-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/2/_/1406/_/974549738/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com David Bacon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MEXICAN UNION LEADER'S HOME BURNED TO THE GROUND By David Bacon RIO BRAVO, TAMAULIPAS (11/15/00) -- Since Eliud Almaguer's house was burned to the ground, he and his wife Evelia have been moving from home to home, staying with friends. They rarely spend more than one night in the same place, fearing that those who destroyed their house might return to finish the job -- hurting them personally, or worse. "I fear for the life of my family," he says. Almaguer believes he was burned out in revenge. For the last three years he's led a campaign to organize an independent union at the Duro Bag plant, a maquiladora just across the Rio Grande from Pharr, Texas. Almaguer's home didn't inspire any envy among his neighbors. It was typical of the houses lining a dirt street in a dusty Rio Bravo barrio. The Almaguers were so poor they even used wood for heating and cooking, doing without the illegal electrical and water hookups which provide the only basic services for most homes in the neighborhood. Houses in border barrios are often made of wooden shipping pallets, with unfolded cardboard boxes stapled onto them for walls. They're extreme firetraps - the Almaguers were lucky they weren't home and therefore weren't harmed in the blaze. But as modest as it was, the home nevertheless was broken into at least twice prior to the fire, Almaguer says. "I think they were looking for union documents, since I don't have anything worth stealing, but we keep them in a safe place." Then, on the night of the fire, neighbors say they saw a man in a blue tee-shirt fleeing the scene just before flames engulfed the small dwelling. When they called the police to report the blaze, they were told that "if it's Eliud's, then let it burn," Almaguer reports. When he went himself to make a statement, the police refused to take one or conduct an investigation. He then went to Ciudad Victoria, to make a declaration to the state prosecutor. So far, however, no culprits have been apprehended. The Duro factory churns out chichi paper bags, sold for a buck at the ubiquitous gift shoppes which dot suburban shopping malls almost everywhere. The Duro Corporation, which also operates three U.S. plants, belongs to the Shor family. It's based in Ludlow, Kentucky, and produces for Hallmark Expressions, Neiman Marcus and other upscale clients. In the spring of 1998, Almaguer, an intense, stocky labor activist in his thirties, got a job at the plant. There he says he saw people lose fingers in machines cutting the cardboard used to stiffen the bottoms of the bags. Safety guards, he claims, were removed from the rollers which imprint designs on the paper lining -- the extra time they caused in cleaning was treated as needless lost production. Almaguer recalls that solvent containers didn't carry proper danger warnings, and while workers got dust masks, they were useless for filtering out toxic chemical fumes. "In terms of safety, well there just wasn't any," he remembers bitterly. Almaguer had already survived some of the best-known labor conflicts in the region - stints at Sony, where workers were beaten in front of the factory gates in 1995, on the union board at a Reynosa foundry, and at the Custom-Trim/Auto-Trim plant where Breed Technology has battled its own workers for years. It didn't take Almaguer's co-workers long to realize who they had in their midst. Facing what promised to be a protracted conflict, not only with Duro but with their own union, they called a meeting that fall to engineer the expulsion of their general secretary, Jose Angel Garcia Garces, viewed as too close to company managers. Before the night was over, Almaguer had been elected his replacement. The union at Duro is a "seccion," the Mexican term for local, of the Paper, Cardboard and Wood Industry Union, which in turn is part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM has been a pillar of support for the country's ruling bureaucracy since the 1940s. The local has a protection contract with Duro - an agreement in which a company pays union leaders to guarantee labor peace. The workers in the Duro plant decided to actually enforce that contract. They brought repeated grievances before the plant's human relations manager, Alejandro de la Rosa. "We'd take [our complaints] to his office, and he'd throw us out," Almaguer says. "The company was in violation of at least fifty percent of the contract." Wages average 320 pesos a week (about $35) - "worse than any in the region," he declares angrily. "And people were willing to work at bad-paying jobs. But not under those conditions." When de la Rosa refused to meet with Almaguer and the union committee, they went to their leaders in Mexico City, warning them they were thinking of striking to enforce compliance. Instead of backing them up, however, Almaguer recalls being told "that I should just negotiate with the company over my own personal benefits." In October, 1999, the company finally fired him. The union in Mexico City cooperated, invoking the notorious exclusion clause, a regulation used for decades by pro-company union officials to get rid of troublemakers, by excluding them from union membership. Police and guards were called into the plant to enforce the firing. But after three days of turmoil, workers forced the company and the union to continue recognizing Almaguer as the seccion's general secretary. De la Rosa didn't return phone calls for this story, but alleged in Rio Bravo's local newspaper, El Bravo, that "the workers are protesting things that aren't our responsibility. Almaguer says he's a dissident leader, but he was actually removed some time ago." This spring the contract at Duro expired, and workers drew up a list of demands for a new agreement. They asked for two pairs of safety shoes each year, work clothes, contributions to a savings plan, and a doctor at the plant to take care of injuries. "The company said it owned the factory - they would decide what would be done here," Almaguer recalls. When workers wouldn't budge, their national leaders signed a new agreement on June 11, ignoring their demands. The local committee returned to the plant the following day, and on June 12, Duro managers barred Almaguer from the factory. The afternoon shift refused to go in to work, and workers voted to strike. By then, they'd decided that better conditions were no longer enough. In front of the factory gates, they began organizing a new, independent and democratic union. "In the past, the company was always able to buy off our union leaders. Always," emphasizes Consuelo Moreno, a Duro worker. "And we paid the price. We can only change things if we have a union the company can't control." Throughout this period, Almaguer and his family were repeatedly threatened, starting as soon as he took union office. He says that not long after he was elected, one person followed his family and made threats, saying he'd been paid to do so by management. A second time, the same individual came to their home at night, and offered money. "They told me to slow down and tell the workers not to be against the National Paperworkers Union and Duro or else I would pay the consequences. That same night they came back at 1:00 AM, and scared my daughter by knocking and kicking the door, trying to open it," Almaguer recalls. Helping Duro workers to negotiate the tortuous road to an independent union has been San Antonio's Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras. The coalition assisted them when they confronted Tamaulipas' governor, Tomas Yarrington, as he made appearances during the national election campaign last spring. They told Yarrington they wouldn't let up until the state labor board granted the union legal recognition. CJM activists were arrested with the strikers, and mobilized a flood of letters and faxes to Yarrington and company officials. Mexico's new independent labor federation, the National Union of Workers, organized a public protest last August, attracting hundreds of advocates of independent unionism from Mexico and the U.S. Under the combined pressure, the Tamaulipas labor board finally gave in, granting the Duro union legal status. Workers have yet to negotiate a new contract to replace the old protection agreement, and 150 remain fired, including Almaguer. For almost five months, grim-faced and determined women, often with their children beside them, have confronted police outside the plant, and camped out in Rio Bravo's main plaza. Their banners demanding "libertad sindical," or the right to belong to a union of their choice, are visible outside the plant every day, as strikers continue to talk to workers and pass out flyers to them as they go in and out. UNT General Secretary Francisco Hernandez Juarez believes that if they win higher wages at Duro, other workers also will organize more independent unions. That could have profound effects. Duro is just one of 3,450 foreign-owned factories, employing over 1.2 million Mexican workers, according to the National Association of Maquiladoras. Most of these workers belong to unions, at least on paper. But, as at Duro, these organizations are not ones the workers run. The UNT estimates that only 50,000 of the country's 650,000 union contracts are actually negotiated with worker participation. If more workers in Mexico were able to control their own unions, and negotiate their own contracts, there would be enormous pressure on companies to raise wages. Success at Duro could cost a lot of money, not just to its own owners, but to the foreign corporations who run maquiladoras all along the border. "This fire was intentional," Almaguer declares. "They were trying to wipe us off the map, and now my home is just ashes." --------------------------------------------------------------- david bacon - labornet email david bacon internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1631 channing way phone: 510.549.0291 berkeley, ca 94703 If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. 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