[Vision2020] Quick End to Mexican Wal-Mart Workers Strike is Suspicious

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

It's amazing how new column topics just fall into my lap, even while on vacation.

I don't think I posted last week's radio commentary "Indonesia: Rich Hindu Past and Moderate Muslim Future."  It is attached for your reading enjoyment or you may want to do something entirely different.

Nick Gier

QUICK SETTLEMENT OF MEXICAN 
WAL-MART WORKER STRIKE IS SUSPICOUS

Every winter since my retirement I spend a month in Mexico at a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas.  Over the years, I’ve seen many changes, and the most noticeable one is the Big Box stores going up along the 25-mile freeway between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas. 

Walmart, CostCo, Sam’s Club, and Home Depot stand as monuments to the new global marketplace. Both tourists and locals load up their cars with groceries and other items as the mom and pop markets struggle to make ends meet.

On February 7, workers at the Los Cabos Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, and the VIPs Restaurant decided to call a strike.  The workers complained that they had to work more than 8 hours a day; they were not paid over-time; they were forced to take arbitrary days off; their wages were sub-standard; and women suffered discrimination and sexual abuse.

At noon about 300 workers gathered outside the stores flying black and red strike flags. Their actions were swiftly rewarded. At 9 o’clock the next morning a contract was signed between Wal-Mart executives and union leaders in Mexico City.

Leading up to the strike, Wal-Mart had been telling the workers that they had already made a deal with their own labor association.  The employees were both puzzled and insulted by this information.  They had never heard about this organization, and a group of them told Wal-Mart that they wanted to be represented by the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Confederacy, with the wonderful acronym of CROC.

Because of a steep decline in union membership in the U.S., precipitated by Ronald Reagan firing striking air controllers and Republican presidents stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointments, American employers have taken advantage of the suppression of unions and the sad lack of labor literacy and awareness in the working population.  

When he came into office, Bush appointed a former Wal-Mart attorney as head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, but he has now left for much better pay at Jackson Lewis, the most effective union busting law firm in the nation.

As a part of employee orientation, Wal-Mart shows anti-union films that are as lurid and biased as the reefer madness films.  No union representatives are ever allowed on the premises. 

In countries where unions are strong, Wal-Mart has tried to make sweetheart deals with phony labor associations, such as this one that Wal-Mart lined up Mexico.  Alternatively, they decide, as they have done in Canada, to close a brand new store rather giving their employees democracy in the workplace.

In China Wal-Mart has been quite content with signing cozy contracts with government-controlled unions rather than those organized by the workers themselves.  That has led workers at one Chinese Wal-Mart to call their very first strike.

The Wal-Mart workers in Mexico may find that a politically controlled union is almost as bad as a government controlled one. CROC is firmly in the pocket of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which won every single national election from 1929 to 2000, and has, over the years, become corrupt and fossilized; in a word, institutionalized.  The new leftist Party for the Democratic Revolution was only 300,000 votes short of winning the 2006 presidential election.  The PRI was a distant third.

Normally, a local labor election is held at the workplace, and the workers would vote on the final contract. In this case there was no election and no vote on the contract. 

The real reason for the quick strike settlement was most likely that Wal-Mart would rather negotiate with CROC’s national leaders rather than an independent union.  CROC is well known for signing “protection contracts,” and that means more protection for the employers than the employees.

Since 1997, the independent Authentic Labor Front, aided by the American AFL-CIO and the pro-labor provisions of NAFTA, has been winning more and more elections, even though its members are thwarted by government labor boards and intimidated by the political unions.  

Recently, a union affiliated with the Authentic Labor Front and composed mostly of indigenous women actually voted out CROC at a blue jeans factory in Tehuacan.  Out of the 450 voting, only three workers chose to retain CROC.

When people criticize unions, one must remember that they can be voted out as well as in.  It also reminds us that human institutions are only as good as the people that make them up, and that it is imperative to keep these organizations as democratic as possible.

Mexican Wal-Mart workers may find that their CROC union is just that: a “crock.”