Seven Oaks Magazine.

The free trade ‘debate,’ too often, comes across only as shallow and often shrill rhetorical point scoring. From its zealous advocates, like Jennifer Mather’s seemingly permanent substitute, Michael Campbell, on CKNW, a barrage of economic statistics are hurled at anyone who dares to question the human or environmental cost of corporate trade and investment deals. Unfortunately, the ‘anti’ free trade position too often comes across in easy, nationalistic rhetoric about “our jobs” — think Ross Perot, and the “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving to Mexico.

In The Children of NAFTA, David Bacon gets beyond the often-demagogical debate and delves deep into the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement on working people on both sides of the Rio Grande. NAFTA is a decade old, only a fraction of the time that Bacon has been immersed in the struggle of the multi-national labour force that works the fields and maquiladoras of southern California and northern Mexico. Bacon’s achievement is significant: a thorough critique of NAFTA from an internationalist perspective, told in an engaging journalistic style, revealing the impact of neo-liberal globalisation through the stories of dozens of workers, families and rank-and-file union activists.

Case studies illustrate the concrete effects of NAFTA, and are often accompanied by historical sketches of the labour movements of Mexico and the United States. In fact, NAFTA and its neo-liberal ‘reforms’ marked the codification of the betrayal of the protections of workers and peasants’ rights in the Mexican constitution that resulted from that country’s social revolution early in the twentieth century. Those gains, of course, had largely been lost through decades of bureaucratic and corrupt rule by the PRI (Partido de la Revolucion Institucional). So, for instance, pliant ‘bosses unions’ are prevalent in the maquiladora factories as a means of ensuring labour peace, which consists of low wages, high profits and little or no organised resistance.

That resistance — against the starvation wages and rampant abuses and safety violations that define working life in the maquiladoras — required new, independent organizations. Bacon explores the case of Han Young, a Hyundai plant in the burgeoning border town of Tijuana, where workers fought a two-year battle to have their independent union recognized. Organisations in California developed to support and raise awareness of the efforts of Tijuana’s workers. This is part of a positive development that Bacon emphasizes. U.S. workers are drawing the lessons of struggle against increasingly mobile corporations and capital, identifying the centrality of internationalism:

“Throughout two decades of wrenching industrial restructuring, plant closures, relocations, and the growth of the low-wage service sector, U.S. workers have developed a deeper understanding of the need for solidarity. Many realize that they cannot successfully confront transnational corporations within the borders of the United States alone.” (Page 51)

This increasing awareness of the need for global resistance has undermined the traditional ‘Cold War consensus’ within the AFL-CIO leadership, and opened up new possibilities for the labour movement to reverse more than two decades of retreat. As Bacon describes, “International working-class solidarity, formerly a forbidden ideological concept, has become a set of practical and political problems confronting workers in the border plants themselves” (p. 310).

While auto production was one of a myriad of industries moving production across the Mexican border to access cheaper labour, a number of industries that needed to keep production closer to their market relied increasingly on Mexican and other immigrant labour within the United States. For instance, the meatpacking plants of the American Midwest have a largely Latino workforce, and Bacon examines the confrontational interaction between the food monopolies, the labour movement, and the hated and feared INS, la migra. The strategies being developed to organise the packinghouses, combining traditions of trade unionism and community organising, may prove key to the future revitalisation of the U.S. labour movement. Specifically, Bacon looks at the organising drive at the ConAgra beef plant in Omaha, Nebraska, where the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) combined efforts with a community coalition, Omaha Together One Community (OTOC), to win union recognition at the plant.

The ‘restructuring’ of the meatpacking industry began long before NAFTA, as companies imposed deep wage cuts through the 70s and 80s. Today, wages in the industry are $4 below the average manufacturing wage, down from what was once an above-average industrial wage. With a lower wage structure imposed, companies are more reliant than ever on immigrant labour. Here, NAFTA’s impact is more indirect. The economic conditions imposed by neo-liberal policies in Mexico put people in motion, spurring migration to factories and fields in the United States.

The Children of NAFTA examines the consequences of this migration of labour to the North, as well as the effects of migration of capital to the South. In opposition to the chauvinism that has historically plagued American organised labour, Bacon points to the new wave of immigration as an infusion of experience in struggle and of potential for rebuilding the labour movement’s strength. If NAFTA and like trade deals have weakened workers’ rights and opened up more of the world to capitalist exploitation, they have also opened up new possibilities for building a truly international workers’ movement. David Bacon’s work is valuable reading for anyone interested in these very real possibilities.