The Children of NAFTA:
Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
by David Bacon

The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border, the first book from labor journalist and photographer David Bacon, provides an important corrective to debates on trade policy mired in economic generalizations. Bacon is a reporter who thrives on the specific. His book is filled with interviews with workers, mainly from the border maquiladoras of Baja California, who articulate the human consequences of treaties like NAFTA.

"We can't live if we don't all work," one 12-year-old boy, laboring alongside his parents, tells Bacon in "the tone of someone explaining the obvious." Indeed, explaining what should be obvious is something that Bacon and his interviewees do with great skill. Typical conditions in the border factories are horrendous, they tell us, and the labor "side agreement" to NAFTA-the rider meant to protect workers' rights-has done nothing.

Exhibit A is Han Young, a Mexican factory making chassis for Hyundai cars, where workers who tried to form an independent union were not only fired, but blitzed by the local SWAT team and chased for months as fugitives. In response to the workers' grievance, the National Administrative Office (NAO)-the labor board created under the NAFTA side agreement-merely mandated a seminar on labor conditions. Then there are the jonkeados-the junked workers-"who became so sick, so chronically disabled" from inhaling fumes from glue and solvents at two auto trim factories that one had a baby born with no kneecaps and an enlarged heart.

These workers held out hope that their NAO complaint would force governmental action because it focused on health and safety violations rather than unionization rights. Instead, their case reinforced a distressing pattern. "Hearings were held. Workers testified, sometimes at considerable risk. The NAO... concluded...that serious violations of the law had occurred," Bacon writes. "And then-nothing."

Bacon takes pains to emphasize the bottom-up contributions of workers organizing on the front lines, but he avoids discussing how different unions are making institutional interventions to change how the US labor movement is structured and how it deploys its resources on a national level (though he does note major shifts within the AFL-CIO).

Since the focus of Bacon's book is on production jobs that have fled south of the border, it's understandable that he gives manufacturing workers the bulk of his attention. His chapter devoted to "transplanted expectations," however, in which he brilliantly explains how immigrants are bringing "their culture, traditions, and forms of social organization" to US movements, is glaringly bereft of reporting on immigrant janitors, hotel housekeepers and laundry workers. Unions in the fast-growing, low-wage segments of the economy's service sector have lately waged the most aggressive campaigns amongst immigrant workers-often scoring impressive contracts-and have most boldly pushed the AFL-CIO to redirect its resources to take on corporate titans.

Lacking these more heartening campaigns, The Children of NAFTA is a book filled with sad endings. Direct action sometimes secures gains for maquila workers, in one case winning "buses to and from work, a ten percent pay bonus, and uniforms twice a year." But more often unions in the border factories are busted, strikes are broken and international hearings offer no recourse.

Journalists tracking the resurgent labor movement's efforts to find a successful strategy to take on multinational corporations have much to learn from Bacon's dogged local reporting and vivid evocation of the experiences of those who stand up for dignity in their working lives. But they will also have to show the institutional processes by which labor's internationals and federations are slowly being remade to build new power.

We will need many David Bacons, but we will also need more than him.

Review by Mark Engler
12.05.04

Support LiP by ordering from our partner, a leading independent bookseller