IRVINE, CA (8/2/98) -- Daimler St. extends for three unimpressive blocks, between anonymous crackerbox buildings in an aging Irvine industrial park, next to Interstate 55. It's hard to tell what goes on in these concrete warehouses - they look pretty much alike. In some of them, it's apparent that nothing goes on at all -- real estate signs hang across their facades, advertising that their occupants have fled or disappeared.
The Friction plant is one of these anonymous tiltups. Soon it will be vacant too -- already a real estate agent's sign partially hides the arrow telling truck drivers where to turn to find the loading docks. Friction is so anonymous that no other sign even announces the company's name. If you don't know the address already, presumably you have no business there.
Friction Corp. gets its name from the simple, automatic process every driver uses a hundred times a day, every time they press downward on the brake pedal of a car or truck. As the brake pad squeezes the rotor or pushes out against the brake drum, friction from the contact brings their vehicle safely to a halt.
Friction makes brakes.
Inside its concrete box, the company's workers bake the pads. They drill the holes and attach them to the metal flanges, which later bolt into the wheel assemblies of a million cars and trucks. For over a hundred people, Friction has been a familiar place for years -- even decades. Since working life absorbs a third of all waking and sleeping hours, these folks have spent as much time in this long low edifice as they have in their own kitchen or living room.
Maria Villela and her husband Raquel spent a combined 32 years in this Irvine auto parts plant. They were there when the business was bought by Echlin, a Connecticut-based transnational corporation. The two were leaders in the organizing drive that brought in the union in 1994, and Maria became its president. And they were there last summer, when three workers from another Echlin plant, three thousand miles away, showed up at lunchtime on the grassy strip between the factory and the street.
When the lunchtruck pulled into the lot that day, sounding its horn, Friction workers began streaming out of the plant's huge doors into the parking lot. A small group took their lunches, walked out of the gate to the street, and sat down on the grass to hear what the three strangers had to say.
Like the majority of Friction's workers, who are immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the strangers spoke Spanish. They told the tale of their own factory, a plant in Mexico City with a history of accidents, where wages are a tenth of those in Irvine, and where a government-controlled union prevented workers from acting independently to improve conditions.
Their story was not a complete surprise to Friction workers. "We used to get boxes of parts from their plant," explains union shop steward Ruben Cabrera. "When we'd open them up, the parts were covered in dust." Brake pads are made from asbestos. Friction workers thought the dust in the boxes was that fibrous mineral which causes mesothelioma, a kind of lung cancer, when it's inhaled. Dust in the boxes, they say, already gave them the idea that conditions in the Mexico City plant were not healthy.
Nevertheless, "we were surprised by what they said, and some of us got pretty mad," Cabrera remembers. "The situation they described was very unjust -- I felt they were being treated like slaves."
As the quiet lunchtime discussion wore on, Friction workers described to their Mexican visitors the improvements they'd been able to make in Irvine after organizing their union. The Mexicans, on their part, explained that they were starting an effort to organize their own independent union, and get rid of the government-affiliated union the company favored.
Many Friction workers, who as Mexican immigrants were already familiar with the country's system of "charro" or management-friendly unions, identified with the effort in Mexico City to win a democratic union. "We wanted to help the workers there win their rights," says Maria Villela.
In February, Echlin Corp. formally notified Villela's union it was closing the Friction plant. By August 31, the gate into the Irvine factory will shut for the last time. The ovens will be turned off. The machinery that churned out brake pads and auto parts for over two decades will be loaded onto trucks and hauled away. The plant's 110 production workers will give the boxy building a last look, and move on with their lives.
Friction will be gone.
Echlin spokesperson Paul Ryder says only that the work is being moved, and claims it's only going to other U.S. factories. "We have overcapacity for that product line," he says. "The closure is just the normal course of business."
But Friction workers are convinced that their desire for a common, human bond of sympathy and support for their lunchtime visitors is the reason why Echlin is shutting Friction's doors. Friction managers, they say, interpreted their desire as a danger signal.
The move came as a shock to Friction workers, who have an average of 11 years on the job. "We think it's revenge," Villela declares. "We work like crazy here, and make the best product in the industry. Now they say they're transferring the work to other plants."
According to Cabrera, a couple of years ago Sears Roebuck, one of Friction's principal customers, was so pleased with the quality of the factory's product that it gave the company money to reward its employees. Each worker took home a $100 bonus.
At lunchtime last week, a group of workers eating on the small grassy strip next to the street speculated that the company would actually sacrifice quality and efficiency by transferring the work to other plants. "We hear that in Virginia" one reported, "where some of the work's going, that they have eight people working on each oven. Here we only need two."
It seems evident that economic motives are not the only ones driving the plant's closure.
According Leanna Noble, a representative for the United Electrical Workers (UE), the parent union for the local at the Friction plant, "the company also told us that the closure reflected a change in corporate management, that it was an effort to reorganize the production mix and the location of production. It's clear that the company isn't cutting production back - it's moving it."
"I think it's likely that the company found out about the Mexico City workers' visit to Irvine, and concluded that the Irvine workers had a special role in encouraging the organization of their independent union," speculates Bob Kingsley, the UE's organizing director.
That conclusion is supported by conversations with supervisors that workers reported to Cabrera. "They were told that 'this is what you get for what you've done,'" he says. "What hurts isn't just the shock of losing a job. It's losing friends and people you've known and worked with for years. I came here from a small town in Michoacan seventeen years ago. I got a job here right away, and I've been here ever since. Working at Friction has been a big part of my life."
Encouraging workers from the Mexico City plant to organize an independent union was not the first time that the employees of the Irvine factory found themselves mired in serious conflict with the company.
Echlin has a reputation as an extremely union-hostile employer.
On March 13, 1998, Echlin senior vice-president Milton Makoski made perfectly clear the company's raging antipathy to unions. In a letter to Teamster Union vice president Tom Gilmartin, who proposed that Echlin negotiate a corporate code of conduct, Makoski wrote, "We are opposed to union organization of our current non-union locations ... We will fight every effort to unionize Echlin employees who have chosen not to be represented by a union." He went on to note approvingly that, despite "60 years of determined and relentless efforts" by unions, a majority of its employees are still unorganized. "There is only one [operation] in existence," he regrets, "where the employees, while they were part of the Echlin organization, have elected to be represented by a union." (The company's other unionized plants were already union at the time that Echlin bought the companies.)
That operation was the Friction plant.
In the Irvine factory, workers had formed their union, UE Local 1090, in a fierce organizing battle in 1994. "We got tired of having supervisors tell us, 'do this or there's the door,'" Cabrera recalls. "If we stopped our machine just to go to the bathroom, they'd yell at us. Even those of us who had been here for years were only making $6.00 an hour."
Cabrera is a heavyset, softspoken man. It's not hard to see why he might inspire confidence in other workers trying to speak up to a hostile management, or why they might later have chosen him as steward. As he desribes these conditions there's no whine in his voice. He speaks carefully and slowly. It's a demeanor that would carry credibility even with the foremen themselves.
But had union depend simply on the credibility of leaders like Cabrera, or the bravery of the other workers inside the plant, it still might not have succeeded in overcoming the company's intense opposition. The union tried to back them up by finding support for them from other factories in the Echlin chain.
"We put one of our organizers on the road," Kingsley explains, "meeting with workers and unions at other Echlin plants. Workers in one Virginia factory where the Amalgmated Clothing Workers (now UNITE) had a contract, and at various Teamster locals around the country signed petitions, sent letters of support, and wore buttons at work supporting the local in Irvine. That was the origin of what grew to be the Echlin Workers Alliance."
The effort was successful. Echlin signed a contract and recognized the union in the Friction plant.
Two years later, during a second round of contract negotiations, unions in the Echlin alliance again sent faxes and petitions to plant managers throughout the company in support of the Irvine workers. Villela, who was elected president of the Local 1090, credited the alliance's involvement with helping them win a sizable raise.
Given the company's stated attitude towards unions, these actions may have won the company's respect, but not its goodwill. Nevertheless, the union organizing alone was probably not sufficient to provoke the closure of the Friction plant.
The series of events which set that into motion may have had their start instead on the outskirts of Mexico City, at Echlin's ITAPSA brake factory. There, throughout 1996 and 1997, workers at the ITAPSA plant endeavored to join STIMAHCS, an independent metal- and steelworkers union. That effort was thwarted last summer through the combined efforts of the company, the government-backed "official" union federation and the local police.
While squelching independent unions in Mexico is nothing out of the ordinary, the international response to it broke new ground. Since '96, STIMAHCS has been part of a NAFTA-zone alliance of unions with contracts in Echlin's factories, including the Teamsters, the United Electrical Workers (UE), the Paperworkers and UNITE in the U.S., and the Canadian Steelworkers and Auto Workers. This unique labor alliance sought to mobilize the unions' combined membership at Echlin factories to assist each other in bargaining and organizing. "Our primary purpose," says Kingsley, "is to achieve a situation where we're all sitting down at the table with the same company, and bargaining together."
When ITAPSA workers began facing firings in June of 1996, unions in the alliance responded. The most active U.S. local in that campaign was the one at the Irvine Friction plant.
Local 1090 members signed a petition after the September 10 sham-election at ITAPSA, demanding that Echlin stop firing workers and recognize STIMAHCS. When Villela and other executive board members presented it to Friction plant manager Mark Levy, "we could see in his face how angry he was. He told us we had drawn a line between the union and the company," she recalls.
The battles around both Friction and ITAPSA show a new level of union resolve to reach across borders in an effort to deal with a common employer in the era of free trade - even as they underscore the difficulties of prevailing in such efforts. As the U.S. auto industry relies increasingly on parts made in maquiladoras and other Mexican plants, however, the increased U.S. focus on struggles such at those at ITAPSA may just be beginning.
NAFTA had only been in effect for a few months when Ruben Ruiz got a job at ITAPSA in the summer of 1994. As his new boss showed him around, Ruiz noticed with apprehension that the machines were old and poorly-maintained. He had hardly begun his first shift when workers around him began yelling out as a machine suddenly malfunctioned, cutting four fingers from the hand of the man operating it.
"I was very scared," he later remembered. "I wanted to leave." But he needed a job.
Accidents were only part of the problem. Asbestos dust from the brake parts manufactured at the plant coated machines and people alike. Workers were given X-rays, Ruiz says, and later some would be fired.
Echlin says its ITAPSA plant complies with Mexican health and safety laws. "Medical records indicate that since Echlin has owned the ITAPSA plant there have been no work-related employee deaths," a company statement says.
It seemed obvious to Ruiz, however, that things were very wrong. When his friend David Gonzalez asked him to come to a meeting to talk about organizing an independent union, he went. As workers at ITAPSA organized, they discovered that the plant already had a union -- Section 15 of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, Mexico's largest labor federation. But ITAPSA's 300 employees had never even seen the union contract.
The CTM agreement with Echlin is a "protection contract," insulating the company from labor unrest. Jesus Campos Linas, the dean of Mexican labor lawyers, says there are thousands of such contracts, arrangements of mutual convenience between government-affiliated unions such as the CTM, and foreign companies who want to take advantage of Mexico's low wages.
In the process of making their decision to challenge the protection union system in their factory, three ITAPSA workers visited their Irvine counterparts to find out about conditions in U.S. plants.
Once ITAPSA managers knew about the independent union, the firings began. In early June, 1996, 16 workers were terminated. Ruiz was called into the office of Luis Espinoza de los Monteros, ITAPSA's human relations director. "He told me he had received a phone call from the leaders of the Echlin group in the U.S., who told him that any worker organizing a new union should be discharged without further question," Ruiz recounts. "He told me my name was on a list of those people, and I was discharged right there and then."
Despite the firings, the independent union chosen by ITAPSA workers, STIMAHCS, filed a petition with the regional office of Mexico's labor board. A date was set for an election between STIMAHCS and the CTM -- August 28, 1997.
That morning, the fired workers went to the plant, where they were joined by union supporters from the swing and grave shifts, anxious to vote. But the day before, at the CTM's insistence, the labor board had postponed the election without notifying STIMAHCS. Company supervisors, looking at the off-shift workers assembled at the gate, got a very good idea of who was supporting the independent union.
"That afternoon the company began to fire more workers," says Benedicto Martinez, general secretary of FAT, a Mexican federation of independent unions. He says that 50 workers were eventually terminated - a claim Echlin disputes. "Allegations of retaliation and dismissal of 50 employees as a result of their allegiance to FAT are false," it says.
The election was finally held 13 days later. The evening before, a member of the state judicial police drove a car filled with rifles into the plant, unloading them openly. The next morning, two busloads of strangers entered the factory, armed with clubs and copper rods. STIMAHCS tried to get the election canceled. But the labor board went ahead, even after thugs roughed up one of the independent union's organizers.
As workers came to vote, escorted by CTM functionaries, they passed a gauntlet of the club-wielding strangers. At the voting table, they were asked to state aloud which union they favored, in front of management and CTM representatives. STIMAHCS observers couldn't even inspect the credentials of the voters. Many voted who were unknown to the factory's workers.
Predictably, STIMAHCS lost.
"The UE had a staff organizer present during the [ITAPSA] election, Sam Smucker, who was on leave in Mexico at the time," Kingsley notes. "Together with the way in which the Alliance was formed, and its origins, this all made the UE a target. That's why we believe the closure of the plant in Irvine is an act of vengeance and retaliation."
Echlin's Paul Ryder wouldn't respond to the allegation that the closure is revenge for workers' solidarity actions.
After the Mexico City election, the trinational alliance of unions filed a complaint over the violation of workers' rights at Echlin, before the administrative body set up to enforce the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. This treaty, commonly known as NAFTA's labor side-agreement, allows workers, unions, and other organizations to charge that either Mexico, Canada or the U.S. is failing to enforce its laws guaranteeing workers' rights.
The Echlin case alleges collusion by the Mexican government, the company and the CTM to deny workers the right to representation by an independent union. The charges were heard before Irasema Garza, secretary of the National Administrative Office, a division of the U.S. Department of Labor, in Washington on March 23. A number of ITAPSA workers submitted affidavits about the firings and intimidation of workers. Ruiz himself testified.
And - just days after being told her own Friction plant was closing -- Maria Villela also went to Washington to support the ITAPSA workers at the NAO hearing, "We don't regret what we did for a minute," she says. "The company is responsible for a great injustice."
Echlin never showed up to contest the testimony. The NAO has not yet reported its conclusions.
In hundreds of small factories scattered across the California southland, job security is evaporating as it did at Friction. They've become cogs within large corporations seeking to cut labor costs to the bone, whipsawing workers and shifting production from plant to plant, country to country, as though borders and distance have vanished.
For years, workers have agonized over the resulting devastation to lives and communities. In Irvine, Friction workers moved beyond complaining to action. Villela and her union argue that the closure provides telling evidence that agreements like NAFTA have undermined their jobs.
To date, however, NAFTA's side agreement has been largely ineffective in protecting them, or other workers who have tried similar efforts.
The problem workers face at Mexican plants like ITAPSA is not a lack of laws to protect them. Mexican labor law is "very advanced and progressive," according to STIMAHCS attorney Eduardo Diaz. "The Federal Labor Law and Article 123 of the Constitution [cover] fundamental social rights," he points out.
But Mexican economic development policy depends on encouraging foreign investment. "Low wages are part of that policy, and every maquiladora that opens its doors is born with a union that protects it," says STIMAHCS general secretary Jorge Robles.
U.S. trade policy reinforces those priorities, using NAFTA and bailout loans to create favorable conditions for U.S. investment. Corporations like Echlin reap the benefits. According to University of California Professor Harley Shaiken, "the productivity of workers in Mexican plants is on a par with plants in the U.S. Investors get first-world rates of productivity, and a workforce with a third-world standard of living."
It's not a surprise that NAFTA's labor side agreement has a hard time overcoming these obstacles. "We recognize there's not enough power in the process to overcome the economic incentives of free trade," says Robin Alexander, the UE's director for international solidarity. "It's an extremely weak tool, and the lack of penalties for violating union rights is a gaping hole." Nevertheless, the union alliance convinced the AFL-CIO, the Canadian Labour Congress and a new union federation in Mexico, the National Union of Workers, to join in a complaint against Echlin under the side agreement. It is the first time they've taken such action together.
"Wherever I look, I see unions making efforts to figure out how to deal with each other, and face the danger of transnational corporations," Alexander observes. "Maybe there is no single answer, at least not yet. But we won't find any answers at all without getting out there and looking for them."
Workers at Irvine's Friction plant were some of the first to do so. They may have been forced to sacrifice their jobs, but they see themselves as pioneers, reaching across international boundaries to find new ways of enforcing labor rights.
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--------------------------------------------------------------- david bacon - labornet email david bacon internet: dbacon at igc.apc.org 1631 channing way phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703 ---------------------------------------------------------------