Rebelion en el Greenfield, and: The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (review)

In 1993, as I bemoaned the passage of NAFTA to a Mexican friend, she said, "I think NAFTA will be a good thing, because it will finally force us to deal with our differences. It will finally bring us together." These two books show how right she was. Despite all of NAFTA's damage to workers and the environment, it has also given birth to a new movement, which is bringing us together and creating new ways of organizing across borders and which has the potential of fundamentally changing the power relations between workers and corporations in North America. Both books show how economic integration is creating common ground in which solidarity is taking root.

They show the changes occurring from the top levels of the U.S. and Mexican labor movements to the grass roots where teenage workers learn how to take on multinational corporations.

In Rebelion el el Greenfield, Humberto Juarez, a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla, tells the story of the Kukdong workers in Atlixco, Puebla, in central Mexico. The workers at the Kukdong garment factory are mostly rural teenage girls in their first factory jobs, who rebel against bad cafeteria food, dictatorial management, and a uninterested union. They use the rich tradition of peasant struggles over the land to win one of the few victories since NAFTA against a foreign (Korean) corporation. In doing so they combine the strategies of direct action inside the factory with community mobilization against the police, and international solidarity through the help of United Students Against Sweatshops and the AFL-CIO to win recognition of an independent union. Juarez provides us with the rich detail of workers in one struggle in the garment export industry and how it opened a world of possibilities for them.

David Bacon multiplies the stories in his marvelous chronicle of labor struggles along the length of the border, and from Mexico City and Michoacan to Omaha, Nebraska. It's a trip back in time to view conditions Americans thought had disappeared seventy years ago, but it's also a trip back to the future as these conditions multiply in the heart of America and on the border where super-modern plants poison workers with high tech chemicals and use sophisticated union busting tactics mixed with the traditional blacklist, rigged elections, thugs, and union corruption. These workers show the real faces of corporate-driven globalization. They are paying a huge price, but they are not just victims. Bacon creates a many-faceted portrait of workers' persistent and dignified resistance to the triple oppression of bosses, government, and corrupt unions.

The Children of NAFTA shows the deep economic and social connections which span the border and create the fabric on which international solidarity is growing. We see how economic forces are transforming North America's workforce from the Mexican countryside to the maquiladoras, to the towns across the United States where immigrants—refugees of globalization—come to take the worst jobs. He also shows us the growing consciousness of workers and grassroots organizations of their place in the global production chain, the maturing awareness of allies and strategies of NGOs like the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and Mexican independent unions like the Authentic Workers Front (FAT), and the change in American union activists who moved from paternalism to respect and collaboration.

Building international solidarity is, however, complex. There is much debate on how to accomplish it. For example, some Mexicans criticized the AFL-CIO for basing its choice of targets, like Kukdong, on U.S. needs and for failing to invest more in creating organizing capacity. Maquiladora workers...