Labor solidarity
in the 1990s
must move
beyond fantasies.
The exhortation,
“workers of the
world unite, you
have nothing to lose
but your chains,”
inspired socialist
trade unionists over
the last century
Striking Coca-Cola workers singing on the roof of the company’s plant in
celebration of a union settlement in 1985.
toward an idealized vision of working-class interna-
tionalism. Their hope was partially realized with the
formation of international trade secretariats attached
to various unions, but as protective national labor
movements thrived and the left-wing labor impetus
faded, the original notion of global worker unity grew
distant, archaic and dreamy.
Meanwhile, capitalists have become the internation-
alists for whom borders are an obstacle and national-
ism a waning ideology. Capitalists have accelerated
the globalization process with their own firms backed
by powerful international organizations such as the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
and now the new World Trade Organization which
will oversee the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT). Such organizations operate outside
political regimes, command enormous resources,
affect the daily lives of millions of people, and have
no public accountability. Yet as capitalists pursue the
internationalization of economic and financial poli-
cies, their agreements
on trade and related
issues-indirectly bol-
stered by the Decem-
ber 1994 heads-of-
state summit in
Miami-can mean life
or death for millions
of Latin Americans.
The new phase of
capitalist expansion
has weakened tradi-
tional accommodations with national unions which
have long been declining in strength. Today, even
with less than 12% of the private U.S. workforce
unionized, companies look toward the available world
pool of bargain-price labor. To counter the interna-
tional clout of mighty corporations, cross-border
cooperative struggles of workers and kindred groups
have become a matter of survival.
Corporations increasingly have interconnected glob-
al operations. Take the world’s largest shirt maker
headquartered in New Jersey, Phillips Van Heusen
(PVH). While it has mainland factories, PVH subcon-
tracts all over the map, with direct production facili-
ties in Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Puerto
Rico. All of these plants can be visualized as “depart-
ments” of a single global factory. In the U.S. “depart-
ment,” for example, after a particular garment is
designed, workers size the model, then mark and cut
the cloth into component parts of the shirt. These parts
are shipped to another “department,” a maquiladora
finishing or assembly plant in Honduras or Guatemala.
There, the “lower-skilled” tasks are completed-the
stitching together of components, pressing, folding
and packaging. The garment is then shipped back to
the United States where it is marketed.
16NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Deborah Levenson-Estrada teaches history at Columbia Universi-
ty, and is the author of Trade Unionists Against Terror (Universi-
ty of North Carolina Press, 1944). Henry Frundt teaches sociolo-
gy at Ramapo College, and is the author of Refreshing Pauses:
Coca Cola and Human Rights in Guatemala (Praeger, 1987).
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16REPORT ON SOLIDARITY
The PVH example represents a step beyond the
process Lenin wrote about when imperialism meant
the internationalization of capital. Now, it involves the
internationalization of production and distribution.
Class solidarity now demands the confrontation of
common employers like PVH. Ultimately, this neces-
sitates organizing the various departments. Many
workers, however, have no means of communicating
with workers in other countries, even if their hands
touch the same cloth. This must change. Working-
class internationalism is not a utopian vision, but a
bread and margarine, rice and
beans issue. Without it, employers
will freely maneuver within their
global operations to maximize
profit with little regard for the Worki
impact this has on the workers internation they hire and fire around the
world. If production and owner- utopian visi
ship are global, workers’ organi- and be
zation must be as well.
A clear cross-border organizing If produ strategy must first shift from
nationalism as the primary trade- ownership
union response to the loss of jobs workers’ o when U.S. factories move abroad.
It must combat the xenophobia of must b U.S. workers who protest the
“giving” of “American” jobs to
non-union “foreigners”-whether
the reference is to workers in a Central American city, or to a seedy, subcontracting workshop in a U.S. Chi-
natown.
Many labor activists realize that a new sort of inter-
nationalism must be created. During the Cold War,
U.S. unions often organized abroad under U.S. gov-
ernment auspices. The AFL-CIO-sponsored American
Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which
sought to undermine the appeal of Communist-led
labor organizations, also organized under the patron-
age of the U.S. government. With the end of the Cold
War, the importance of these anti-Communist groups
is diminishing. Today, a number of U.S. unions, influ-
enced by the example of European international trade
secretariats, are expanding pragmatically, not to
undercut the left, but to maintain bargaining power
with employers. Mexico has been the site of lively
organizing drives by the United Electrical Workers
(UE) working with the Authentic Workers Front
(FAT) at General Electric, the Teamsters at Honey-
well, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) at Mexi-
can Ford and Volkswagen plants. The Amalgamated
Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) and
the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
(ILGWU) are also following factories across borders
n
a
0
c
to organize textile workers in the Dominican Repub-
lic, Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere.
Building a new labor internationalism is a task
fraught with difficulties. There are numerous econom-
ic, political and cultural differences to be worked
through, as well as mutual suspicions flowing from
ideological divergences and past allegiances. Many
Latin American trade unionists, for example, believe
their Northern counterparts may still have links to the
CIA, while some U.S. activists worry that the Latin
Americans’ leftist orientation may compromise shop-
floor organizing. Despite these
difficulties, a fresh international-
ism has been developing on the
unlikely terrain of Guatemalan g-class labor struggles. Because it is nei-
lism is not a ther highly industrialized nor
highly unionized, Guatemala may
n, but a rice appear an unlikely birthplace for a
ns issue. new internationalism, but workers
in this “peripheral” nation have
tion and stimulated innovative approaches
to cross-border organizing. are gloual,
rganization
e as well.
n mid-1975, 150 workers
organized a union at a Coca
Cola bottling plant in
Guatemala City. The franchise
owner, a U.S. national, was noto-
riously anti-union, and was
pleased to be living in a country where trade unionists
were-and are-routinely disappeared and tortured to
death. After considerable anti-union violence, Coke
workers and supporters contacted the American
Friends Service Committee staff working in Central
America, and the New York-based Interfaith Center
on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which took up
their cause. International pressure from these religious
groups, combined with continuous shop-floor agitation
inside the plant, led to union recognition and a con-
tract in 1978. Subsequently, the company did every-
thing it could to destroy the union, constantly violat-
ing the contract, and beating and jailing union leaders.
Several workers were killed, and trade-union member-
ship declined.
In 1979, the Geneva-based International Food and
Allied Workers Secretariat (IUF) joined religious and
human rights groups in an enormous global cam-
paign, bringing a class perspective to what had been
largely a human rights issue. From late 1979 to mid-
1980, the IUF combined a successful letter-writing
campaign to the Guatemalan Presidential Palace with
support strikes in Venezuela, France and Mexico, along with union endorsements of a Coke boycott in
over 20 countries including Canada, Germany, Italy
and Israel. It convened
meetings between the
representatives of the
parent company in
Atlanta, Georgia, and
the Guatemala City
union. It inspired hun-
dreds of newspaper and
magazine articles in
dozens of languages
about the violence
against Guatemalan
Coca Cola workers. It
also encouraged the
world’s largest trade-
union body, the Inter-
national Confederation
of Free Trade Unions Sewing machines being removed fr
(ICFTU), to support a following the owners’ decision to n
tourist boycott of Guatemala. In the plant, 60
besieged unionists kept on with the struggle. In
August, 1980, shortly after another five Coke workers
were killed, the pressure on Coke’s Atlanta headquar-
ters became unbearable. It transferred the franchise to
new owners on the condition that they respect the
union-a tremendous victory for the workers and
their international supporters.
By this time, Guatemala was engulfed in a civil war,
and most of the nation’s unions had been destroyed by
state-corporate violence. Yet, protected by internation-
al support in this adverse situation, the Coke union, an
exceptional survivor, grew. Over the next few years, it
developed a profound sense of historical mission, a
David overcoming Goliath, a symbol of the capacity
to accomplish what seemed impossible. In February,
1984, the new owners-experienced soft-drink busi-
nessmen in Latin America-closed the company due
to “bankruptcy.” In fact, Coke had sold them the fran-
chise so they could milk it dry. Even though the coun-
try was under military rule, over 400 workers occu-
pied the plant for one year. With the support of the
IUF and a remobilized international movement, the
workers won their third major battle in ten years. In
1985, Atlanta officials sold the franchise to yet anoth-
er set of owners who, to date, have kept their agree-
ment to respect the union, which remains one of the
strongest in the country.
The Coca Cola example contains many of the ingre-
dients required for the international labor solidarity of
the future. The union’s survival in the face of repeated
and grotesque attacks depended on the initiative of a
small number of individuals: the minority of workers
at Coke who kept the union going in the worst of
times; the few religious/human rights workers in Cen-
tral America and elsewhere who promoted their cause;
“eo el
and the dedicated
individuals at the IUF
who decided to make
an international case
out of Coke. The
Coke union’s perse-
verance was also the
result of large-scale
collective actions:
mobilizations by the
majority of Coke
workers; letter writing
by thousands of peo-
ple; and beverage
boycotts and solidari-
ty strikes by thou-
sands of consumers m the Transcontinental maquiladora and workers around ocate. the world. Key was
the dialectical interchange between individual actions,
which often appear to be idealistic uphill battles, and
the large institutional efforts that ultimately sheltered
the union.
The lesson is that international secretariats, even
social-democratic ones like the IUF, cannot single-
handedly build a large and expansive global campaign.
In this instance, the campaign politics were simple
enough: opposition to state and company violence, and
support of workers’ rights to a living wage and decent
conditions. It was, however, the interplay of individual
initiative and collective action that kept the union firm,
relatively democratic, and effective. Without the strong
local, the international campaign would have been
meaningless, and without the international support, the
union would have been destroyed.
future international labor movement must
emulate the Coke model by maintaining both
local and international strength. The model
must, however, be modified to fit patterns of interna-
tional production and distribution that involve subcon-
tracting, legal restructuring, and inter-company trade.
In the ten years following the Coke success,
Guatemalan workers have attempted this adaptation in
fits and starts through cooperation with the Guatemala
Labor Education Project (GLEP) and related groups.
After Guatemala was returned-by the military-to
a shaky civilian rule in 1986, rural and urban workers
began to organize into a number of confederations
such as the independent Union of Guatemalan Work-
ers (UNSITRAGUA), and the Confederation of
Guatemalan Unions (CUSG) which was largely fund-
ed by AIFLD. In 1987, U.S. activists, Guatemalan
exiles, and staff members of ACTWU inaugurated
GLEP to build on the solidarity generated by the Coca
18 NACL4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS s18 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON SOLIDARITY
Cola strike. GLEP was premised on
the understanding that the intensity
of Guatemalan state violence made Guatema
it very difficult for Guatemalan unionists ha
workers to win anything without
international solidarity. The need for organiz
a special mediating group like neighborh GLEP-as opposed to a committee
within an existing U.S. union-was maquilado
clear. Without having to wade
through the bureaucracy of a U.S. be concent
union, GLEP could act directly and should tf quickly to support Guatemalan labor
unions, look for ways to educate leave, the
U.S. workers, and encourage U.S.
unions to join in these efforts. But have
GLEP, in common with the IUF and organi
the post-1986 labor movement in
Guatemala, faced additional unfore-
seen challenges due to transforma-
tions in the Guatemalan economy and workforce.
By the mid-1980s, not only was the labor movement
small and plagued with the traumas that state terror
constantly reproduces, but existing Guatemalan indus-
try had slithered into crisis due to lower revenues and
increased debt payments. Factory after factory–
including many in the food and beverage sector where
the IUF sought to organize-shut their doors. As the
existing industrial working class stagnated, workers
moved into the informal economy where they enjoyed
even fewer legal protections. By 1995, Guatemala
City’s informal sector employed two-thirds of its eco-
nomically active population. In the formal sector, many workers had moved from larger companies to
smaller ones where working conditions remained
harsh, and organizing was particularly difficult.
New industries, largely composed of maquiladoras,
arrived during this period of growing urban and rural
poverty, when capitalist restructuring called for priva-
tization, a sharp decrease in social spending, and the
lowering of labor costs through the downgrading of
labor conditions and lowering of wages. Since 1986,
maquiladora plants, located either in the city or on the
outskirts of nearby towns whose residents usually
work in agriculture, have increased from six to nearly
500. They are owned by citizens from Guatemala and
other countries, notably Korea. Guatemalan
maquiladoras generally are finishing plants which
assemble garments cut in the United States. The
approximately 100,000 workers they employ are pri-
marily young women-some as young as eleven years
of age. As elsewhere in the hemisphere, they have
now replaced men in a new “re-gendering” of
Guatemala’s industrial workforce. Organizing the
maquiladora sector, and allying with workers in the
ilan trade
ve begun to
re in the
oods where
,ras tend to
rated. Then,
e factory
Workers still
some
zation.
informal economy posed problems
that extended international solidarity
beyond the Coca Cola model. In the
1980s and 1990s, GLEP, Gua-
temalan unions and their U.S. union
supporters have employed new
means to respond to these new
issues.
everal union-busting actions at
maquiladora plants in the late
1980s led to local-international
labor cooperation. At the Lunafil
thread plant in 1987, and the U.S.-
owned Inexport maquiladora in 1988,
the owners locked out all union mem-
bers. In 1988 the Playknits
maquiladora, a subcontractor for Liz
Claiborne, suddenly shut its
Guatemalan facility, without even
covering workers’ back pay. Following the Coca-Cola
example, the UNSITRAGUA-affiliated workers occu-
pied the premises of all three companies until they were
ejected by police, at which point they camped out in
front of the facilities. In all these cases, GLEP rallied
with protests and publicity about U.S. corporate behav-
ior and, on behalf of Playknits’ union, GLEP was able
to arrange negotiations in New York between union
representatives and the company. Negotiations won
monetary compensation for laid-off workers. At Lunafil
and Inexport, GLEP helped the workers gain reinstate-
ment and maintain union recognition.
Between 1991 and 1993, GLEP generated a huge
U.S. campaign to force Phillips Van Heusen to recog-
nize the CUSG-affiliated union in its Guatemalan plants
where intimidation was rampant. GLEP circulated
information about the PVH maquiladora inside U.S.
textile unions, and organized demonstrations at scores
of PVH outlets in at least 15 states. Although bargain-
ing has yet to occur, the company improved wages and
working conditions, and acknowledged the union.
Accelerating pressure on contract purchasers Sears, J.C.
Penny and Wal-Mart, GLEP also supported a reinstate-
ment of women workers at a maquiladora called Con-
fecciones Unidas. Even though the incipient maquila
unions remain fragile, GLEP, Guatemalan labor orga-
nizers, and a representative of the ILGWU are working
to approach other maquiladora workers in an effort to
encourage them to organize. To increase rank-and-file
solidarity in the United States, GLEP even brought
some ILGWU members from the Leslie Fay plant in
Pennsylvania to Guatemala. The Leslie Fay workers,
who had mounted protests to prevent the company from
shifting operations to Guatemala, left the United States
thinking Guatemalan workers were the problem. They
VOL XXVIII. No 5 MARCH /APRIL 1995 19REPORT ON SOLIDARITY
returned thinking they shared problems with their
Guatemalan counterparts.
U.S. and Guatemalan labor activists have also
pressed employers to enforce labor codes that incorpo-
rate employee protections. They have successfully el-
icited such codes from PVH, Coca-Cola, and various
U.S. purchasers of maquiladora products. Working with
ACTWU, Levi-Strauss has authored its own world-
wide code, and contracts have been terminated for non-
compliance. Recently, GLEP supporters have extended
the call for codes to the rural sectors. In the United
States, they are leafletting Starbucks, a popular
gourmet coffee company, demanding adoption of a
code of conduct that would require Guatemalan planta-
tion owners from whom they purchase to respect basic
rights, pay a living wage, and honor safety and health
standards.
G LEP, U.S. supporters such as the International
Labor Rights Education and Research Fund
(ILRERF) and the Central American Working
Group (CAWG), and Guatemalan trade unionists have
also successfully employed U.S. trade law to call
attention to labor abuses in Guatemala. This involves
pressuring the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to
penalize Guatemala under the provisions of the 1984
General System of Preferences (GSP). GSP allows for
penalties against countries which do not make
progress in eliminating five types of labor violations:
interference with free association; obstruction of union
organizing/bargaining; child labor; slave labor; and
sub-minimum working conditions. Because
maquiladora owners regularly commit four of these
abuses-there is no slave labor in the maquiladora–
there were ample grounds for action. In 1992,
Guatemala was placed on GSP probation.
Between 1991 and 1994, GLEP-ILRERF missions
visited Guatemalan factories, spoke to corporate lead-
ers and public officials, and met with union groups
from all the major confederations. All this pressure
had an effect. In late 1992, Guatemala revised its labor
code to speed union recognition and improve rights
for women. For the first time, it punished several cor-
porate violators in the maquiladora sector. In mid-
1993, when President Jorge Serrano Elias attempted to
assume dictatorial powers, unions participated in the
battle to restore constitutional rule. The private sector,
and eventually the military, refused to support Serrano
because they feared the loss of U.S. trade privileges,
forcing him to flee the country.
By 1994, facing insistent demands from the U.S.
Embassy to support Guatemala’s new president,
Ramiro de Le6n Carpio, the U.S. Trade Representa-
tive was poised to drop its review but twice backed
down, first because of ILGWU mobilization over
Leslie Fay, and then after 500 police attacked protest-
ing workers at the Empresa Exacta cattle ranch in the
western highlands who were demanding union recog-
nition to assure their legally required minimum wages
of two dollars a day. The police wounded 13 workers,
killed two, and abducted one, later dropping his tor-
tured body from a helicopter.
uatemala remains a difficult country for union
activity. Workers may win union recognition,
but since 25% of the workforce must join before
negotiations are mandatory, they often gain no con-
tracts. Maquiladoras are especially problematic
because they can close quickly, move out machinery,
and reopen elsewhere in the same country or a nearby
country whenever an organizing drive begins. One
innovative approach proposed by Guatemalan trade
unionists has been to organize in the neighborhoods
where maquiladoras tend to be concentrated-not only
inside the factory. Then, should the factory leave, the
workers have some organization, and they can better
discuss and confront their problems. Workers’ neigh-
borhood committees facilitate self-defense in many are-
nas, and link informal- and formal-economy workers.
In thinking out a fresh approach to organizing,
Guatemalan unions are debating what tactics are most
useful under varying conditions of repression. At issue
is the extent to which repression has changed from
being officially sanctioned (as under the regimes of
Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efrain Rios Montt, from
1978 to 1983) to being controlled by specific owners
or landholders who have certain military connections.
Even under officially sanctioned repression, as in the
case of Coca Cola, organizers could sometimes
achieve victory through noisy public demonstrations
in conjunction with international support. However, as
repression has become more selective and less official,
some argue that maquiladora and other organizing
should be more systematic and clandestine to assure
the 25% union membership necessary for bargaining.
“The army really doesn’t care what happens to Korean
or North American firms, and we should take advan-
tage of this to quietly build union strength,” stated one
labor activist. Others remain willing to hold a well-
publicized demonstration in front of a plant, but are
less convinced that the clandestine door-to-door work
can be done safely, even though it would increase
union membership.
A fresh approach requires examining the old issue
of gender practices and beliefs. The trade-union move-
ment on both sides of the border is male in leadership
and self-conception, although both men and women
belong to unions. Even the International Ladies Gar-
ment Workers Union (ILGWU), which has a long tra-
dition of organizing women workers in the United
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20REPORT ON SOLIDARITY
States, has not yet overturned sex-
ism and male domination within its
union. To assist in, and not to
undermine the organization of
maquiladoras, male trade unionists
must alter their perceptions of
women as primarily housewives,
not workers, who are fragile and
need protection by male trade
unionists, and who in a short time
will be out of the factory and back
where they belong, in the home.
Within the Guatemalan labor
movement, this understanding is one
most men share with the many
women who see their factory work
as temporary and their maquiladora
wages–even absent ones. The iden- c:Ci rF Al
BY GUATEMA EARNING 6.
tLtIItt..4U1 UI WuIIIVCII ftUYlUtLUUVIJU A GLEPsoli workers as moonlighting house-
wives, and not as workers, makes organizing difficult.
Despite the female leadership of maquiladora sit-ins, male trade unionists have been hesitant to organize the
maquiladoras in part because they see the workers
there as less “real.” Since they are not men, they are
thought to be incapable of the militancy that trade
unionism requires. While some women workers hold
this view, many, in increasing numbers, reject it. In the
Guatemalan labor movement, women are inventing a
grassroots working-class feminism.
he Guatemalan case has shown that corporate
campaigns and code demands, combined with
strong local organizing, can be an important anti-
dote to the unrestricted corporate expansion promoted
by NAFTA and GATT. The advantage of corporate
codes is that they offer the U.S. public a chance to apply
consumer pressure as a sign of labor solidarity abroad.
It should be axiomatic that if a worker at a cattle ranch
which exports beef to the United States is dumped out
of an army helicopter to prevent him from organizing a
union, as happened at Empresa Exacta, or if a labor
leader at a banana plantation that sells to Chiquita is
shot dead by anti-union thugs, as just happened at the
Chinnok Finca in the eastern part of the country, we
would not buy Empresa Exacta beef or Chiquita
bananas. Labor solidarity must determine how to gener-
ate a larger, more analytical, creative and activist “we.”
The labor-rights strategy is also an essential political
approach that requires the collaboration of unions on
both sides of any border. While other groups have
effectively documented cases of rights abuses, what
makes GLEP-Guatemalan labor solidarity worthy of
imitation is its cultivation of a two-way process in
g 0
4
5′
da
LAN WOMEN 4an HOUR? ?
developing a labor-rights strategy
using U.S. trade law. Given the loss
of any meaningful labor-rights pro-
visions in NAFTA, cross-border
trade-union supporters are invoking
trade provisions to emphasize the
upholding of local labor laws.
Quiet, systematic organizing is a
third requirement, but the battle will
be a long one. After a number of
apparent successes, unionized work-
ers have been isolated and prevented
from any meaningful ability to nego-
tiate a contract, and companies have
often closed. As the PVH and other
Guatemalan examples suggest, suc-
cess will eventually require organiz- mno nll nf the onmninv’ “dIPn:rt-
ments” around the world. This
begins wnen a strong and strategic rity poster. local organizing effort is combined
with international worker and consumer support. It
demands both sophisticated international coordination
and on-site individual involvement.
Finally, an effective challenge to male domination
and “normative” gender roles and ideologies remains
on the agenda. The decades-old “imagining” of class
militancy as male really backfires in the new global
economy–even if it hadn’t before. A new internation-
alism must “demasculinize” conceptions of class, mil-
itancy and leadership. U.S. unions are not significantly
less male chauvinist than their Latin counterparts, but
many of the U.S. men and women who work in Latin
American labor solidarity tend to be more conscious
of the discourse of feminism. If they are not self-criti-
cal, however, they risk being patronizing and conde-
scending toward Latin American workers-male and
female. The problem of sexist ideology and practice,
like many others, is international, and the solution
must come from the women and men who suffer
because of it.
Drawing on the Coke model, these strategies offer
the beginnings of a program for labor solidarity. They
enable unions and supporters across borders to effec-
tively fight the elimination of wage equity, health and
safety protections, and union rights. The strategies pro-
tect the hard-fought-for rights recognized by the Inter-
national Labor Organization, now encoded in the labor
legislation of most nations. The labor solidarity move-
ment is demanding its own codes of accountability and
trade-based labor standards and is pursuing basic orga-
nizing principles and gender sensitivity. Only in this
way will it break the chains forged by corporate power,
and allow working people to build their own new and
very real international bond.
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