Workers at Tijuana Factory Win Independent Union

TIJUANA — Workers at a small, Korean-owned factory made history Tuesday when their long-sought request to install an independent union was approved by Baja California officials who had tried to stop them.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, an industrial frontier of 2,700 factories, the only worker “advocates” have been government-backed union representatives who are absent or disengaged.

But an independent union was recognized Tuesday evening, said Mary Tong, executive director of the Support Committee for Maquiladora Workers.

“The union has been recognized and they did win the second vote,” Tong said. “It’s been a long time coming, but it’s a very positive development.”

Peter Smith, an expert on U.S.-Latin American relations at UC San Diego, said the labor fight has exposed the ugliest contradictions of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

“What is finally being revealed is the conflict behind this dual logic of NAFTA: the pro-investment logic versus the pro-labor logic,” he said.

NAFTA lured U.S. factories south of the border but did not mandate that Mexico adopt U.S. workplace standards. Critics of the bill said American workers would be eclipsed by cheaper Mexican workers who were unprotected by their labor system.

Workers at the Korean-owned Han Young plant elected an independent union Oct. 6, but Baja California officials threw out the results and deemed the union illegitimate.

The controversy at Han Young spurred four of the 12 fired workers to launch a hunger strike. By the time Tuesday’s agreement was announced, three men were still fasting outside the government plaza. The fourth dropped out after the first week because of anemia.

The three men ended their hunger strike after the confirmation vote Tuesday evening.

The men, who earned an average of $8 per day, had all been fired for “union activity,” their employers told them.

On Friday, it had appeared that a tentative peace between workers and officials had been reached. But at the last minute, the governor’s undersecretary refused to sign the agreement, which would have installed a de facto independent union, reinstated fired workers and raised the salaries about 30%.

One of the hunger strikers, Miguelangel Sanchez, said the undersecretary cowed to the city’s merchants.

“The business community was pressuring him not to sign,” the 29-year-old said Tuesday morning. Sanchez and his colleagues wanted better wages and safer working conditions. At Han Young, workers make steel chassis for tractor-trailers sold exclusively to Hyundai Precision. They said only some of the workers were given masks to protect them from smoke and fumes.