Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 16, 1993 TAG: 9309120256
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GERALD W. MEADOWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I'll tell you what I see and what I know. We had an AT&T plant in Fairlawn between 1980 and 1989. At its peak, it employed 2,500 Virginia workers and paid $7 to $9 an hour. I represent workers at the General Electric plant here, and I know GE has pursued a relentless program of job cuts for years in the United States, just recently announcing 170 jobs cut in Rome, Ga., 300 in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and 480 in Hickory, N.C.
The Genicom plant in Waynesboro used to employ 1,500 workers making computer printers. They're down to 650 workers doing only assembly and repair. The work is being done in Mexico where Genicom has a plant and 1,100 workers.
Is that what the Congressional Budget Office means when it says, ``net increases in jobs and income''? I say it doesn't know what it's talking about, and it's not listening to workers in this country or seeing what is going on under its nose. We've got one helluva fight on our hands.
I'll tell you about a study I believe. It's ``NAFTA's Corporate Cadre,'' published last month by the Institute for Policy Studies. This study concludes, ``NAFTA's passage would advance certain narrow individual corporate interests, often to the detriment of communities, states and North America as a whole.'' The report underscores the experience of my union, the International Union of Electronic Workers, AFL-CIO, and other unions of this region that this agreement will cost U.S. workers their jobs.
The report's chief findings are that corporations supporting NAFTA have already moved jobs to Mexico and have a base there. They will expand that base if NAFTA passes. It documents the fact that certain pro-NAFTA companies exploit workers in Mexico and conduct anti-union practices.
The study also examines USA-NAFTA, the leading pro-NAFTA organization in the United States, consisting of 2,300 U.S. corporations and lobby groups. They have appointed ``captains'' for each of the 50 states to sell NAFTA to the public. All but one of the state captains are among the 500 largest firms in the United States, but they claim to be a grass-roots organization. All but four of the state captains enjoy privileged access to the NAFTA negotiation process through representation on advisory committees to the U.S. trade representative.
Several USA-NAFTA state captains have eliminated jobs in the United States while increasing them in Mexico and elsewhere. The study says that U.S. corporations shipped 180,000 jobs to Mexico in the past 12 years, primarily to take advantage of low wages and poorly enforced environmental laws in Mexico. Among those identified as moving significant numbers of jobs to Mexico are AT&T, General Electric, General Motors and TRW, all of them state captains in USA-NAFTA. GE, with 13 plants in Mexico, cut 15,000 jobs in the United States between 1990 and 1992. With four plants in Mexico, AT&T cut 21,700 U.S. jobs in the same period.
Of the 32 state captains for which there is data, 29 have plants in Mexico, led by General Motors with 50 and United Technologies with 26. These figures show that the state captains have a significant interest in eliminating investment and trade barriers to increase their exports from Mexico to the United States.
USA-NAFTA captains, while claiming to be promoting what's best for their states, include some of those same states' most notorious job destroyers. Massive layoffs by GM have devastated the economies of several communities in Michigan, the state for which GM is the captain, and the firm plans to lay off 10,000 more workers at Michigan plants in the next three years.
Many United States corporations in Mexico violate worker rights' laws and have helped suppress Mexico's independent labor movement, although blacklisting workers for union activities is illegal in Mexico and in the United States. GE, a state captain for Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont, is one of the most notorious violators of worker rights in Mexico.
On March 23, GE's subsidiary, Electrocomponentes, fired employee Alma Molina after discovering her name on a list of ``undesirables'' distributed by the Association of Maquiladoras. Molina had been hired a week earlier as an electrical tester at $4.50 a day. She testified before a U.S. House subcommittee in July that she was blacklisted by her previous employer, Clarostat, for attempting to form a union to fight for improved safety standards and better wages in the plant.
Another GE subsidiary allegedly fired and blacklisted four union officials for organizing a work stoppage to protest mistreatment of a female employee at another maquiladora. The worker, Petra Avilez, began suffering a miscarriage in the plant and nearly bled to death because the manager refused to allow her to go to a hospital.
AT&T, a captain for seven states, has had numerous environmental, health and safety problems at its Matamoros plant. In February, Mexico`s counterpart to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, SEDESOL, shut down several lines at the AT&T plant because extractors were not removing hazardous smoke and chemical vapors. SEDESOL put seals on the equipment so it could not be operated. AT&T violated SEDESOL's regulatory action by breaking the seals and using the equipment without authorization. SEDESOL fined AT&T approximately $3,000 for violating the seals. Workers in AT&T's Mexican operations have complained about respiratory problems, skin rashes and extreme headaches from fumes and volatile chemicals.
NAFTA would encourage the kind of irresponsible corporate behavior analyzed in the IPS report and would promote competition at any cost. It ignores labor, social and environmental needs. It is not in the public interest and is not in the interest of the working people of this country or this region. It must be defeated.
\ Gerald W. Meadows of Roanoke is president of the IUE, Local 161, and the Roanoke United Central Labor Council.
by CNB