The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border / Edition 1

by David Bacon

Overview

Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date.

Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520244726
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	356
Sales rank:	494,007
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David Bacon is a journalist and photographer. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to The Nation, The Progressive, Z, The American Prospect, and the L.A. Weekly. His photographs documenting the lives of the workers discussed in the book were recently exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California as well as in Germany and Great Britain. His work can be seen at http://dbacon.igc.org.

Read an Excerpt

THE CHILDREN OF NAFTA

LABOR WARS ON THE U.S. MEXICO BORDER

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By David Bacon

University of California

Copyright © 2004 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-23778-1

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Chapter One

GRAPES AND GREEN ONIONS

THE CASTILLOS LOSE THEIR UNION

NAFTA repeatedly plunged a knife into José Castillo's heart.

He felt its first thrust on almost the same day the treaty took effect. He lost his job.

That New Year's Day, in 1994, the Zapatistas took up arms in southern Mexico, denouncing NAFTA's marginalization of poor Mayan farmers in the Lacandon jungle. Video cameras closed in on their ski masks and ancient rifles, uplinking to satellites a new iconography of the underside of the global economy. Three thousand miles north, on the desert fringe of southern California, Castillo and a thousand other Mexican farmworkers were also being pushed to the social margins. They offered an equally haunting icon of the impact of free trade, but unemployed Mexicans in California have less media appeal. No one from the Times or CNN noticed.

NAFTA then inflicted a second wound: its promised benefits failed to materialize. According to U.S. president Bill Clinton and labor secretary Robert Reich, a safety net-including retraining and extended unemployment benefits-was ready to catch the unfortunate few whose out-of-date skills made their jobs expendable. José Castillo and his wife, Ingracia, found this promise to be like the hot wind that blows around their home in the Coachella Valley-elusive, empty, and incapable of sustaining life.

But the third thrust was the cruelest. To understand this, you must know that José and Ingracia are veterans of the union wars that swept the California fields for three decades. They are the ones called de hueso colorado-all the way "to the marrow of their bones"-they are Chavistas, followers of César Chavez.

They lost their union.

"I felt like I lost my child." Ingracia's voice aches at the memory of the change that turned their world inside out and threatened the meaning that their struggle for dignity had given to their lives. Their story is part of the real history of NAFTA, about its consequences for working people on both sides of the border.

Because the Coachella Valley is so far south, only a couple of hours north of Mexico, its grape harvest comes in at the beginning of the season, in late May. By bringing their grapes into supermarkets before anyone else, valley growers always commanded premium prices; during the early 1990s, they were accustomed to receiving twenty dollars or more for a twenty-two-pound box in May. By July, when the harvest moved north to the San Joaquin Valley, the price usually dropped by half.

General Augusto Pinochet was the first to threaten that privileged position. Looking for exports to revive Chile's economy after the 1973 fascist coup, he discovered a winter market in his patron country. Even today, supermarket shelves in the United States are filled with Chilean grapes when the Coachella harvest starts.

But the real blow to the Coachella growers came from Mexico. U.S. ranchers like Delano's Jack Pandol, who began growing grapes in Chile under Pinochet, later began planting in the Sonoran Desert, south of Arizona. The year after NAFTA dropped restrictions on importing Mexican grapes into the United States, 7 million boxes flooded across the border. Coachella Valley's harvest was 10 million boxes that same season, only slightly more than the Mexican imports. And, to make matters worse for Coachella growers, the Mexican harvest starts at the same time. Their profitable position vanished overnight.

Since NAFTA, hardly any new fields of grapes have been planted anywhere in the Coachella Valley. Heaps of dry dead vines, their roots torn from the earth, point at the sun-sentinels of a dying industry.

The Bluestone Farming Company was one of the first to start tearing up its grapes. On January 6, 1994, Bluestone sent a letter to the Castillos and hundreds of other workers, informing them that the company was quitting the business of growing table grapes. By that time, however, the company was only a shell of its former self, a far cry from the days when its huge vineyards, spreading out across the desert, belonged to Lionel Steinberg.

Steinberg's enterprise, the David Freedman Company-or simply Freedman, as workers called it-is legendary in the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). It was one of the world's largest grape growers through the 1960s and 1970s, and it became the early home of the union.

While other grape growers fought the UFW with everything from lawyers to the gloved fists of strikebreakers to bullets, Steinberg was the exception. Perhaps ironically, his different attitude made him a very wealthy man.

by 1970, grape growers in California had been squeezed for five years by the UFW's fight for union recognition and its first grape boycott, a social movement that had become a symbol of economic justice in the minds of millions of people. The boycott had spread across the country, keeping growers' grapes locked up in coolers instead of filling supermarket shelves.

Steinberg broke ranks with the other growers and signed the first contract ending the historic grape strike, which had begun in 1965. Other growers followed suit. But when those same growers signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters union in 1973, in an effort to break the UFW, the farmworkers struck again. The renewed boycott once more squeezed off the sales of table grapes.

Steinberg, however, stayed with the UFW. Socially conscious consumers were trained to look for boxes of Freedman grapes, with the UFW's black eagle stamped prominently on the side. Steinberg sold when no one else could, and he got a higher price.

In 1973, the Castillos were strikers. But a decade earlier, when the union began, they had not been Chavistas. After coming north from Mexico at the beginning of the 1960s, José Castillo became a seasonal laborer. Like most farmworkers of that era, he was unemployed and hungry much of the year. But then he got a job as a year-round permanent employee on the big grape ranch of Mr. Karahadian.

With a dream of stability seeming closer to reality, he went back to Mexicali, a hundred miles south across the border. There, he married Ingracia, a woman from his home state of Jalisco, and then brought her back to the vineyards in the desert. Mr. Karahadian rented a house to them on the company ranch, a privilege commonly granted to permanent employees. And, in return, the Castillos were loyal workers.

"Those were hard times. We never had any breaks," Ingracia says. "I remember that I would bring food to work hidden in my clothes, and I would eat a little when I thought no one was looking. Today there's cold water to drink when we work, but in those days there was nothing. When women wanted to go to the bathroom, we'd just have to go find a place to hide ourselves in the vines. These were all things we had to battle for-time to eat, water to drink, bathrooms. We never had unemployment insurance before. We just had to work and work and work. As soon as one job ended, I had to find another one right away."

In June of 1965, the first grape strike started in Coachella. Filipino workers across the valley walked out, seeking to raise wages from $1.10 an hour to $1.25. When the harvest moved north into the San Joaquin Valley around Delano, the Mexican workers organized by César Chavez and Dolores Huerta agreed to join the fight. The two streams of migrants-the old Filipino manongs (a term of respect because of their age), who had been organizing field labor upheavals since the 1920s, and the vast wave of Mexican workers who had been flooding California fields since the 1940s-came together, and the United Farm Workers union was born.

"I remember that I was very afraid," Ingracia recalls. "We were so green then. I'll never forget it. We were working in a field on Fifty-Seventh Avenue, which is just a dirt road. When the organizers first showed up and started talking to us from the road, we went running into the field so that we wouldn't be able to hear what they were saying, about how good the union was. We went running into the vines. We didn't want to have anything to do with the union."

This, of course, made Mr. Karahadian very happy, and he told his workers to run and hide whenever the organizers showed up. But as the strikes ground on, year after year, Karahadian's losses began to temper his enthusiasm for fighting the union.

José remembers: "In 1970, Karahadian couldn't sell his grapes because of the boycott. One morning, very early, he came out and told us he wanted to talk to us. We were all at the labor camp. At that time, we were all still very against the union, because we were with him. We always believed whatever the boss told us. 'Don't sign anything. I'm with you. You're with me.'

"But when the boycott beat him, he said, 'I don't want to go broke. I'm going to sign with Chavez. You have four days. If you don't sign within those four days, you'll be out of here.' From that time onward, we saw how he had used us, and we never believed him again. First he'd hidden us inside his vines, and then he'd just made us a meal on a plate on the table."

In the three years that followed, the Castillos and the other grape workers in the valley realized that the union organizers had been right: the union was good for the workers. They might have been drawn in by the growers' involuntary defeat, but once they learned how to make the union work, they discovered that their contracts provided benefits, job security, and a newfound freedom from discrimination.

Despite the UFW's tumultuous history of strikes and boycotts, most grape workers had only those three years of UFW contracts by which to judge the union. Yet it was enough to win their loyalty for the two decades of struggle that were to come.

When the UFW grape contracts expired in 1973, "one night, Mr. Karahadian signed with the Teamsters," Castillo explains. "The next morning, he told us, 'Señores, I'm with the Teamsters now, and for me it's the better choice. You have four days to sign up.' But this time, a worker at the ranch named Hilario stood up, and he said to Karahadian, 'If you've made what's the best choice for you, well, we have too.' And he pulled a great big union flag out from under his shirt, and that's how the strike started there. And so Karahadian threw us off his property, into the street."

The Castillos took their children to stay with José's mother in Mexicali. Ingracia and her sister pulled their crew out on strike, in a scene made famous in the UFW's film Fighting for Our Lives. By the time the strike reached Delano in midsummer, it was one of the largest farmworker strikes in U.S. history. The Teamsters union, still two decades away from reform under Ron Carey, furnished goons who beat up strikers on the picket lines. In rural, grower-dominated counties, the sheriffs either looked on approvingly or arrested strikers and carted them off to jail. Ingracia still remembers vividly a priest telling her that her own arrest was an act of conscience and that God was on the side of the poor.

But when Juan de la Cruz and Nagi Daifullah were gunned down on the picket line, César Chavez called off the strike. The union sent some of the strikers to reorganize the grape boycott in cities across the United States and Canada, but most went back to the fields to find work, having spent months on the picket lines. And they discovered the unpleasant reality of the blacklist.

For grape workers like the Castillos, Freedman was the only company where the union still had the right to dispatch workers to the job-and it was the only company that would hire them. For twenty-one years, that right kept them employed-José as a permanent worker, Ingracia as a seasonal one-and provided stability for their family. It helped them buy a house in a pleasant neighborhood in Coachella. Their children went to college, a rare achievement for farmworkers.

It was the blacklist that made Freedman the vibrant heart of the union.

The workers at Freedman, despite their many skirmishes with Steinberg over work rules and grievances, looked at the company almost as if it were their own. "All the people who had the consciousness that the union was a good thing were concentrated there," José asserts. "And with that consciousness, Freedman was very well organized. Lots of workers would tell us it was the best place to be. It had the best benefits, and it had job security. In other companies, if you weren't working, you were afraid to even leave the house to go on an errand, because they might call you to give you work. In Freedman, we knew when we were going in to work and when we would leave. We didn't have to please anyone today to get work tomorrow."

When Governor Jerry Brown signed California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the vote at Freedman to decide whether or not workers wanted the union was a celebration, whereas at most other companies it was like a war. More than nine hundred workers voted for the UFW at Freedman. Only fourteen voted against it.

As the years passed, Steinberg's son, Billy, left farming and went to Hollywood to become a songwriter. Lionel finally sold most of the ranch to new investors, including Prudential Insurance, who renamed it Bluestone Farming Company.

When Bluestone closed, the Freedman workers applied for benefits under the NAFTA-related Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. A bone thrown to workers during the debate over the treaty, NAFTA-TAA extends unemployment benefits and pays for retraining for workers who can demonstrate that NAFTA cost them their jobs.

Hundreds of workers at Bluestone depended on getting seasonal work every year thinning and picking grapes and pruning, tying, and girdling the vines. But the California Employment Development Department (EDD) ruled that, out of the entire workforce, only forty-three people were eligible for benefits-everyone except the permanent year-round workers was disqualified. José got a little extra money as a result, but not much.

EDD's rationale was that the company's layoff notice was dated January 7, a few days before the seasonal crews would have been called to begin pruning vines. Because they were on layoff and not yet actively working at the time of the notice, EDD held that they didn't qualify. Ingracia and hundreds of other workers received no benefit at all from NAFTA-TAA, although no one-not EDD, the U.S. Labor Department, or even the company itself-disputes that Mexican grape imports allowed under NAFTA caused the company to close.

EDD will not discuss the case, but its claim of confidentiality seems an odd objection. The EDD office does virtually nothing to let workers know that the program even exists.

Continues...

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Excerpted from THE CHILDREN OF NAFTA by David Bacon Copyright © 2004 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Grapes and Green Onions
2. Putting Solidarity on the Table
3. Tijuana’s Maquiladora Workers
4. Han Young
5. Build a House, Go to Jail
6. The Strategic Alliance
7. Duro Means Hard
8. Mexico’s Wars over Privatization
9. Transplanted Expectations
10. The World of the Border Has Changed

Epilogue: The Confrontation to Come
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Bacon's] books . . . are sharp, analytical, and urgent."—Utne

Editorial Reviews

[Bacon’s] books . . . are sharp, analytical, and urgent.

Utne

Normally rare firsthand accounts from Mexican workers make up most of this examination of labor struggles in the fields and factories along the U.S.-Mexican border in the 10 years since the signing of NAFTA. Bacon, an associate editor with Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to the Nation, provides exhaustive, meticulous retellings of intimidation, violence and voter fraud that reveal a pattern of corporate and government collusion to squash laborers' attempts to organize independent unions. Such tactics are nothing new in Mexican politics, but Bacon argues they have a new significance post-NAFTA: enforcing the government's neoliberal policy of suppressing wages in order to attract foreign investment. While Bacon offers little in terms of substantiating this claim, the testimony of the workers is powerful and compelling (as are Bacon's 24 b&w photos), and the chunks of Mexican labor history Bacon presents along the way are clear and accessible, making this an invaluable book for anyone interested in the human mechanics of globalization. Ironically, despite rampant suppression of workers' organizations, Bacon finds an unintended success of NAFTA in burgeoning ties between U.S. and Mexican workers, in preparation for a large-scale fight for workers' rights that "will take place on the floors of the maquila plants." (Feb.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly