Members of Mexican FAT union join UE at Jobs with Justice rally in Chicago

Workers of the World, We’ve Got to Move Forward Together

From a speech by former UE General Secretary-Treasurer Amy Newell

The talk was given at the inauguration of the mural which had been painted by Juana Alicia in the Local 506 Hall in Erie Pennsylvania during the UE's convention in August, 2000. She speaks both about the UE's history and approach to international solidarity as well as the origins of the UE's relationship with the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT) of Mexico.

"Let me begin by making clear that the roots of this alliance go way back in the history of UE. This is not a situation of some officers and staff people getting a good idea in 1991. Internationalism and international solidarity is at the beginning of the UE. "Workers of the world unite" - that defines the UE. Our union has never advocated protectionism or "buy American" programs as being somehow the solution to the problems which confront working people.

"So just to give you one example, I was still kind of a youngster in the union in the late Seventies when imports started flooding into the country and jobs started to be lost overseas and we saw plants closing. While the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was running a high-profile "buy American" campaign with these ugly representations of the Asian workers who were stealing their jobs, and the United Auto Workers were parking Toyotas in their parking lots and giving members a chance to bash them with sledgehammers, the UE had the guts to put out a pamphlet called How Foreign Is Foreign Competition, stamped "Made in America," laying out the role of U.S.-based transnational corporations in pitting workers of the world against each other and then tying it in to a U.S. foreign policy that has propped up dictators around the world to create the low-wage havens where these same corporations could move our jobs.

UE member from Iowa with Mexican FAT leader and president of a coop to which his local contributed a computer.

So that's always been UE's point of view - workers of the world, we've got to move forward together. And meanwhile, during all these decades, the official labor federation of the United States, the AFL-CIO, and the official labor federation of Mexico, the CTM (the Confederation of Mexican Workers), supposedly had a sister alliance. But, it was actually reported to have been largely symbolic. And to the best that anybody has been able to determine, it consisted kind of a Cold War politics within the International Confederation of Trade Unions. There was never a single bilateral meeting to talk about safety and health, to talk about collective bargaining or wages.

"And so even before NAFTA, while the maquiladora zone was growing and 200 plants had opened, with workers just miles apart on our side of the border earning $6 or $7 dollars an hour and a few miles on the other side of the border earning $4 a day, the AFL-CIO and the CTM had no plan in place to organize those plants and raise the wages of the Mexican workers, nothing.

"And on top of that, when the fights against NAFTA arrived, while the AFL-CIO was gung-ho against NAFTA, the CTM supported NAFTA - so the AFL-CIO had no partner to work with to defeat that trade agreement and all of the unions affiliated to the AFL-CIO were similarly blocked. But UE did not have that problem and we immediately, as that fight loomed, went out looking for a partner in Mexico to help us fight NAFTA. We wanted to be sure that the fight was not Canadian and U.S. people against Mexicans, but working people in the Canada and United States and Mexico against the transnational corporations and the governments that serve them that were trying to shove NAFTA down our throat.

"My best recollection is that some time in 1991 we asked then U.S. Washington Representative Bob Kingsley to go to a trinational, anti-NAFTA conference in Zacatecas, Mexico. And Bob Kingsley came back with the welcome news that yes, there is independent, militant, democratic unionism in Mexico and he had met it and it was the Authentic Labor Front of Mexico the Frente Autentico del Trabajo, the FAT.

"And we spent the next year or so getting acquainted, the UE and the FAT, because it seemed, you know, on the surface, that we were just like two peas in a pod, but you never judge on first impressions. So we collaborated on a number of joint efforts, we attended each others' conferences on both sides of the border. We got to know the FAT's leadership: Benedicto Martinez, Bertha Lujan, Alfredo Dominguez, Manuel Garcia and other key leaders of the FAT. They were checking us out at the same time; it was a mutual process. And finally we decided we were ready to take the plunge, kind of like getting married.

We decided that while we were going to have an alliance that would have encompassed many different forms of cooperation, including a joint campaign to defeat the North American Free Trade Agreement, the heart of our agreement would be organizing - organizing the unorganized and working jointly to raise the wages of the Mexican workers. We wanted to put the platitudes of international solidarity into concrete practice, to make a practical difference in terms of building solidarity across borders. And our strategic organizing alliance targeted the Mexican operations of the U.S. companies who our members worked for on this side of the border. And it was an alliance not only between our national organizations but involving the local unions as well.

We formalized this on Valentine's day in 1992. We had a signed agreement.

I am totally proud to be associated with the union that is leading the fight against globalization. Let's define what they mean by globalization: the kind of corporate-driven, cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost, race-to-the-bottom kind of globalization that they want to impose on us. And the union is proving that the alternative to that is not isolationism but internationalism - true international solidarity reaching out across borders to unite for more justice and more dignity and more decent lives for working people.