Solidarity Transformed: Labor Responses to Globalization and Crisis in Latin America

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

1.1: Labor’s four responses to globalization

2.1: Traditional versus segmented production regimes

2.2: Model of export processing zones

2.3: El Salvador: Segmentation and unionization rates

in manufacturing

2.4: Central America and DR apparel and textile exports

to the United States

2.5: Auto industry: Model of modular production

2.6: Brazil: Motor vehicle production and employment

2.7: Argentina: Motor vehicle production and employment

3.1: The triangle of power and labor’s tri-level strategy

3.2: Example of labor’s tri-level strategy

4.1: The radical flank mechanism in El Salvador and Honduras

Tables

1.1: Global commodity chain internationalism

2.1: Brazil: Wages and unionization in traditional and

modular auto plants

2.2: Argentina: Wages and unionization in traditional and

modular auto plants

3.1: Left labor actions to form unions in apparel export plants

4.1: Moderate labor actions to form unions in apparel

export plants

5.1: Brazil: Transnational labor activities by factory

6.1: Unionization in the Brazilian auto sector

6.2: Unionization in the Argentine auto sector

PREFACE

This book is a product of both lived experiences and careful academic research and analysis. My years in academia have given me a profound appreciation for the rigors of the scholarly enterprise, with its attention to methods, data collection, and analysis. My decade in Latin America, where I often lived with workers and their families, and spent countless nights with workers at strike sites, have given me many insights into the thoughts, beliefs, and ideas that shape their actions. What I have learned is that in order to understand how people act we must know something not only about their economic and political contexts, but also about how they see themselves and others in society.

I also believe that, just as it is important to know the lived experiences of the subjects of our writings in order to better understand their actions, so too is it useful to know something about the experiences of the authors who write about them, especially if those experiences are particularly pronounced. So let me say a little about some of the experiences that have influenced me and ideas that have made their way into this book.

My college years were marked by the Central American wars of the 1980s. These wars might not have mattered that much to me if it had not been for a new law requiring young men to register for the draft. That hit close to home. I began taking Latin American history courses and paying more attention in Spanish class. My first real activism was in the Central America solidarity movement. Soon after graduating, I developed another interest: I was given the opportunity to work with a local labor union to organize a large hotel and restaurant in the Boston area. In coordination with two skilled union organizers from the local chapter of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, I endeavored to establish a union from the inside as a busboy. But after nine months the union leadership decided to shift its attention and get out the vote for a local election in which the union president was running. Union representatives told me that they might return to the organizing effort in six months. In union organizing work, this is an eternity. The campaign was over, and I needed to move on.

I learned that a progressive union in El Salvador was looking for a bilingual activist to work with it in San Salvador, the country’s capital. My two passions, labor and Central America, seemed to have come together for me in one opportunity. El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war, and government arrests and death squad killings of unionists were on the rise at the time. The Salvadoran unionists realized that their survival depended not only on their organizing ability, but also on the solidarity of international labor unions and human rights organizations. Yet, with Spanish as their only language, communication was a problem. The unionists needed someone to help send off urgent action alerts in English whenever a unionist was arrested or killed, or some other emergency presented itself to solidarity groups in Europe, the United States, and Canada.

Foreign solidarity groups were asked to pressure the Salvadoran state to punish those responsible for the killings and to release those unionists who were unjustly imprisoned. The hope was not only that the culpable parties would be punished, but also that the protest would create deterrence to future repression. International solidarity in this context was a very political affair; the state was most often the direct target of the protest movement. But it was also a high-stakes and basic affair. It was about fundamental human rights and activists’ survival.

The job provided no salary or benefits, but I would be given three meals a day at the union cafeteria. Sleeping accommodations would be provided on the cement floor in the back of the building, at least until other arrangements could be worked out. Old protest banners could be used as blankets. Work would be seven days a week and often go well into the night.

Although it was not a job description that I was willing to share with my parents, I was twenty-four at the time and it all sounded perfectly fine to me. There was a clear and urgent need for the solidarity work I could provide, and everyone working for the union was there because they were deeply committed to what they were doing.

Weeks after arriving, I moved into the apartment of a former textile worker turned union leader who lived with his family in the working-class Zacamil housing projects. I was given a space with a cot behind a partition in the kitchen. During the day I worked in the office communicating with U.S. and European activists about the latest abuses against unionists. Many nights were spent at strike sites. Striking workers stayed at work centers at night to prevent state security forces from taking over the installations and returning them to the employers. The strikes gave me the opportunity to have countless hours of conversations with workers.

After a few weeks in the country, I met the representative for Latin America of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO-Norway). As residents of a small, progressive European country with more powerful neighbors, Norwegian unionists appreciated some of the challenges facing El Salvador. With generous collaboration from the Norwegian government, LO-Norway provided much of the funds allowing the progressive Salvadoran federation I was working for to function.

I quickly felt a certain political affinity with the Norwegian approach to international labor solidarity, which was based on mutual respect and a belief in progressive, political unionism to transform not only the workplace but also society. It was in sharp contrast to the AFL-CIO at the time, which, through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), received money from the U.S. State Department to build conservative, market-oriented, business unions in the region.

One evening, I asked my Norwegian colleague how he knew which unionists to work with in Latin America. That’s easy, he responded. I go to a country, ask who the Americans are working with, and I work with the other ones. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Of course, there was more to it than that, and there were plenty of good U.S. union locals and solidarity committees doing effective solidarity work, but the point was taken.

I worked part-time for LO-Norway, writing occasional reports and translating for delegations of Norwegian unionists who came through on a regular basis. I also continued to work for the Salvadoran federation, where I became involved in raising funds internationally to maintain strikes and other union activities. This eventually put me on the radar screen of the state security forces. In September 1989, several heavily armed men came to my Soyapango home in a coordinated predawn raid on union activists. I was taken to their headquarters, stripped to my underwear, blindfolded, handcuffed, and placed in a basement jail cell. For the first twenty-four hours, I was denied food and water, and was forced to remain standing for prolonged periods between interrogation sessions.

During the interrogation sessions I was asked if I worked with labor unions in the country, as if doing so was a serious crime against the state. I decided to say that I was an economics student, and that I was doing research on the benefits of free trade in small developing countries. I do not think they believed me, but fortunately for me they were disinclined from using other means at their disposal to test the veracity of my claim. Other unionists arrested that day were severely beaten. Several women and one young man were raped.

I later learned that an activist campaign and the Norwegian government (which responded to pressure from Norwegian unions) demanded my release and that of several Salvadoran unionists who had been arrested on the same day. The campaign made direct reference to our right to carry out labor union work. This countered my attempt at discretion during my interrogation, but it worked. I was released two days later, the beneficiary of an urgent action campaign (ironically like the ones I had originally come to help organize for detained Salvadoran unionists).

The anti-union violence escalated. Six weeks after our release from detention, a lunchtime bombing of our union cafeteria by paramilitary forces left ten people dead and me with a severe head wound and lingering health problems. Three union friends sitting with me at the time were killed, including a top union leader, Febe Elizabeth Velásquez. After eight days in a Salvadoran hospital, I returned to the United States for continued medical attention. Days later, the leftwing guerrilla insurgency launched its largest military offensive in over a decade, briefly taking over considerable segments of San Salvador and other large cities.

The extreme level of violence in the country spurred the international community to act. By the time I returned to live in El Salvador in the summer of 1991, the United Nations was actively involved in a peace process with the Salvadoran government and the guerrilla forces to end the twelve-year civil war. For labor, the end of the war, which coincided with the end of the Cold War internationally, lessened levels of polarization among groups and allowed unions to focus on organizing new factories and improving wages and working conditions. Alliances expanded as local nongovernmental organizations like women’s groups and human rights organizations became engaged in anti-sweatshop activism.

The AFL-CIO, now under new leadership, sought ties with left-oriented unions that the previous leadership had shunned and demonized. And groups working on international labor rights, like the National Labor Committee, shifted their focus from protesting the arrest and torture of union leaders to ensuring that the young women workers who produced apparel for North American consumers were treated with dignity at work.

Now instead of spending my days writing urgent alerts on the latest anti-union repression I spent time overseeing Norwegian-funded programs in El Salvador and eventually in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. These programs focused on labor union growth, capacity building for tasks like collective bargaining, and international campaigns to assist union organizing efforts.

In El Salvador, as employment in export processing zones (EPZs) mushroomed from three thousand to eighty thousand, labor conditions in these factories quickly became a concern for the labor movement. I increasingly focused on documenting labor rights abuses in these apparel export factories producing North American brands for North American consumers.

A case involving a local factory that produced for Gap took much of my attention in the mid-1990s. Workers at the factory complained that when they had attempted to form a union, all of the workers identified by management as being sympathetic to the union had been dismissed. The National Labor Committee organized an international campaign that forced Gap to require that the local factory owner rehire the dismissed unionists. I was asked to join a group of local NGOs to achieve that goal.

The following months for me were filled with countless visits to the factory, numerous interviews with workers and union activists, and lengthy discussions and negotiations with the local factory owner and Gap representatives. During this process, the world of export processing zones was opened to me in great detail. I learned about the complexities of supply-chain management, production order cycles, the role of supplier consortiums in Asia, and the impact of complex trade rules. More important, I began to understand how these dynamics influenced working conditions and employment relations in the factories.

This level of understanding of the world of work had eluded me during the 1980s when international solidarity was a highly politicized affair often involving issues of unionists’ survival. International solidarity was still political in the 1990s, in that the government remained a concern and often the target of the solidarity movement, but now the focus shifted from demanding that the security forces respect human rights to demanding that the Ministry of Labor ensure employers respect basic labor rights.

New alliances opened up to the labor movement during this time, and old alliances took on new forms. Women’s groups concerned about the fate of women garment workers embraced labor campaigns. Human rights groups and faith-based organizations that had focused on ending the war in the 1980s now joined labor organizations in their demand for human dignity at work.

The transition from old to new forms of solidarity is never seamless, partly because old practices by repressive, anti-union forces often die hard. Some unionists still received death threats and a few were killed. In my case, four days after accompanying several union leaders as they returned to their jobs at the Gap supplier, three armed men visited me in my home and, after waiting for the right moment, attempted to take me with them. Fortunately, the police arrived in response to a call from a concerned neighbor, and the assailants fled over a wall in my backyard. My remaining year in the country was spent with heightened security precautions, which included changing homes and driving a car with windows so dark that evenings out, especially when it rained, became an additional risk to my safety.

The legacy of dictatorship and civil war in El Salvador would take more than a peace accord to erase. Yet many things were indeed changing. The emerging anti-sweatshop activism of the mid-1990s had blossomed into a major transnational movement. It had become a dramatic and creative form of activism on college campuses. Anti-sweatshop groups grew in Canada, Europe, and in parts of Asia.

The new form of activism differed in many ways from labor activism during the era of civil war and military dictatorship. It suffered less from excessive politicization, and was more focused on concrete work demands, and on broad social alliances. And a networked form of organization was slowly replacing the more rigid organizational form of the preceding era.

These dynamics were not unique to El Salvador. Transnational anti-sweatshop activism spread to Mexico, through Central America and the Caribbean, and then to Asia and the Middle East. In South America, autoworkers had joined forces with their global counterparts to protect jobs and achieve global employee committees and international agreements on rights at work.

The international solidarity movement would not be without problems. Power imbalances between activists in the global North and workers in the South sometimes distorted campaign goals and created tensions. Some southern unionists denounced northern activists and proclaimed that they would organize without international solidarity. Often, either deliberately or unwittingly, they used the threat of unionization by more radical unions to make themselves more palatable to employers and thus facilitate their union successes.

On the left, tensions emerged between women’s groups and labor organizers. Some women’s groups accused male union leaders of lacking a gender perspective as they attempted to organize mostly female garment workers. Unions responded that women’s groups did not understand the dynamics of union organizing and collective bargaining, and that women’s committees were poor substitutes for strong unions. Yet, in the midst of these disputes, the movement grew and enjoyed several important successes. It found new points of vulnerability in global supply chains by exploiting structural weaknesses and cultural frames that resonated with larger societal values.

In more than a few cases, these successes were short-lived due to capital mobility, world economic crises, and the international industrial restructuring that facilitated South-South competition. In other cases, the effects were more long-lived. These dynamics made the study of labor solidarity all the more fascinating for me.

When I left El Salvador to begin my academic pursuits, I decided to turn an intense decade of experiences in Latin America and my initial research endeavors into the foundation for my studies. First, I wanted to know why union organizing was still so difficult after the end to such a long period of authoritarian rule in Latin America and, in countries like El Salvador, violent civil war. Peace accords and democratization should have created a much more permissive environment for unionization. What was it about global industrial restructuring that made local factory owners so resistant to unionization? And how did state transformation during this period affect labor movement dynamics?

Second, given this new political and economic context, what strategies were unionists turning to and why? Was international activism the only response, or were there others? How would workers in other countries—like Brazil and Argentina—respond to the challenges of globalization in their dominant industries, most notably the automobile industry? As my own experience working with unions made clear, countless potential strategies were available to union organizers. How did historical experiences, ideational influences, and political identities shape the transformation of labor solidarity?

It took me years of intellectual inquiry to begin to understand in more theoretical terms some of my experiences from my ten years in Latin America. It took another several years of field research and writing to systematically probe the ideas and arguments that I derived from my experiences and academic exploration. This book is a product of that endeavor.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time coming, and my debts are extensive. I am grateful to my union friends in the National Federation of Salvadoran Workers (FENASTRAS) of 1988–1992 who took me into their organization as one of their own and gave me a crash course on unionism under authoritarian rule. I am also indebted to the workers in export processing zones—especially at Mandarin International—who trusted me to work with them in finding a solution to their problems and in the process introduced me to the EPZ production system and the lives of the workers who make our apparel. My colleagues in the Norwegian Confederation of Labor confided in me and gave me the honor of representing them internationally for many years.

In the earliest incarnation of this work as an academic project, I benefited enormously from Sidney Tarrow, who, from our first meeting, encouraged me to theorize more about social movement dynamics. He gently pushed me when I needed it the most, while giving me the freedom to develop and explore my project as I saw fit. Peter Katzenstein inspired me to go beyond economic and political structures by exploring the role of norms and political identities in shaping large social processes. He helped me to focus my arguments and find my own voice. And he provided a remarkable source of encouragement.

Maria Cook was a friend and a colleague from the moment I arrived at Cornell University. She constantly pressed me to make my arguments and evidence more precise, and this greatly improved my project. Peter Evans provided a wonderful source of support and intellectual collaboration, and he helped me to see some of the deeper implications of my arguments before I recognized them myself. Victoria Murillo provided extensive and extremely insightful and helpful comments.

At Penn State University, I have benefited from the feedback provided by the social movement reading group led by John McCarthy and Lee Ann Banaszak. The Rock Ethic Institute’s Social Justice Seminar, under the guidance of Sandra Morgen, was an additional source of insight and inspiration, as was the Political Science and Economics departments’ globalization seminar organized by Quan Li and Andrés Rodríguez. Penn State’s chapter of United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) provided a different sort of encouragement, for which I am grateful.

Through other academic conferences, workshops, and collaborative endeavors, many other colleagues provided support and valuable insights on segments of my work. They include Teri Caraway, Alex Colvin, Lance Compa, Susan Eckstein, Henry Frundt, Gary Gereffi, Michael Gordon, Michael Hanagan, Shareen Hertel, Harry Katz, Margaret Keck, Mark Kesselman, Audie Klotz, Scott Martin, Gene Palumbo, Dan Plafcan, Jonas Pontusson, Karthika Sasikumar, Andrew Schrank, Gay Seidman, Joel Stillerman, Charles Tilly, Lowell Turner, Peter Waterman, Christopher Way, and Peter Winn. My appreciation also goes to Harley Shaiken, whose path-breaking book Work Transformed helped inspire the title of this book.

My students at Cornell and Penn State have been a source of encouragement, and they contributed in their own way to this project. When I began teaching on topics related to this book, they let me know—through their verbal feedback or, more often, their facial expressions and body language in the classroom—when I was being precise and engaging, and when the presentation of my ideas was somewhat uninspiring. I quickly learned the benefits of clarity as well as the effectiveness of incorporating stories from Latin America to illustrate my points. These lessons served me as I’ve endeavored to write this book.

Research for this project entailed living abroad and numerous field research trips in four countries between 2001 and 2010. I am especially thankful to the workers and unionists in Latin America who shared their lives, hopes, and frustrations with me over countless hours of conversations. In El Salvador, I am grateful to the members of the Center for Labor Studies (CENTRA) who opened their archives to me, provided free photocopies, and offered countless discussions about labor politics. The Center for Labor Studies and Support (CEAL) provided invaluable contacts, meeting space, and an opportunity to exchange ideas. For gathering data and conducting surveys in El Salvador, I thank Norma Molina, my research assistant there.

In Honduras, all of the labor centers were generous with their time. I am particularly grateful to the FITH labor center and the CGT’s maquila organizing project for their support during my stay, their patience in answering my endless questions, and their willingness to organize countless meetings for me with apparel workers. Juan Ramon Irías provided first-rate research assistance in assisting me with my surveys. Representatives of the Ministry of Labor and the Honduran Maquiladora Association were also generous with their time, information, and analysis.

In Brazil, the researchers from DIEESE—particularly Patricia Pelatieri, Jefferson José da Conceição, and Airton Gustavo dos Santos—were extremely helpful in providing scholarly studies and feedback on some of my ideas. At the DESEP research center, Carlos Augusto S. Gonçalves provided office space when I needed it, and also intellectual discussion. Kjeld Jakobsen and Silvia Portella of the CUT labor center provided contacts, encouragement, and friendship. Fernando Lópes and Valter Sanches of the National Confederation of Metalworkers were extremely generous with their time, as were all of the colleagues of the SMABC autoworkers’ union. I also thank the SMABC for giving me access to their internal files, and for the assistance