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From: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SuDate: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 18:52:00 -0500
Tobject: Workers Conference: Mexico, Apr 2001
Subject: Appeal Tri-National Conference to Repeal NAFTA!
Appeal for a Tri-National (Mexico, Canada, United States)
Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and Privatizations and for the
Repeal of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
( Mexico City, Mexico, April 2001)
To the workers, retirees, students, activists, and their organizations:
Introduction
We - delegates who have assembled on November 18, 2000, in the city of
San Cristobal de las Casas (Chiapas) at the "Fifth Convention in Defense
of the Nation, Against Deregulation and Privatizations, and for the
Repeal of NAFTA" - hereby issue an "Appeal for a Tri-National (Mexico,
Canada, United States) Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and
Privatizations and for the Repeal of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA)."
We propose that this Tri-National Workers' Conference take place in
Mexico City in April 2001 as a stepping stone to build the International
Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All,
which will be held in Germany in February 2002 at the initiative of the
International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International (ILC), the
Continuations Committee of the Open World Conference (OWC), and a number
of German trade unions.
Seven Years of NAFTA
January 1, 2001, marks the seventh anniversary of the signing of NAFTA by
the governments of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The disastrous
results of NAFTA are there for all to see:
a) Jobs and wages: Mexico has been embraced by the multinational
corporations as a country with cheap labor and cheap natural resources.
The minimum wage is barely $4 a day. During the government of Ernesto
Zedillo, the average wage of Mexican workers lost 48.3 % of its
purchasing power.
In the United States, the results of NAFTA are clear - despite the vain
attempts of the Clinton administration to cover up the facts. At least
400,000 - and perhaps as many as 600,000 jobs - have been lost as a
direct result of NAFTA. Employers continue to threaten plant closures and
production shifts to Mexico in the drive to lower wages of all U.S.
workers and hamper union organizing attempts. In Canada, the number of
full-time jobs with benefits has been slashed dramatically, as have been
union jobs as a whole.
b) Delocalizations: The governments of Mexico and the United States
promote delocalizations of businesses, that is, the transfer of the
productive facilities of these giant corporations to Mexico or even to
regions in the United States (particularly in the Southeast of the United
States), where there is more flexibility of the workforce, lower wages
and a far lower rate of unionization.
In Mexico, the industrial sector that has grown most rapidly is that of
the maquilas (pass-through sweatshops), where 1.5 million workers (mainly
women, youth, and even children) are submitted to the most savage
exploitation, with precarious jobs and no labor rights. This is a sector
where even Mexican federal labor law does not apply and where the
so-called unions are in fact direct instruments of the bosses and the
government.
Production in Canada is also being moved to lower-wage countries, as in
the case of the Bauer Skate Company in Ontario - which was bought by the
Nike Corporation, operated in Canada for six months, and then moved to
Malaysia, along with 500 factory jobs.
In their drive for maximum profits, global corporations pit working
people, our communities, and entire nations against one another in a
downward spiral of takebacks, concessions, and direct assaults - what has
come to be known appropriately as the "race to the bottom."
c) Export of cheap labor: Another result of NAFTA is the dramatic
increase in migration from Mexico to the United States by adults and
youth aspiring to a job and better wages. Entire populations >from
various states of Mexico (Michoac�n, Jalisco, Guanajuato, etc.) are left
without a male population. An estimated 1.3 million Mexicans attempt to
cross the border each year. Some of them succeed, while others are forced
back. Many of them die of heat exhaustion in the desert, or they drown in
the Rio Bravo. Others still are assassinated by the Migra or they are
hunted down as animals by U.S. ranchers. This mass of undocumented
workers exerts a constant pressure to lower the salaries of U.S. workers,
while the Mexican workers in the United States are treated miserably,
having no rights - in particular, no rights to organize collectively.
d) Privatization: NAFTA is the over-arching plan that imposes
privatization of public services and enterprises as well as the
deregulation of finance and labor legislation. In Mexico, over the past
seven years, the national railroad system has been turned over to the
multinationals, with the ensuing loss of the collective-bargaining
agreement and with the layoffs of thousands of workers. In the case of
Mexico City, the Ruta 100 public bus system was dismantled and its union
and collective bargaining agreement destroyed. Thousands of bus drivers
were left without a job. In the United States, privatization of
transportation, public services, and even sectors of education has moved
ahead. The deregulation of public utilities (particularly electricity),
trucking, and telecommunications in the United States has had extremely
negative results for consumers, while severely attacking the unions in
those sectors.
To conclude, NAFTA has only benefited the large corporations, primarily
the U.S. multinational corporations, imposing still greater flexibility
of the work force - all with the full support of the three signatory
governments.
The Extension of NAFTA through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
A new offensive against the workers and peoples of the entire Western
Hemisphere is in the works. The objective of the Clinton administration-
fully embraced by new Mexican President Vicente Fox and by Canadian Prime
Minister Chretien - has been to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA) by the year 2003. This objective was dealt a major setback when
the U.S. Congress, under the sustained pressure of the U.S. workers and
their trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, blocked "fast-track" authority
to expand NAFTA.
Both major party candidates to the U.S. presidency, Al Gore and George
Bush, pledged to deepen the policies of the Clinton administration in the
realm of "free trade." Both candidates pledged to promote FTAA vigorously
and to deepen the drive to "remove all barriers" to the free circulation
of U.S. capital and goods in the hemisphere. Whichever candidate wins the
presidency will continue to promote the interests of Big Business at the
expense of the workers and peoples of the region.
Vicente Fox Quesada, the new Mexican president, is offering to turn over
to the U.S. multinational corporations control and ownership of the oil
and electricity industries, which are the source of much of the country's
wealth as well as the material basis of the sovereignty of the nation.
The Free Trade Areas of the Americas is a plan aimed at driving down even
further the cost of labor in the Western Hemisphere, including the United
States and Canada, through the liquidation of the rights and
organizations of the workers. In the case of Mexico, as has been announced
already by the new team of President-elect Fox, the priority is to deliver
the Mexican national oil enterprise, Pemex, to the multinationals.
On that same plane, the so-called "Plan Colombia" - which, on the
surface, is presented as a war against the drug dealers - is in fact part
and parcel of the same policies aimed at dismantling the national borders
of the countries of this region. What is involved is the pursuit of a war
to help the multinationals make further inroads on the continent and to
carry out fully the Free Trade Areas of the Americas.
Let there be no doubt: The U.S. government seeks to liquidate workers'
rights and to dismantle the national sovereignty of the countries of
Latin America and of the entire continent.
Deregulation and "Free Trade" - an International Policy
The policies of deregulation - which target social protection systems and
collective rights won through bitter struggle by workers and their
organizations over many decades - are international in scope.
But the resistance of working people to this assault has not abated; if
anything it has increased. In the United States, workers and their trade
union federation were able to put a halt to fast-track. In Mexico, the
electrical workers, through their mass mobilizations, have been able to
prevent - at least for the time being - the privatization of the
electricity industry. In Mexico, as well, public-sector workers engaged in
a massive strike for a year-end bonus that has paralyzed the government.
In Canada, workers waged a general strike to prevent the initial attempts
to privatize health care and social security.
To advance this resistance across borders, the trade union delegates who
assembled on June 11, 2000, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the International
Workers' Conference in Defense of ILO Conventions, issued a Call for an
International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor
Rights For All. Such a conference is also aimed at advancing the
follow-up work of the Open World Conference in Defense of Trade Union
Independence and Democratic Rights, which was held in San Francisco in
February 2000.
What comes through loud and clear in the Appeal for the International
Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All is
the need for workers the world over to fight back against the policies
aimed at substituting individualized labor relations for the collective
relations established through collective bargaining agreements and
codified in enforceable labor rights.
All governments today - in the name of "globalization" and promoting the
"comparative advantages" of the corporations in the host countries (cheap
labor, lack of social security, etc.) - seek to subordinate the
Conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) to the World
Trade Organization. In so doing, they seek to replace these ILO
Conventions with mere recommendations that have no enforcement power.
One case in point is the recent revision of ILO Convention 103 in defense
of maternity rights. The revision of ILO Convention 103 and its
replacement with Convention 183 has led to the removal of the iron-clad
prohibition to fire a pregnant woman from her job. Already governments on
every continent have seized upon the revision of ILO Convention 103 to
modify their own labor legislation in such a way as to undermine and
reverse the maternity rights of women at work.
The call for the International Workers' Conference Against Deregulation
concludes by pointing out that there is an urgent need to organize on
every continent a sustained fightback against all forms of deregulation
with the aim of defending collective rights and rejecting the
individualization of those rights.
In Mexico, the United States, and Canada, the deregulation offensive is
rooted in the "free trade" agenda of the multinational corporations and
of the governments in their service. This offensive has a name: It is
NAFTA. It is the FTAA, which will only extend the devastation inflicted
on the three countries of North America to the rest of the continent.
In light of this dramatic situation, and to prepare the International
Workers' Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All, we
call on working people, students, youth, activists, retirees, to join in
Mexico City in April 2001 at a Tri-National Workers' Conference to help
advance the fightback around the following demands:
* Repeal NAFTA!
* Stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)!
* Stop Deregulation!
* Defense of PEMEX and of the national electrical industry in Mexico!
* No to the privatization of the public services and enterprises (health
care, education, social security, etc.)!
* Amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the United States!
* Solidarity and unity of working people across North America and
throughout the hemisphere!
* Full Labor Rights for All!
* For the right to self-determination for all the oppressed peoples of
the continent!
- San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas - November 18, 2000
Peter Downs
1917 S. 12th St.
St. Louis, MO 63104
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
314-621-8103
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Liberate democracy from corporate control
Bob Olsen, Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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