MINERS AND FARMERS CHALLENGE MEXICO'S COPPER GIANT

MINERS AND FARMERS CHALLENGE MEXICO'S COPPER GIANT

By David Bacon

Al Jazeera America, 4/15/15

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/15/unlikely-alliance-in-the-copper-mining-town-of-cananea-mexico.html

Miners from all over Mexico march in Cananea to support the strikers and farmers.

Traveling west across the Sonoran desert, just south of the U.S. border on Mexico's Route 2, La Mariquita peak dominates the horizon for miles.  Just below it rise huge ochre mountains of tailings from the world's second largest copper mine - Cananea.  

As the highway approaches town, it passes a huge white concrete water tank and adjacent pumping station.  Normally its huge pipes would be humming from the water flowing through them to the mine.  For two weeks, though, the pumps have been silent and the flow halted.  Instead, in what is normally empty desert, tents and busses line the highway.  Dust and smoke from cooking fires fill the air.  Hundreds of people walk about, listen to speeches, or just talk among themselves.

This planton, or occupation, has successfully shut most operations at the mine.  Cananea must consume huge quantities of water pumped from 49 wells across the desert in order to process crushed ore into copper concentrate.

Sergio Tolano

Many of the planton's residents are miners who went on strike in 2008.  Two years later the mine was reopened by massive police intervention.  Since then it has been operated by contracted laborers recruited from far distant parts of Mexico.  Now, for the first time in six years, 80% of the mine is again paralyzed.  This time, however, strikers didn't stop the operation by themselves.  Half of the people with them here are farmers -- residents of the Rio Sonora valley, angry over a toxic spill that upended their lives in August last year.

This winter groups of miners fanned out to the small towns along the river, talking about that disaster's impact.  Strikers and community leaders called meetings in the town plazas, making speeches through jerry-rigged speakers on the back of pickup trucks.  Finally, on March 18, busses headed from the towns toward Cananea.  Mine managers, hearing they were coming, called out hundreds of police to keep strikers from blocking the mine gates.

The protestors outflanked them.  Instead of heading through town to the mine itself, they roared down the highway to the pumping station.  Facing hundreds of angry miners and farmers, the operators shut down the pumps and fled.  And as the pumps grew quiet, so did operations at the mine itself.

The planton

 The first battle of the Mexican Revolution was fought here, when a miner's insurrection challenged the mine's U.S. owner, Colonel William Green, in 1906.  That earned the town its reputation as "Revolutionary Cananea."

Over the years since, the mine first belonged to U.S. corporations, and then was taken over by the Mexican government.  It's union, Section 65 of the national miners' union, the Mineros, had a strong contract.  Work in the mine, while dangerous, paid better than most jobs in Mexico.  Miners built small homes in the town at the foot of the mountain.

In 1990, however, the mine was sold to Grupo Mexico, a corporation owned by German Larrea, for $475 million, less than a quarter of its market value.  Larrea bought the privatized national railroad as well.  Capitalizing on his friendship with then President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, he became one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, worth over $15 billion.

Reyna Valenzuela and her family

Grupo Mexico produces two-thirds of Mexico's copper and has the largest copper reserves in the world.  It bought the U.S. mining corporation American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) in 1999, and now owns mines in Arizona.  It operates the world's fifth largest copper mine in Peru, and is negotiating to buy others in Spain. 

Corporate expansion, however, came at a price.  In 1998 miners struck in Cananea to stop reductions in the workforce to cut labor costs.  After Grupo Mexico asked the government to call in troops to break the strike, 800 miners were laid off.  Union leaders were blacklisted.  According to Carlos Navarette, one of the organizers of the planton, "the company blacklisted us throughout the whole country." In one job interview, he charges, "the person interviewing me asked me where I was from, and I told him from the south.  But then he saw my name on his computer.  He said, 'There's no work for you here.'"  

Anger mushroomed in 2006 when 65 miners died in an explosion at Grupo Mexico's Pasta de Conchos coal mine.  Workers had complained of gas leaks, and struck repeatedly over safety concerns.  After five days, however, the company halted rescue efforts, and the government announced the mine would be closed.

Laura Gutierrez, from the river town of San Rafael

The head of the Mineros, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, accused the corporation and government of "industrial homicide."  Within weeks the conservative administration of President Vicente Fox charged him with fraud, and Gomez left Mexico to escape arrest.  Since then all charges against him were found groundless, and he has been reelected union president several times.  Nevertheless, he continues to stay in Vancouver, Canada, worried that the government and Grupo Mexico will find another pretext for jailing him should he return. 

In 2008 miners in Cananea went on strike again, over health and safety concerns.  They charged that the company had disconnected the huge fans and pipes that extract dust from the buildings where the ore is crushed.  Dust buildup can cause silicosis, permanently damaging miners' lungs.  A study by a team of U.S. and Mexican health and safety experts found "substantial elevations in the prevalence of respiratory symptoms" among miners and that "a significant percentage of this population may have radiologic silicosis."  In one area acid mist was so prevalent it had eaten away at the structure of the building.

Under Mexican law, an enterprise that is on strike cannot continue to function, so the mine stopped operation.  But Grupo Mexico asked the administration of Mexico's next president, Felipe Calderon, to declare the strike illegal.  In spite of court decisions upholding its legality, the government complied.  Three thousand federal police drove miners from the gates and the mine was then reopened.

Sergio Martinez and Juan Velasquez, two striking miners in front of the pumping station

Grupo Mexico created a new business entity, Buenavista de Cobre, to hire workers through contractors to replace the strikers.  Sergio Martinez, who worked in the foundry for 13 years, says that before the strike miners got a base pay of 1800 pesos for working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week.  With a productivity bonus, they earned at least 3000 pesos ($215).  Today the contracted employees earn 1200 pesos ($85) a week, and work 12 hours a day instead of 8.  Adjusted for inflation, the average wage in mining nationally is 21 percent lower today than it was in 1978.

Says another miner, "If you say you're from Cananea, you can't get a job.  Ninety percent of the people now working in the mine are from far away.  This is very humiliating for people here.  You have kids and there's no work for them either - even more humiliating."  Like many others, this miner crossed the border without documents to find work in Arizona.  "I left my family here.  The pain of our separation can't be compared to anything," he laments.

Then last August 40,000 cubic meters (10.5 million gallons) of concentrated sulfuric acid and heavy metals was released from a holding pond at the mine into the headwaters of the Sonora River.  Arturo Rodriguez, of the office of the Attorney General for Environmental Protection, told the Associated Press that the cause was lax supervision at the mine, along with rains and construction defects.  Grupo México didn't respond to requests for comment, but according to Yahoo News, Juan Rebolledo, vice president for international relations, said that the acid wasn't toxic and "there's no problem, nor any serious consequence for the population, as long as we take adequate precautions."  Grupo México's solution was to pour calcium into the river to neutralize the acid.

Heriberto Verdugo, a miners' union leader, talks with a group of farmers

Miners charge, however, that Grupo Mexico was using a contractor, Tecovifesa, to work on the dam.  "Before the strike, experienced union members, who were direct employees, did all the work," according to Martinez.

And although the spill began on August 6, the company didn't tell the river communities until August 8.  Many only discovered what had happened when the river turned orange.  "Our children were at the river that day," remembers Reyna Valenzuela, from Ures.  "We didn't know they would be affected because the company didn't tell anyone."  The children got extreme rashes, and doctors finally told her they were due to heavy metal exposure.  Other residents began to experience more serious health problems.

The family's business making sweets and cheese folded when customers in the state capital didn't want to buy any products from the river towns.  Valenzuela went to the mine to ask for money to take the kids to Phoenix for tests. "The miners helped us and gave us a place to stay," she recalls, but when they went to the mine's director, José Julián Chavira, "they wouldn't even talk with us." She became one of the first residents of the planton.

Jose Angel Villa Peralta, a farm laborer from the river town of Distancia de Aconchi

Another was Laura Gutierrez.  "Our town, San Rafael, is made up of farmers," she explains. "We plant corn and peanuts, and we didn't harvest anything last year. The crops were just thrown into the trash.  Now we have nothing to live on.  That's why we're here."  Farmers there and elsewhere along the river aren't planting this spring because they fear the water is contaminated.  So do customers for their crops.

"This was an extremely toxic brew that went into the river," according to Garrett Brown, director of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, and former inspector for CalOSHA.  "Lead causes serious and permanent damage to children.  Cadmium is a known carcinogen.  The spill deposited heavy metals along hundreds of miles, which wind up along riverbanks and leach into the aquifer.  People eat the food that's grown with water from the river and aquifers.  That has long term implications for their health."

Approximately 24,000 people live along the river.  Three hundred wells were closed after the spill.  Grupo Mexico's website displays photos of pastoral scenes along the river and posts articles that describe its efforts to clean it up.  It says the company has distributed 164 million liters of water, and installed 58 tanks of 5,500 gallons each in schools.  The company set up a $150 million fund to pay damages to residents, and paid a fine of $2 million. 

Jesus Rios Leon holds a list of all the heavy metals found in a test of his blood.

Many river residents, however, say they haven't received anything.  "We didn't go talk with the town people right after the spill, because many believed in the promises," says Sergio Tolano, general secretary of Section 65.  "But months later most saw they would get nothing, and were willing to take action."

The purpose of the planton, he says, is not just to stop the mine's operation.  The union and residents have organized a coalition, the Sonora River Front.  It is demanding that the government force Grupo Mexico to clean up the river and take responsibility for the health and lost income of residents.  It also seeks to restore the strikers to their jobs.

Some elected officials recognize that their political future could be at stake if people vote against a government they perceive as too friendly to Grupo Mexico.  Alfonso Durazo, a Federal deputy from the leftwing MORENA party, came to the planton to show support.  When he tried to turn his speech into a campaign event for local candidates, however, an angry crowd told him to speak to their concerns, not his own.

"Because the miners are supporting us, we're supporting them," Valenzuela says. "If we all get together, we can do something here.  The whole Rio Sonora is with them." 

Strikers burn in effigy a picture of German Larrea, owner of Grupo Mexico

Part of this effort also includes the U.S. union for copper miners, the United Steel Workers (USW). Manny Armenta, a USW representative, has helped the local union in Cananea since the strike started.  The night the police broke the lines at the gate in 2010, he led families out of the union hall to safety. 

"You could smell the tear gas all over, " he recalls.  "It was like a military occupation."  At the march to the pumping station, Armenta spoke to the crowd.  "The government and Grupo Mexico are making history," he charged, "but backwards, taking away the right to strike and the right to industrial safety."

The U.S. union is trying to renegotiate a contract with Grupo Mexico.  As a result of buying ASARCO, the company is now the new owner of mines where the Steel Workers represents the miners.  Two years ago the Mineros and the USW agreed to join to form a single union.  The merger has not been completed, but they now support each other in dealing with their common employers, and look to the day when their bargaining can be coordinated.

Tolano credits this alliance with keeping the strike in Cananea alive.  "Some of us have had a very hard time, but due to our tradition of supporting each other we've been able to take care of ourselves," he says.  "There have been divorces.  Some people have lost their homes.  But we're still here."

GROWERS MOVE TO GUT CALIFORNIA'S FARM LABOR LAW

GROWERS MOVE TO GUT CALIFORNIA'S FARM LABOR LAW 

By David Bacon
Capital and Main, 4/7/15
http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/growers-move-gut-californias-farm-labor-law/



When hundreds of people marched to the Los Angeles City Council last October, urging it to pass a resolution supporting a farm worker union fight taking place in California's San Joaquin Valley, hardly anyone had ever heard the name of the company involved. That may not be the case much longer. Gerawan Farming, one of the country's largest growers, with 5,000 people picking its grapes and peaches, is challenging the California law that makes farm workers' union rights enforceable. Lining up behind Gerawan are national anti-union think tanks. What began as a local struggle by one grower family to avoid a union contract is getting bigger, and the stakes are getting much higher.

The Gerawan workers got the City Council's support and, on February 10, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution that went beyond just an encouraging statement. The LAUSD purchases Gerawan's Prima label peaches and grapes through suppliers for 1,270 schools and 907,000 students. The LAUSD's resolution, proposed by board member Steve Zimmer, requires the district to verify that Gerawan Farming is abiding by state labor laws, "and to immediately implement the agreement issued by the neutral mediator and the state of California."

Verifying compliance, however, may not be easy.  In mid-March a hearing on Gerawan's violations of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) ended after 104 days of testimony by 130 witnesses. According to the Agricultural Labor Relations' Board's general counsel, Sylvia Torres-Guillén, and its regional director in Visalia, Silas Shawver, Gerawan mounted an intense campaign against the United Farm Workers after the union requested bargaining in October 2012.  According to the board, Gerawan sought to "undermine the UFW's status as its employees' bargaining representative; to turn its employees against the union; to promote decertification of the UFW; and to prevent the UFW from ever representing its employees under a collective bargaining agreement."

The conflict at Gerawan Farming has been building for 26 years. In 1990 over a thousand workers voted in a union election in its fields near Madera, in the San Joaquin Valley, choosing the United Farm Workers. The company was not neutral towards its workers' efforts to organize, however.  After the 1990 election the ALRB issued two complaints against the company - for laying off workers in 32 crews to eliminate them from the voting list, and for firing one crew because workers were UFW supporters. A state hearing officer found the company guilty of tearing down six labor camps to intimidate them.

Five years after that election, having exhausted legal efforts to overturn it, Mike Gerawan finally sat down with UFW representatives. Instead of negotiating, however, he told them: "I don't want the union and I don't need the union."  That ended bargaining before it even started. Over the next 17 years, with no contract, Gerawan Farming grew to become one of the nation's largest growers, exporting its Prima label fruit globally.

Hardball tactics towards unions in the fields have been typical of California growers. Although the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 gave farm workers the right to vote for unions, the law had no teeth to force unwilling growers to negotiate contracts afterwards. According to UC Davis professor Philip Martin, workers were unable to win agreements in 243 of 428 farms where they'd voted for the UFW between 1975 and 2002.

Federal law has never covered farm workers.  Outside of California, no state has a law giving farm workers a legal process for recognition and bargaining. The few union agreements that exist in other states are the products of long campaigns and boycotts. As a result, less than one percent of the nation's farm workers have union contracts.  Wages and conditions in farm labor are worse than in almost any other occupation.

In 2002, however, California's legislature passed two bills that amended the original law.  Today the ALRA allows a union to ask for a mediator if a grower won't reach agreement on a first-time contract. Once the Board adopts the mediator's report it becomes a contract. The process is called mandatory mediation.  Growers challenged this process and lost at the state court of appeals in 2006. The UFW has since used the law to negotiate contracts at several large employers, covering about 3000 workers.

In 2012 the UFW made another demand for bargaining at Gerawan.  This time, according to the labor board, the company unleashed a sophisticated drive, not just against the union but against the law itself.  In that effort, it's acquired the help of some of the country's most conservative advocacy groups and think tanks. Losing mandatory mediation would be devastating to the UFW. No real union can survive indefinitely without being able to win contracts, and through them, gain members and improve wages and conditions.


A Dirty Election


The UFW says it continued working with Gerawan workers to improve conditions during the 17-year hiatus between 1995 and 2012. According to Gerawan's publicist, Erin Shaw, "The UFW abandoned Gerawan employees without ever negotiating a collective bargaining agreement."

Nevertheless, the UFW renewed its bargaining demand in October 2012, and union workers chose a negotiating committee.  This time the company sat down at the bargaining table - from January to July of 2013.  But when bargaining went nowhere, the union filed for mandatory mediation. Gerawan still claims there is no negotiated agreement. But according to UFW negotiating committee member Agustin Rodriguez, "We negotiated a contract. The company refuses to implement it."

Gerawan did not want about 2000 workers hired through labor contractors covered by any agreement.  Those workers are paid less than the company's own employees.  The company sought to keep a medical plan that only 13 of its workers could afford, Rodriguez says.  "In the company rulebook," he told Capital and Main, "they can fire you with or without a reason. With the union, they can only fire you for just cause. This is what the company doesn't want. It has power right now and it doesn't want to lose it."

A key allegation in the ALRB complaint charges Gerawan Farming with manipulating wages to keep the union out.  The company boasts it pays $11.00/hour -- $2 above the state minimum -- and says it shows workers are better off without a union. Fifteen-year employee Severino Salas believes, however, "it's the pressure from the union" that got the company to raise wages. "They're not giving us $11 for nothing," adds Rodriguez. "Until recently they'd accuse whole crews of not working fast enough and fire them."

In June 2013, while bargaining was going on, Gerawan rehired Silvia Lopez, a previous employee whose boyfriend was a company supervisor, and whose daughter and son-in-law also work there. Lopez "began her involvement in anti-union activities at Gerawan before she started working for the company," according to the ALRB. Almost immediately she became a client of Paul Bauer, a lawyer for a Fresno firm representing employers in labor disputes.

Lopez began to collect signatures on a petition for a decertification election to get rid of the UFW.  Companies can't assist such efforts, but Lopez and her friends collected signatures during work hours, and rarely even worked a full day picking grapes. The company set up a supportive website, helpfarmworkers.com, that announces, "This website is [the workers'] effort to insure that their voices are heard in Sacramento, and they get to make their own decision."

Salas charges foremen told workers the company would uproot trees and vines if the union came in.  "They'd just plant almonds and pistachios that don't need many workers. People were afraid to support the union, even though they wanted it, for fear of losing their jobs," he recalls.

In August 2013 Dan Gerawan invited Lopez and her friends to go with him to Sacramento, to testify against a bill that would have strengthened mandatory mediation. On September 18, as the mediator prepared to issue his report, Lopez turned in her petitions. Shawver and his staff compared the signatures to the employee list and found there weren't enough.

By then, Sylvia Lopez had an additional lawyer, Anthony Raimondo, who also represents Gerawan's two largest labor contractors, Sunshine Agricultural Services and R&T Grafting Labor. He asked for more time, and signature collection went into overdrive. Of the additional signatures he turned in, an exhaustive investigation found at least 100 were forged, allegedly from workers employed by Raimondo's contractor clients. The ALRB found many foremen and forewomen had participated in collecting signatures. In just one case, "after explaining the petition and sending the employees to work, [supervisor] Sonia Martinez went row by row and provided the employees in her crew with the signature sheet," according to the ALRB complaint. The decertification petition was dismissed.

A second decertification campaign was immediately launched. On September 27 the company gave time off to hundreds of workers, to leave their crews and go to Visalia to demonstrate outside the ALRB office. According to the ALRB, the following Monday supervisors shut down work entirely, blocked entry to the fields and packing sheds, handed out petitions and demanded that workers sign. A statement by Gerawan claims "1500 workers walked out of the fields," and describes this as "the largest ever seen in California's agricultural industry."

Two days later the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, a grower organization, supplied busses, food and anti-union tee-shirts to Gerawan workers, taking them to Sacramento to lobby for decertification.   A lawyer at McCormick Barstow LLP (Raimundo's Fresno law firm at the time) ordered four busses and snacks, costing $6,366, from Classic Charter, listing Sylvia Lopez as the contact person.

That order was paid with the credit card of Barry Bedwell, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.  His card statement includes a charge for a similar charter for $3,466.  He additionally paid $3512.70 for burritos, and bought 1,170 tee-shirts for the demonstrations.  In total he spent $19,234.70.  The League's board of directors includes Gerawan vice-president George Nikolich along with some of the biggest family names in California agriculture: Giumarra, Pandol, Bagdasarian, Zaninovich and others.

Meanwhile a media campaign produced TV and newspaper stories alleging workers were being denied the right to vote in a decertification election. The labor board in Sacramento, whose appointed members have final say over the agency's decisions, seesawed back and forth.

First it delayed approving the contract drawn up by the mediator.

But then Shawver and Torres-Guillén rejected the second petition as well.  When the company appealed, the labor board ordered them to conduct the decertification election anyway, despite the charges of company interference.

Workers voted on November 5, 2013. Their votes were impounded, however.  Legally, they cannot be counted unless an investigation concludes the company had nothing to do with organizing the decertification campaign.

After the election, the ALRB finally approved the mediator's contract. Gerawan Farming refused to implement it, and Torres-Guillen formally charged the company with violating the mandatory mediation law.

Gerawan then asked a judge at the state court of appeals in Fresno to declare mandatory mediation unconstitutional, overturning the 2006 decision upholding it. Joining Gerawan were the Western Growers Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation and the California Grape and Tree Fruit League (now the California Fresh Fruit Association). Even Lopez and Raimondo filed an amicus brief.

A Gerawan statement claims, "We support [workers'] right to choose, but the ALRB staff and the UFW do not.  Our sole message to our employees has never wavered:  'We want what you want.'  There is now only one correct and just solution to ensure employees' rights are protected. Count the ballots."

According to veteran labor lawyer David Rosenfeld, who teaches law at the University of California's Boalt Hall Law School, "Gerawan has all the money in the world, and doesn't lose anything by appealing.  In the meantime, they can delay implementing the contract for at least a couple of years."  The company's problem, he believes, is that the state supreme court is generally favorable to workers' issues.


Conservative Groups Gather Around Gerawan


As this fight unfolds national anti-union organizations are moving in. The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence joined the appeals case. This far-right legal institute holds that "The right to acquire, protect, and enjoy property was considered to be one of the fundamental, inalienable natural rights of mankind." In recent years the Center has joined the Harris v. Quinn suit against the Service Employees International Union in Illinois, sued the California Labor Commissioner on behalf of employers, argued for Hobby Lobby Stores against birth control, and supported the initiative to end affirmative action in Michigan.

Much of the San Joaquin Valley is conservative Republican territory. In "The Perfect Fruit," author Chip Brantley quotes Ray Gerawan: "My philosophy is survival of the fittest," he says. "In this family, we're real big on free enterprise."  He says his ambition is "to put my competitors out of business ... because that makes us all stronger."

The Gerawan's local congressman, Devin Nunes, is a grower who criticized President Obama for opposing the use of torture. Republican Kevin McCarthy is the House Majority Leader representing neighboring Bakersfield. Both are allies of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a key opponent of mandatory mediation funded by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers, among other conservative sources.

The Center for Worker Freedom, headquartered in ATR offices in Washington DC, publicized the pro-decertification demonstration outside the Visalia ALRB office.  The Center's director, Matt Patterson, wrote an editorial for Forbes.com, extolling Lopez and charging, "farm workers in California's Central Valley are finding their civil liberties stripped from them today - by a government agency ... [that] wants to force the union on Gerawan until the election is 'investigated'."  Last year Patterson bought billboards to attack the United Auto Workers at the new Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Copying the same strategy, the Center then bought billboards in Sacramento attacking the UFW and the ALRB.

This year the Gerawan's local state assembly member, Republican Jim Patterson of Fresno, introduced AB 1389.  It would allow groups like Sylvia Lopez and her friends to inject themselves into mandatory mediation proceedings on the same basis as the union's elected negotiating committee.  Further, it would allow growers to decertify unions that "abandon" workers for three years, an obvious reference to Gerawan.  Both measures would make mandatory mediation essentially unworkable.

When the Gerawans are criticized, they react with hardball tactics. When Berkeley passed a resolution like Los Angeles', it got a swift and threatening response. Company attorney David Schwarz wrote a four-page letter to its city council. "Republication of libelous statements," he fumed, "whether in newsletters, press releases, constituent updates, or speeches outside the legislative chamber, is not immunized from liability..." Katy Grimes, who writes for the Watchdog Wire blog (a project of the pro-free-market Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity), called the resolution's authors "liberal busybodies."

Last June former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso coauthored an op-ed piece with UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, urging the company to negotiate with its workers. Reynoso was formerly director of California Rural Legal Assistance, the state's legal advocacy organization for farm workers. In 1981 Jerry Brown, in his first stint as governor, appointed him to the state Supreme Court. In 1986 growers and rightwing Republicans spent $7 million to recall him and two other justices.

After seeing Reynoso's op-ed, Dan Gerawan sent him a threatening letter. At the end of eight pages it demanded "that you disavow authorship of the article. If you refuse to do so, then we ask that you correct the false and misleading statements made in the article, and retract these defamatory statements. The retraction must be complete and unequivocal." Reynoso politely refused. "I respectfully decline to disavow authorship nor do I find any statements to be false, misleading or defamatory," he countered.

Despite the threats and name-calling city councils in New York City and Washington D.C. are taking up measures like Los Angeles'. The grower's biggest buyer is Wal-Mart, an inviting target for people already angry at that chain's treatment of its own workers.  After the LA City Council vote, Maria Elena Durazo, at the time still the head of the county labor federation, warned Gerawan Farming of a possible boycott: "You will not be welcome in the stores of Los Angeles if that's the next thing these workers ask us to do."

Boycotts can take time to have an effect -- the original UFW grape boycott lasted five years.  And once started, they're hard to stop. But targeted boycotts have been very successful in recent years at forcing garment companies selling clothes on college campuses to recognize unions in sweatshops.   The Farm Labor Organizing Committee won an agreement covering thousands of North Carolina farm workers several years ago by successfully boycotting Mount Olive pickles.  By taking on the largest consumers of Gerawan's Prima brand fruit, like school districts, the UFW could make a big dent in sales.  Cesar Chavez believed that cutting off 5% of sales was normally enough to make a boycott successful.


The Impact of Decertification


Decertification is more than just the key to undoing the original election that required Gerawan to bargain. If holding an election can't actually lead to a contract, there's not much reason for workers anywhere to risk their jobs supporting a union. Growers far beyond Gerawan, therefore, have an interest in the outcome - the reason why the Grape and Tree Fruit League and national conservative groups are paying attention.

A stronger union in California fields could raise wages (and growers' labor costs), which are far lower now than they were thirty years ago when the UFW was at its strongest. One recent study found that tens of thousands of Mexican indigenous farm workers in California receive less than minimum wage. It is common today to find workers sleeping in cars in parking lots during the grape picking season, or even under trees and on hillsides. Outside the state wages and living conditions are often worse.

The ALRB's responsibility is to make the election and negotiation process work. This March Governor Jerry Brown appointed William Gould IV chair of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Gould is an African American emeritus law professor at Stanford University, and former chair of the National Labor Relations Board under President Clinton. In answering questions from the legislature, Gould expressed concern over long delays and the low number of petitions for representation. "Enforcement of collective bargaining agreements as imposed upon the parties through the Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation ... must be expedited by the Board," he urged.

In the Senate Rules Committee hearing on his nomination, he told legislators that he wanted "to make mediation and conciliation more streamlined, so parties don't wait months."  In the case of labor law violations he advocated using temporary injunctions to get relief "without waiting years for them to play out."

The board's operations, however, are constrained by reduced budgets.  To make the process work faster the ALRB needs more hearing officers and staff, which means Gould will have to use his political skills to convince the Governor and legislature to give it more money.

Meanwhile, enforcement of the mediator's contract at Gerawan seems far away to the company's workers.  While the grower continues to operate without it, UFW supporters like Salas say they face retaliation. "I've worked for Gerawan since 1999," he told Capital and Main. "The foreman realized I was for the union when they began passing around the petition and I wouldn't sign it. " He was denied work along with his wife in their normal crew. "What the company really wants is for us to quit," he charges.

STUDENTS AND PARENTS OF DISAPPEARED AYOTZINAPA STUDENTS MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

STUDENTS AND PARENTS OF DISAPPEARED AYOTZINAPA STUDENTS MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

Photos by David Bacon

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 4APRIL15 - Two students, Angel Neri and Josimar Cruz de Ayala, of the Ayotzinapa teachers training school in Guerrero, Mexico, and the parents of two others, Blanca Luz Nava Velez and Estanislao Mendoza Chocolate, march with supporters in San Francisco to protest the disappearance of 43 students from the school last fall, and the murder by police of three others. The four are part of a caravan traveling through U.S. cities to publicize what happened in Ayotzinapa.

TO RAISE WAGES IN PANAMA, DOCKERS JOIN A U.S. UNION

TO RAISE WAGES IN PANAMA, DOCKERS JOIN A U.S. UNION

By David Bacon

ILWU Dispatcher

PANAMA CITY, PANAMA (4/2/15) -- You see a lot of parked taxis in the parking lot at the Panama Ports terminal here.  They're not waiting to give rides to longshoremen.  Dockworkers themselves are the drivers.  Longshore wages in Panama are so low that after a shift driving a crane, a longshoreman has to put in another shift driving a taxi, just to survive.

At Panama Ports, however, this situation has begun to change.  A few weeks ago the union signed a new contract with raises totaling more than 27% over the next four years.  One factor that made this agreement possible was support from a U.S. union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.  That agreement will have a big impact on the lives of longshoremen and their families. 

In Panama they call longshore pay "hunger wages."  Workers' families live below the government's own poverty line, and some families literally go hungry.

"That's one reason why the company had to constantly hire new workers," recalls Ramiro Cortez, a leader of the Panamanian union SINTRAPORSPA.  "Most people who got jobs here were just working while they were actually looking for better jobs somewhere else.  Many accidents in the port could have been avoided if the workers weren't so exhausted.  They go in at 7AM, and leave at 8PM, and then go and drive or do some other job."

The port does have a high accident rate, and two workers were killed a month apart at the end of last year.  In one accident, a crane lifting a container hit a six-high stack of other containers that were being stored on the dock, right next to the ship.  As they fell, one hit a 22-year-old man who'd been working less than a month.

Cortez was called by the workers.  On arrival he saw the crane operator in shock and weeping.  He stopped managers from interrogating him until he got counseling, and then told the company that all the workers in the terminal had been traumatized and should be sent home.  If they weren't, he warned, the union itself would shut down the terminal.  In the end, management sent the shift home with pay for the day.

When Cortez announced the agreement to the workers, "I could have been elected president of Panama that day," he says.  "It had never happened before." 

The new union contract established five committees, the most important of which is safety. "The challenge is now to implement this agreement and ensure the company abides by it," emphasizes SINTRAPORSPA president Alberto Ochoa.  "Before the company did what it pleased, and changed the hours, overtime, days off, and wages - whenever it wanted.  Now they know we're not on our own, by ourselves. Companies don't want real unions because we open the eyes of the workers."

Panama Ports is a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH).  Workers at the terminal were trapped in a "yellow" or company union there for many years.  Ochoa and other independent-minded longshoremen had a long history of trying to change this, and finally organized a new union - SINTRAPORSPA.  They collected over 2000 signatures on a petition for recognition, and asked for a government-administered election to certify it as workers' bargaining representative.

In balloting last year, however, the Ministry of Labor claimed that 1500 workers had voted against SINTRAPORSPA.  Workers out on the docks found this unbelievable, since they knew how many votes they had lined up.  They also knew, however, that the President of Panama himself, Juan Carlos Varela, is a partner in the law firm used by Panama Ports, one that specializes in helping company management fight unions.  The dockworkers challenged the transparency of the election.

"It was obvious that we had the support of the great majority of the workers, including those who belonged to the company union," recalls Cortez.  "Nevertheless, when we went to the ministry to protest, they did everything they could to stop us." 

Ochoa and Cortez appealed to the ILWU, whose headquarters is in San Francisco.  ILWU International Vice-President Ray Familathe and Greg Mitre, president of the ILWU retirees in Southern California, flew to Panama City and met with the Minister of Labor, Luis Ernesto Carles Rudy.  They brought with them a letter signed by six U.S. Congress members, asking for a rerun.  The government reluctantly agreed, and in a fair vote SINTRAPORSPA won overwhelmingly.

"The support from the ILWU was very effective," Cortez says.  "The Panamanian authorities were never concerned before about how they conducted themselves with us.  Powerful companies, with the money at their disposal, got whatever that money could buy."

The impact of that support was also felt in the subsequent contract negotiations, which only took a month to arrive at agreement.  In one meeting the company executive president even told union negotiators that he was "very concerned" at the union's growing relationship with the ILWU. 

These experiences led the Panamanian dock union to become the newest member of the ILWU's Panama Division.  The division was established in 2012, when several hundred members of the Panama Canal Pilots Union decided to join the ILWU. The division has now grown to include 2580 Panama Ports longshore workers.  According to Capt. Rainiero Salas, the Panama Canal Pilots' Union secretary general, "The Panama Division is growing as workers see what we can gain by working together.  It's not going to stop here."  Adds Ochoa, "Unions in the ports and the Canal should get together so that we can speak with one voice, and get better benefits and respect for all workers."

Panama division leaders are also meeting with the union for dockers in Colon on the Atlantic side of the isthmus, the Union of Workers at the Manzanillo International Terminal.  Like the workers at Panama Ports, the dockers in Colon also rebelled against a former union leadership they viewed as too close to the company.  At MIT they elected a new slate of officers a few months ago. 

The MIT terminal is operated by SSA Marine, a global company headquartered in Seattle, Washington.  According to workers in Colon, container crane operators work 8-hour days, for six days straight.  For that, their pay starts at $854 a month, or about $4.27 per hour.  Base pay for an experienced longshore worker in SSA Marine's home port of Seattle is $35.68 per hour.

The low wages on Panama's docks have a lot to do with the difficulty workers face in forming militant unions and negotiating contracts.  But poverty is also a product of trade and economic policies pushed by U.S. corporations and the government trade negotiators who represent their interests. 

The U.S. signed a free trade agreement with Panama in 2009.  In 2007 Panama's National Agrarian Organization, the country's largest organization of farmers, wrote to the U.S. Congress, asking it to stop the negotiations.  In Panama, it said, the agreement "was ratified by ... a small sector of Panamanian elites."  It predicted a huge displacement of farmers no longer able to compete with U.S. agricultural exports.  They would then become either migrants leaving the country, or unemployed people desperate for work in the country's cities.

In Colon, displaced farmers have become workers in the Free Trade Zone, a stone's throw from the harbor and MIT terminal.  The zone is one of the world's oldest, set up in 1946 when the Canal Zone was a defacto U.S. colony.  Today over 300 mostly-foreign companies run factories that pay no municipal or local taxes, no national taxes on investment, and no duties on products they export.  Workers earn $10-15 a day - even less than longshoremen.

"In this country," says Ramiro Cortez, "there is no middle class.  There is just the upper class and the lower class."  While wages are low, Panama is second only to Hong Kong as a home for multinational firms' subsidiaries - many created with the sole purpose of evading taxes.

The U.S. gave up the Canal in 1977, in an agreement negotiated between President Jimmy Carter and one of Panama's most progressive presidents, General Omar Torrijos.  Nevertheless, U.S. influence in Panamanian politics is still strong.  The U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 to "arrest" then-President Manuel Noriega for drug dealing.  Hundreds of residents of Panama City's poorest barrio, El Chorillo, died after it was bombarded by naval vessels.  The seafront neighborhood was then assaulted by troops. 

Resentment against the U.S. still reverberates.  Eighteen years after El Chorillo burned, a U.S.-led naval exercise used the Canal to practice repelling a hypothetical terrorist attack.  Three Panamanian sailors drowned, and vocal protests followed.

The ILWU in Panama does not directly challenge the reverberations of that old colonial relationship.  But it does represent the interests of workers by advocating progressive policies on wages, trade and labor rights, while effectively defending workers on the job. 

Over the past year pilots have fought, with the division's support, to ensure that the huge ships that pass through the canal every day are operated safely.  The Canal Authority has launched a huge expansion project, building new locks capable of handling giant post-Panamax container ships carrying up to 13,000 containers.  The union has criticized the government for not working closely with pilots to design work rules and procedures for safely handling these larger ships in the new locks.  It is especially concerned over a new unilateral government directive that, for the first time, seeks to have ships pass each other in the narrow Culebra Cut.  Previously ships traveling in opposite directions have waited, so that only one ship at a time traverses the cut. 

The government says the cut has been widened, but pilots says there is no room for error, and the consequences of ships hitting each other would be disastrous.  Last October Capt. Salas criticized the government publicly.  "It seems very odd that the most experienced people moving ships through this highly important system have been completely ignored by its governing authority," he charged. "Pilots' most critical mission is ship safety, yet we've not been consulted."

Panamanian port and maritime unions are also concerned at the government's efforts to decertify the union for the canal's tugboat captains.  The same legal technicalities used against the captains, they fear, could be used to attack the representation rights of other unions.  That would undermine dock unions just as they are starting to change the basic living standards of workers.

"Our main objective as a union is to make a difference in the economic status of those who have earned the least - the longshoremen," Ochoa declares.  "I'm not saying this new contract will give us a wage that can pay for everything, but it's a lot better than what we had before.  As a union we will keep struggling to win better conditions, especially economic ones."