By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 1997 (IPS)

Employer threats to move jobs to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are increasingly common in the United States, according to a study whose public release is apparently being held back by the administration of President Bill Clinton.

The study, which was commissioned by a tri-national secretariat set up under the labour side agreement to NAFTA, says the trade accord between Mexico, Canada, and the United States is fuelling more aggressive tactics by U.S. employers against workers who try to join unions.

In more than 10 percent of the over 600 cases covered by the study, employers “directly threatened to move to Mexico if the workers were to organise,” according to the report written by Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labour Education Research at Cornell University.

“The spectre of moving to Mexico has contributed to a climate of fear and uncertainty among workers which has emboldened management,” Bronfenbrenner told IPS.

Bronfenbrenner sent copies of her report to interested parties four months after she submitted it to the labour secretariat. The U.S. Labour Department, which must agree to its public release, has so far refused to clear it with the secretariat.

A Labour Department official told IPS that his agency is still studying the report and claimed that a final version was not received until mid-December. The secretariat, however, says the initial report was sent to the three governments in October.

“They don’t want anything out that’s anti-employer at a time when Clinton is trying to get fast-track legislation for adding Chile to NAFTA,” said Bronfenbrenner. Fast-track authority, which must be approved by Congress, permits the president to negotiate trade agreements which cannot then be amended on the floor of either house.

Paul Boldin, research director for the giant U.S. Teamsters Union agrees. “The administration wants to stop any bad publicity for NAFTA and their free trade policy,” he told IPS. This study is bad for their attempts to get fast-track for Chile or more liberal terms for admitting China to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).”

The Bronfenbrenner study was commissioned by the Secretariat of the Commission for Labour Cooperation in Dallas as part of a “special report” on the effects of plant closings and threats of plant closings on the right to organise in the three NAFTA countries.

The report was ordered as a result of a complaint by the Mexican Telephone Workers on behalf of the mostly Hispanic employees of La Conexion Familiar, a division of the Sprint company in California. Sprint abruptly shut down the division in 1994, just one week before the workers were scheduled to vote on joining the Communication Workers of America.

The resulting report, ‘Plant Closings and Labour Rights’, incorporates findings of more than a dozen researchers, including those of Bronfenbrenner, in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Bronfenbrenner’s study is supposed to be released when the Secretariat’s report is made public, according to Lance Compa, director of the secretariat’s labour law and economic research division.

But that cannot happen until the Commission’s Council of Ministers, which includes the U.S. Labour Secretary, approves it. “If the Council considers that a report is materially inaccurate or otherwise deficient, the Council may remand it to the Secretariat for reconsideration or other disposition,” said Compa.

“The administration can stop it, and they will stop it,” said Boldin.

Bronfenbrenner, who has conducted a series of studies over the past decade on union and employer behaviour, has found that employers have generally become much more aggressive in discouraging workers from organising during that period.

Those studies have shown that threats to close down unionised plants — which is considered an unfair labour practice and thus illegal under U.S. law — are the most effective in bringing workers to heel.

Despite the law, plant closing threats have become “an extremely pervasive and effective component of employer anti-union strategies,” according to the study which found that the tactic was used in about half of all union fights from 1993 until 1996 covered by the study.

Because making the threat explicit violates the law, according to the study, many of the threats were conveyed indirectly and verbally, according to the report.

In 12 percent of the cases where the union won the election, management reacted by closing the plant. These cases more than double the rate of plant closures of just a few years ago, according to the author who called the increase “very dramatic.”

“What my findings show is that the Sprint case was not an aberration; that employers are actually closing plants down,” she said, noting that the result is a “ripple effect” which weakens unions throughout the country.

The most blatant example of threats to move to Mexico involved ITT Automotive in Michigan, where the company parked 13 tractor- trailers “loaded with shrink-wrapped production equipment in front of the plant for the duration of the (union) campaign with large hot-pink signs posted on the side which read, ‘Mexico Transfer Job.’ The equipment came from a production line (ITT ) had closed down over the weekend without warning.”

Another company cited by the report provided statistics to its workers in a meeting “on the average wage of a Mexican auto worker, the average wage of their U.S. counterparts, and how much the company stood to gain from moving to Mexico.”

Other companies posted maps of North America on bulletin boards showing the current location of the plant and an arrow pointing south.

“Mexico is now in the back of everybody’s mind,” said Bronfenbrenner. “Employers don’t even have to say it any more. NAFTA is part of a climate that has emboldened management by making it easier to carry out its threats.”

“Everybody knows this has been happening,” said Boldin, but this study documents it. It’s an important part of the puzzle that the Clinton administration wants to hide.”

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