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Maquiladora Workers, the Missing Faces in the NAFTA Renegotiation

Kent Paterson, Americas Program

Miércoles 8 de noviembre de 2017, puesto en línea por Claudia Casal

12 de octubre de 2017 - Americas Program - Low wages paid to Mexican workers continue to be a contentious issue as the three-way talks for a new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) proceed.

In Mexico, many workers and their advocates had hoped that Pope Francisco’s visit to Ciudad Juarez back in February 2016 would bring about improvements for Mexican labor long before the NAFTA negotiators rolled up their sleeves. During his visit to the troubled border city and export production center of about 1.4 million people, Francisco denounced poverty, lack of opportunities for youth, and “the mentality” that seeks “the greatest amount of profits possible, at any cost and in an immediate way.”

Speaking before businessmen and others, the first Latin American Pope condemned what he called “the dominant mindset that sucks people into the flow of capital, leading in many cases to exploitation of employees as if they were objects to use and throw away.”

The Pontiff openly challenged the Mexican government, asking, “What does Mexico want to leave its children? A memory of exploitation, of insufficient salaries, of labor harassment or trafficking and slave labor? Or does it want to leave them the culture of the memory of dignified work, a decent roof over their heads and land to work?”

Today, twenty months after the Pope’s visit, Ciudad Juarez’s 300 plus export factories, or maquiladoras, continue cranking out electronic, automotive and other pricey products for the global market. An estimated 275,000 plant workers (up from 177,027 during the depths of the Great Recession) wake up every day, hurrying from their modest or ramshackle homes in far-flung, underdeveloped neighborhoods to make it to the shop floor on time. [1]

In the months before Francisco’s visit, a factory workers’ movement for living wages, better working conditions and independent unions had emerged in Juarez, attracting international attention and solidarity. Did Pope Francisco’s words make any real difference in the lives of the people whose hands assemble goods for the global market?

Veteran maquiladora workers Isidro Sotelo and Nicolasa Juarez shrug their shoulders. “Things stayed the same, except when he was here,” they said, almost in unison. The two workers are in the prime of their working lives. They have bills to pay, families to raise and expensive quinceañera parties to stage for dream-filled young daughters coming of age.

Veterans of the 2015-16 labor movement, Sotelo and Juarez, along with two other Juarez workers Marcelo Uscanga and Tito Arrendondo, explained in a Juarez interview the challenges of economic survival in an expensive border city. Uscanga said he earned just 85 pesos a day (less than five dollars), plus small weekly bonuses and a package of basic supplies at a Foxconn plant in 2015, and that was after working seven years with the company.

In her 14 years with Johnson Controls, Juarez estimates her earnings increased from a starting wage of 110 pesos daily plus a weekly bonus of 120 pesos in 2001, to 168 pesos per day and a 130 pesos in weekly bonus in 2015. She later changed factories. All those interviewed suffered some form of reprisals for their defense of labor rights.

After factoring in the peso devaluation and price inflation of recent years, Juarez’s take home pay of 110 pesos bought more in 2001 than 168 did in 2015. To make ends meet, Juarez said she put in overtime and worked weekends, leaving little time to spend with her two children. “I felt stressed and tired,” she added.

“We had to work poorly paid extra hours or look for any other little job to survive,” Sotelo said. “Obviously, the wages paid by industry don’t allow a family to survive.” Typically, weekly work shifts range between 42 and 45 hours, the workers said.

Arrendondo sums up the consequence of working full-time in the maquiladoras, “I was always bad off economically.”

Citing Mexican government statistics, Proceso magazine recently estimated that the real value of Mexico’s minimum wage in 2017 is 22 percent less than in January 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. [2]

The Mexican government’s 20 percent gasoline price hike last January, coupled with Trump-induced peso devaluation, has meant that inflation has steadily eroded the purchasing power of workers over the past year.

In Juarez, prices increased 6.95% from the middle of August 2016 to the middle of the same month in 2017, according to a report in El Diario de Juarez based on government statistics. Prices of tomatoes, lemons and avocadoes–essentials in Mexican diet—soared. [3] Although avocados are the poster child for NAFTA boosters, many Mexicans can’t afford them.

Nicolasa Juarez and her co-workers also felt the pain in the pocketbook when the price of city bus fare increased to eight pesos this year. The factory worker and her two children pay 68 pesos a day for transportation, or about a third of her daily salary, adding to the burden of making ends of meet.

In Guadalajara, another big export production center, inflation hit 8% this year while worker pay saw only a 4% increase, said Jorge Barrajas, director of the Center for Reflection and Labor Action (CEREAL), a non-governmental advocacy organization that works closely with electronics and other workers.

“Salaries are falling behind the cost of basic services and products,” Barrajas said, adding that the average daily wage of Guadalajara electronics plant workers is 116-120 pesos (approximately $7) while the daily basket of basic goods and services costs 240 pesos for an individual worker.

The minimum wage should cover basic needs. But currently the cost of the basic needs package is three times the current minimum wage that President Enrique Peña Nieto called “an historic increase” in his Sept. 1 State of the Union Address.

Miguel Angel Alvarez, CEREAL’s coordinator, pegged the amount needed for a family of four to get by at 400 pesos a day, still just $22 dollars–less than a quarter of the amount earned by a US minimum wage worker.

Barrajas slammed the current minimum wage as “unconstitutional” since Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution declares the wage level must be sufficient for a head of household to meet “normal material, social and cultural needs” and be able to provide an obligatory education for the children.

Hard Times on the Global Assembly Line

Declining or stagnant wages, however bitter a pill, represent only one aspect of the ongoing squeeze of maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez and across Mexico. Another is an industry-wide practice of “bumping”, or super speed-up, that has become standard practice in recent years.

Bumping means one worker now performs tasks formerly done by several employees. Juarez labor lawyer and activist Susana Prieto, who worked in the factories in the 1980s before going to law school, recalls that in those days they had “universal operators,” or rotating, substitute workers who would fill in for a fellow worker who was absent so the assembly line could continue without interruption.

Nowadays, “universal operators” have been cut, and where 11 or 12 workers might once perform a task, between five and seven workers carry out the same job, Prieto said.

(Companies) are killing them,” she said of workers’ current circumstances. All this is done, Prieto stressed, “for cost reduction.”

Prieto says another way the foreign-owned maquiladora companies maximize profits is by paying increasingly specialized technical workers assembly-line wages instead of the higher pay that value-added work should command in an increasingly automated production environment.

And Harder Times for Women Workers

Companies also dodge the demand for child care by scheduling a couple on different shifts so one employee takes care of the children while the other puts in his or her time on the factory floor. The scheme functions as long as a harmonious relationship prevails, but when a partnership ends, it’s the woman who is most often left in the lurch, forced to cope with children on her own and faced with few options for income other than sex work , Prieto said.

Although the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) maintains daycare facilities in Juarez, these cover a small fraction of the identified need among maquiladora worker families. In 2015, 29 centers provided care for six thousand children, according to El Diario de Juarez. [4]

The Juarez maquiladoras began in the mid 1960s as a response to sagging economic fortunes along the border and the mass unemployment of former Mexican bracero farmworkers who lost their jobs when the United States ended the guestworker program in 1964. However, the assembly lines were soon filled with young women instead of male ex-braceros.

By the turn of the century, more men were getting jobs in the Juarez maquiladoras and other export plants across the country. An Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez study found that of 866,381 line workers in the national Mexican maquiladora industry in 2004, 400,000 were men and 466,381 women. [5]

Maquiladora industry spokespersons frequently argue that the pay workers complain about is only a small fraction of their real wage, with bonuses, annual profit-sharing, cafeteria food, store discount coupons, funeral and life insurance, eyecare benefits, transportation and employer contributions to government programs like affordable housing (Infonavit) and social security, which also allows workers access to government health care facilities, making up the overall compensation package.

But Prieto and other industry veterans counter that companies often scrimp on promised benefits. They also deduct many of these from the pay base. Former Foxconn worker Uscanga noted that plant medical services are often deficient. He noted that one time he was injured falling off a chair in the plant and a factory nurse who had no prescription for the medicine gave him a shot. He also remembered another “nurse” who had no professional training and got the position by completing a first-aid course at a community center.

Donald Trump has criticized Mexico’s maquiladora industry for encouraging US companies to outsource production and close down US plants. [6] Yet within Mexico’s maquiladora industry, outsourcing workers and services is central to the business model. By sub-contracting employment agencies to hire workers on short-term contracts, and contracting transportation out to government-friendly unions that bus workers in old, accident-prone vehicles, foreign companies seek savings for the bottom line.

Just last month, a bus transporting workers in Tijuana veered off the road and down a cliff, injuring 18 passengers.. No fatalities were reported in the crash that may have been caused by a young driver falling asleep. [7]

A scandal erupted earlier this year when several Mexican media outlets revealed that maquiladoras in Juarez and elsewhere in Chihuahua state were serving horse meat to unknowing employees in company cafeterias. In one of her last articles before she was murdered, La Jornada correspondent Miroslava Breach reported that a Chihuahua state government commission was investigating the importation of 50,000 “used-up” horses from the United States. The investigation alleges that the horse meat was mixed with smaller quantities of beef and disguised in stews for workers in more than 500 offshore assembly plants. [8]

The speed-ups, long hours, insufficient nourishment and stress of the maquiladora plants take a huge toll on the human body. Dr. Jesus Jimenez, a retired IMSS physician who formerly did illness prevention in Juarez maquiladoras, said

“Maquiladoras should be judged for how many (workers) finish their careers in the industry, and few do,” Jimenez insisted.

Alvarez said potential retirees confront serious obstacles to collecting benefits due to the 1997 social security reform that extended retirement eligibility to about 24 years of enrollment in the social security system, and the 2012 labor reform that legalized employment subcontracting. This resulted in a “significant number” of workers not properly enrolled in the system or dropped from the rolls for certain periods of the year so they accrue less time. Another trick, he said, is for an employer to report a lower wage than is actually paid to reduce employer contributions.

Neither the IMSS nor the Labor Ministry conduct “effective inspections of companies to verify labor conditions, wages and social security status,” Alvarez charged.

CEREAL’s Barrajas echoed Jimenez in judging that few workers are able to retire from the electronics plants because they don’t last long enough to comply with the many years of service required for retirement.. Asked about the percentage of workers who retire from Juarez’s maquiladoras, attorney Prieto just laughed and replied, “None!”

In late 2016, the president of the administrators of the privatized retirement accounts hatched from the 1997 reform, Carlos Noriega, floated a trial balloon to lengthen retirement eligibility from age 65 to 67 as an answer to the financial crisis facing the retirement system. So far, however, the full retirement age remains at 65. [9]

Labor Shortage, Violence and Stunted Development

Because wages and conditions are so bad, lately Juarez’s maquiladoras have had to offer extra incentives and ease candidate qualifications to lure new workers, a recruiting pitch that’s been used in the past during booms like the late 1990s but is quickly withdrawn in busts such as the Great Recession.

In recent ads, IGMex (Regal) offered “immediate” hiring at the rate of 143.73 pesos a day and 222 pesos in weekly bonuses. Stoneridge-TED Mexico dangled bonuses of 1,800 and 2,400 pesos, depending on the shift, for potential production workers who last three months.

GE Healthcare advertised a weekly wage of 1,000 pesos (about $53 dollars), plus bonuses, a savings account, a 400 peso monthly stipend for education expenses, and eye glass subsidies. The company also billed sports activities and a gym where users had the assistance of a “professional instructor” and “therapeutic and anti-stress” massages.

Still, many Juarez residents shun the maquiladora industry, preferring the informal economy. Uscanga no longer works in the plants and instead sells perfumes door to door. “It’s going better for me. I work when I want to and earn more,” he said. Others stick with the factories because at least it keeps them enrolled in the social security system.

To keep the global assembly lines rolling, industry recruiters search outside Ciudad Juarez, contracting fresh hands from as far away as the state of Chiapas on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.

Similar to the system of busing Mexican farmworkers daily from El Paso, Texas, for work in the onion and chile fields of nearby southern New Mexico, Foxconn even resorted to transporting workers back and forth every day from smaller towns in Chihuahua state an hour or two from Juarez for work in assembling computers at a company plant, Prieto said.

Juan Carlos Martinez Prado, editor of Allimite.mx, a local left political and cultural journal, has lived in Juarez for 30 years. According to Martinez, many local youth confront a bleak choice. “There are two destinies on the border: the maquiladoras or the narco,” Martinez said.

Entering the maquiladoras with a sense of resignation and “mental insubordination,” often young workers rebel. But they don’t always express it in healthy ways, instead undergoing a “slow death” marked by spiritual emptiness and addictions to digitalized diversions, drugs or alcohol, Martinez affirmed.

“This is a border of young people. What is the maquiladora industry doing? Disappearing them. Even though you have a (place) in the factory, you’re still disappeared,” he said. “It’s the perversity of capitalism on the border. It’s scary.”

While violence declined in Juarez since the so-called drug war of 2008-12 when about 11,000 people were murdered, bloodletting routinely flares in neighborhoods inhabited by maquiladora workers. Virtually every day, one, two or more people are shot, strangled, stabbed or beaten to death in disputes over the small-scale, illegal drug market or in outbursts of “domestic violence.” Compared with a dip in 2015 when 303 murders were reported in the city, violence is on the rise again. According to Molly Molloy, a New Mexico State University researcher who tracks violence in Mexico, at least 536 homicides were committed in the border city from January 1 to the end of September of this year.

Dr. Kathy Staudt has studied the El Paso-Juarez borderland for decades, and is a staunch advocate for raising the pay of maquiladora workers. Staudt argued at a recent NAFTA town hall organized by community groups in El Paso that the low factory wages in Juarez have an impact on the U.S. side of the border.

“Even the El Paso retail trade is affected by extremely low wages,” the political scientist contended. “Approximately 15% of shoppers come from Ciudad Juarez and spend $980 million annually, according to economist Tom Fullerton. If Mexican workers’ wages increased, not only would we see better living conditions, but also greater spending on this side of the border, thus spreading and sharing prosperity.”

Employing government data of salaries in the national maquiladora industry, the 2016 Juarez Strategic Plan report, Así Estamos, ranked the city almost at almost the bottom of the scale–number 31 of 33 cities analyzed. [10]

“Border society won’t solve its problems without a good income for the workers,” Martinez insisted.

Wages in the NAFTA Talks

A former University of Texas El Paso political science professor, Staudt has attended border security conferences and other events featuring representatives of the El Paso-Juarez business and political elite for many years. “I raised (wage) issues, but it fell on deaf ears,” she said in an interview. “Mostly, I was kind of iced out of conversations.”

Now that the Trump administration has put the issue of Mexican wages on the table in NAFTA renegotiation, people are forced to pay attention.

“In Mexico there is a lot of pressure to increase salaries, including on the part of some businessmen who are asking the government to increase salaries so it will increase the internal market. Workers don’t have money to buy things,” Barrajas said.

Leaders of the business class, including the president of the Business Council (Consejo Coordinador Empresarial), Juan Pablo Castañón, and the Employers’ Confederation of Mexico (Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana), have proposed a 15.8 percent increase in the minimum wage, to 92 pesos. [11]

As September kicked in, Mexican Labor Secretary Alfonso Navarrete said economic trends signaled a possible opportunity for increasing the minimum pay. But Alvarez cautioned that Navarrete “is only asking the opinion of the business sector, forgetting and excluding from the table workers, universities, academics and labor rights defenders.” In essence, flirting with a deal between big business and pro-government unions at the expense of workers’ pay and shop floor conditions.

September came and went with no proposal for a hike in the minimum wage.

Navarrete’s remarks came as the vast disparities in U.S., Mexican and Canadian wages became a bone of contention duringthe second round of NAFTA renegotiations in Mexico City. Mexican representatives immediately rejected a specific wage hike as part of a new NAFTA deal, reacting defensively to the wage question and contending it was an internal matter for Mexico to tackle.

“The results of these negotiations should impact in higher income for workers of the three countries, preserving labor rights but respecting the specific laws of each country,” stated Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo. [12]

The Mexican Economy Ministry had no comment on the wage question after the third round of talks concluded in Canada late last month, preferring instead to laud progress on small business concerns.

Yet demands for higher wages aren’t going away soon. The maquiladora industry came face to face with them at a national meeting in Mexicali last month of Index, the industry’s trade organization. Organized by the Mexicali Civic Front, about 50 protesters demonstrated outside the hotel where Index was convened, clamoring for higher worker pay. Index president Federico Serrano defended the pay scales, claiming they were “competitive,” “dignified” and allowed employees to “grow day by day.” [13]

But as recent reports spell out, Mexico is now behind China in the wage category, with average manufacturing wages in China reaching $3.60 per hour in 2016 compared to $2.10 per hour in Mexico. And after deductions, the take-home pay of many Mexican maquiladora workers falls below the hourly average. [14]

In Mexico opinions vary as to whether NAFTA renegotiations, linked with political pressures from the 2018 elections, will produce a significant wage hike. “Anything is possible this year,” Barrajas said. For Prieto, the wage posturing of U.S. and Canadian negotiators reflects a “double standard”. She points out that both countries have business interests in Mexico that could benefit from the added consumer power of a wage hike and in the case of the United States, other goals such as stemming immigration and keeping jobs on this side of the border also come to play. The Juarez labor lawyer predicted no higher wages for Mexican workers will result from the trade talks.

Scholar and author Staudt maintains although NAFTA brought economic growth in the border region, low wages tell another story of the impact of regional integration. “I think it’s also important to look at these wages to complement the critique of NAFTA, and also the inequality and stagnation of wages in Mexico,” Staudt said.

She notes that the trade pact did not reduce inequality between Mexico and the United States, much less yield “shared prosperity.” From her standpoint, raising Mexico’s minimum wage must be raised immediately.

Alvarez believes the Mexican government’s position is a betrayal of its workers. “The only nation in the NAFTA talks that hasn’t sat down to negotiate dignified salaries for its workers is Mexico,” he pointed out.

On September 1, the Mexican Telephone Workers Union and the Mexican Electrical Workers Union demonstrated outside the Mexican Congress demanding a seat at the table in the NAFTA renegotiation. Among the speakers was Jerry Dias, president of Canada’s 310,000-member Unifor union. [15] They called for higher wages as part of the renegotiated trinational pact.

Last spring, scores of Mexican, Canadian and U.S. unions, environmental groups and social organizations gathered in Mexico City to issue a proclamation on the upcoming NAFTA talks. Among the 15 demands they formulated, the activists demanded a “transparent” and “democratic” process including the participation of the public and their lawmakers, measures to increase salaries, “access to decent work in the three countries”, union democracy and freedom, and a “transnational, collective negotiation in those cases in which an employer operates in two or three countries.” [16]

Vital but Violated Right to Unionize

Guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution, but fiercely disputed in practice, the right of workers to freely join a union of their choice is another critical issue hovering over the NAFTA talks. With its huge maquiladora industry, Ciudad Juarez is a key test case for union freedom.

In 2015 and 2016, workers at six foreign-owned companies with factories in the border city-Foxconn, ADC/Commscope, Eaton, Lexmark, Eagle Ottawa and Johnson Controls– staged work stoppages, held public demonstrations and organized protest encampments outside factories. They demanded higher wages, an end to sexual harassment and, significantly, independent unions.

Sparking the wave of discontent was swelling anger over an imbalance in wages, with newly hired employees paid more to do the same job than workers with years under their belt with a company. Prior to the protest movement, a labor shortage hit the industry after having recovered from the Great Recession. Ramped-up production led to a need to hire more workers. Consequently, companies slightly upped pay for new hires without raising the wages of longtime workers.

That only made matters worse, and the local labor protests began to generate press coverage. U.S. unions joined in with solidarity actions in El Paso and other citiesin support of the Juarez workers’ demands for better wages, decent treatment and independent unions. The AFL-CIO and other organizations wrote letters and provided material support.

“I think it helped to educate more people in El Paso about the conditions of working people,” said Staudt, who helped organize a public forum where Juarez workers spoke out about their struggles.

A pattern developed in the protests, with the companies, including Eaton, Foxconn, Lexmark, Eagle Ottawa and ADC/Commscope, and later (with a legal conflict still pending) Johnson Controls firing activist workers, settling individual workers’ legal complaints and raising wages to attempt to deflate the movement.

Some plants adopted other measures to prevent future protests, including installing more security checkpoints, requiring workers to provide fingerprints and reorganizing employee work groups into “cells” isolated from each other so worker contact was minimal, according to Prieto. Workers rejected these measures.

Prieto estimates about 2,000 workers overall participated in the movement. The industry fired activist workers, called out the police on occasion, reportedly visited workers at home to warn them against participating, gave some pay hikes to defuse discontent, stymied formal petitions for independent unions in the labor board, offered confidential settlements to workers who filed lawsuits, and– especially in the case of Lexmark– waited for the weather and activist burn-out to take its toll on a months-long encampment that lasted through the winter. It worked.

Although they were a small fraction of the city’s maquiladora labor force, they brought public attention to labor problems in the industry and caused the captains of industry to close ranks and move to suppress any further outbreaks of discontent.

Ex- maquiladora worker Marcelo Uscanga and his co-workers concurred that many workers did not participate because of threats and fear of losing their jobs. While the movement won some gains, such as higher pay, it ran into a brick wall over the demand for independent unions, said Prieto, whose Obreros Maquileros Facebook page promotes the workers’ movement.

Besides legal and bureaucratic hurdles, problems arose from the interference of the pro-government CTM and CROC unions, which have a long history of close collaboration with industry. Unlike the Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas where the pro-government unions like the CROC have a long established presence in the maquiladora industry, Ciudad Juarez has historically had a low rate of unionization.

“It’s the Chihuahua (state) government’s commitment that there will be no unions,” Prieto said. “They make that commitment whenever there is a change of administration, whether it is the PRI or PAN parties.” Nonetheless, the situation shifted in the wake of 2015 labor movement when suddenly plants had “unions” belonging to the CTM or CROC. Mexico has a tradition of protection contracts with business-friendly unions to keep real worker representation out.

“The right to strike is nullified, a dead letter. The right to strike is what will give the workers a life,” Prieto, who represents Johnson Controls workers, contended. “If you only give that right to a union that’s with the government, you’re already screwed.” The bottom line for the Juarez labor advocate: “as long as there are no independent unions, freedom to organize can’t exist.”

After the movement’s failure to win its demands, worker discontent sizzled in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua during 2016 and 2017. For instance, maquiladora workers at Yazaki plants in Juarez and Chihuahua City staged demonstrations for higher wages, and dozens of Furukawa workers in Juarez conducted a brief work stoppage protesting a company plan to transfer them to another factory far away from their neighborhoods and denouncing the collusion between the CROC union and management. The Johnson Controls conflict is not over yet, with 667 legal complaints still pending.

At this critical juncture, U.S. citizens must stay informed about the NAFTA talks, support Mexican workers’ calls for higher wages, and connect with civil society groups pushing for better labor and trade standards as negotiations move forward, Staudt affirms.

The fate of NAFTA and the Mexican workers who produce the profits of the pact are up in the air as the negotiations continue. Amid disagreements over addressing the wage and labor questions, observers like the non-governmental Council of Canadians note an impasse on labor and increasing talk of a collapse of negotiations.. The key demand of transparency issued by last spring’s trinational encounter of civil society organizations from the NAFTA nations has not been satisfied, with officials keep close wraps on the content and occasional, bombastic leaks. Although hundreds of business representatives are privvy to the talks, labor information and participation has been tightly restricted.

Recently, Canadian union leader Jerry Dias met with Mexican Ambassador to Canada Dionisio Perez Jacome to discuss NAFTA and labor issues. The union also wrote to United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, calling for better across-the-board labor standards.

“No amount of signaling or posturing will serve a purpose unless the terms of the deal deliver meaningful, demonstrable and enforceable provisions to improve work standards throughout the continent,” the letter stated in part.

Resources:

Obreros Maquileros (Spanish): https://www.facebook.com/obrerosmaquilerosdeciudadjuarez/

CEREAL: http://www.cerealgdl.org/index.php/en/

Allimite (Spanish): http://allimite.mx/

EL Paso Social Justice Education Project: http://www.epsocialjustice.org/new-blog/

https://www.facebook.com/sjeducationep/

Juarez Strategic Plan (Spanish) https://planjuarez.org/images/docs/informes/informe_AEJ_2016.pdf

Unifor Nafta: https://www.unifor.org/en/nafta

Unifor Letter to United States Trade Representative: http://www.unifor.org/sites/default/files/attachments/robert_lighthizer.pdf

Council of Canadians: https://canadians.org/trade

Spanish Language Video of Johnson Controls Protest, Ciudad Juarez, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMLXXZWN9jg


https://www.americas.org/archives/20271

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[1Así Estamos 2016, Juarez Strategic Plan; El Diario de Juarez, September

[2Proceso, August 22, 2017

[3El Diario de Juarez, August 25, 2017

[4El Diario de Juarez, January 23, 2015

[5Rodríguez Pequeño, Consuelo. Mujeres en Movimientos. Organización y Resistencia en la Industria Maquiladora de Ciudad Juarez, UACJ. November 2015; INEGI, July 2017 report.

[6Noticieros.televisa.com, September 6, 2017; 2017; El Sol de Tijuana, September 6, 2017

[7La Jornada, February 10, 2017

[8La Jornada, November 25, 2016.

[9Así Estamos, op.cit.

[10Zeta (Tijuana), October 2, 2017

[11Aristegui Noticias, September 5, 2017

[12La Cronica (Mexicali) September 21, 2017

[13Associated Press, September 25, 2017

[14El Sol de México, September 1, 2017

[15Aristegui Noticias, August 17, 2017

[16El Mexicano, December 23, 2016

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