production in the U.S., production in Mexico continued. Grupo Mexico can use profits gained in mining operations in Peru to subsidize the costs of a strike in Cananea.

    The privatization of electricity in Mexico will not just affect Mexicans. Already plants built by Sempra Energy and Enron in Mexico are like maquiladoras, selling electricity into the grid across the border. If privatization grows, that will have an impact on US unions and jobs, giving utility unions in the U.S. a reason to help Mexican workers resist it. This requires more than solidarity between unions facing the same employer. It requires solidarity in resisting the imposition of neoliberal reforms like privatization and labor law reform as well.

    In both countries, the main union battles are now ones to preserve what workers have previously achieved, rather than to make new gains. Mexican unions are enmeshed in the state labor process, in which the government still certifies unions’ existence, and to a large degree controls their bargaining. In the U.S. labor is endangered by economic crisis, falling density, and an increasingly hostile political system. This leads to a rise in nationalism and protectionism, creating new obstacles for solidarity.

    As the attacks against unions grow stronger, solidarity is becoming necessary for survival. Unions face a basic question on both sides of the border – can they win the battles they face today, especially political ones, without joining their efforts together? Fortunately, this is not an abstract question. Enormous progress has taken place over the last two decades.

    Individual U.S. unions began looking across the border for themselves, seeking new contacts with unions opposed to the free trade agreement. The FAT’s Benedicto Martinez traveled the US in the free trade caravan, organized by the Teamsters Union, to build rank and file opposition to NAFTA.

    The NAFTA debate provoked discussion about the relationship between workers in Mexico and the US.  Many union members responded by supporting efforts to organize independent unions in the border plants. “It was a kind of school,” Martinez recalls. “It was not so easy anymore for someone to say that Mexicans were stealing jobs. They could see there was a real problem.”

    The border provided an area for experimenting with new ways to organize workers. The following decade saw an explosion of activity on the border. The maquiladora organizing drive at Plasticos Bajacal in 1993 first highlighted for U.S. unions the reality of public union representation elections and the lack of the secret ballot. The San Diego Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers raised enough money to pay lost time for fired workers, so they could continue organizing the factory.

    The worker rebellion at the huge Sony factory was the first major battle under NAFTA, and the first place where the false promises of its labor side-agreement became obvious.  Hundreds of workers were beaten in front of the plant when they ran candidates in their CTM union’s election. When that door was closed, they tried to form an independent union, and were blocked by the company and Mexican government. NAFTA’s labor side agreement did nothing to change the situation.

    The leader of the Sony workers, Martha Ojeda, was smuggled by her coworkers across the Rio Grande to Texas, and she eventually became director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.

    In the late 1990s two strikes at Tijuana’s Han Young factory led to killing fast track authorization in the U.S. Congress for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The independent union there became one of the first to successfully force the government to give it legal status. Los Angeles’ big oil union, later a local of the Steel Workers, was a major source of support for the strikers. An investigation by the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network documented dangerous conditions and lack of inspections that violated Mexican law, as the network also did at CustonTrim/AutoTrim. Those experiences in maquiladoras were the precursors of the later investigation into silicosis among striking miners in Cananea.

    Struggles have taken place in maquiladoras for two decades all along the border. Many centers or collectives of workers have come together over those years. Walkouts over unpaid wages or indemnizacion, or terrible conditions, are still relatively common. Local activists still find ways to support them, like the Collective Ollin Calli in Tijuana, and its network of allies across the border in Tijuana, the San Diego Maquiladora Workers Solidarity Network.

    Maria Estela Rios Gonzalez, a CJM board member, former legal advisor to Lopez Obrador when he was Mexico City Mayor, and former president of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers, believes greater commitment still faces a perception in Mexico City that the border region is a remote area, far from the places where decisive changes are made in the country’s direction. “Local struggles on the border have never been successful in becoming national causes,” she charges. The same observation could be made about the way large U.S. unions and organizations see border struggles. In addition, the difficulties of maintaining a cross-border relationship in which unorganized factory workers play a leading role have never been adequately examined.

    Despite the flight of many jobs to China, a U.S. economic recession that has caused massive layoffs in border plants, and extreme levels of violence in many border communities, the maquiladora industry in north Mexico is still enormous. Three thousand plants employ over 1.3 million workers.  It’s not just the size of the industry that makes these plants important. They’ve been the laboratories for the rightward shift in labor law and labor relations, now being applied to workers across Mexico. The states are a stronghold of political conservatism and corporate power, because of the disenfranchisement of their working population.

    A vibrant and strong labor movement on the border would change Mexico’s politics. The influence of the maquiladoras on U.S. employment and runaway production over the years is undeniable, and strong unions there would have a tremendous impact on U.S. labor too. The growth of labor solidarity in the last two decades between the U.S. and Mexico owes a lot to the border labor wars. It was there that U.S. unions first acquired a clear vision of the importance of their relations with Mexican workers. The decline in activity in border factories over the last few years, and in the support from major unions and institutions in both countries for it, is a real weakness in the efforts to build a culture of labor solidarity.