[asia-apec 555] ARTICLE: Free Trade's Revenge (part 1 of 2)

[PAN Asia Pacific]

 FREE TRADE'S REVENGE 
 By David Bacon

        IRVINE, CA (8/2/98) -- Daimler St. extends for three unimpressive
blocks, between anonymous crackerbox buildings in an aging Irvine
industrial park, next to Interstate 55.  It's hard to tell what goes on in
these concrete warehouses - they look pretty much alike.  In some of them,
it's apparent that nothing goes on at all -- real estate signs hang across
their facades, advertising that their occupants have fled or disappeared.
        The Friction plant is one of these anonymous tiltups.  Soon it will
be vacant too -- already a real estate agent's sign partially hides the
arrow telling truck drivers where to turn to find the loading docks.
Friction is so anonymous that no other sign even announces the company's
name.  If you don't know the address already, presumably you have no
business there.
        Friction Corp. gets its name from the simple, automatic process
every driver uses a hundred times a day, every time they press downward on
the brake pedal of a car or truck.  As the brake pad squeezes the rotor or
pushes out against the brake drum, friction from the contact brings their
vehicle safely to a halt.
        Friction makes brakes.
        Inside its concrete box, the company's workers bake the pads.  They
drill the holes and attach them to the metal flanges, which later bolt into
the wheel assemblies of a million cars and trucks.  For over a hundred
people, Friction has been a familiar place for years -- even decades.
Since working life absorbs a third of all waking and sleeping hours, these
folks have spent as much time in this long low edifice as they have in
their own kitchen or living room.
        Maria Villela and her husband Raquel spent a combined 32 years in
this Irvine auto parts plant.  They were there when the business was bought
by Echlin, a Connecticut-based transnational corporation.  The two were
leaders in the organizing drive that brought in the union in 1994, and
Maria became its president.  And they were there last summer, when three
workers from another Echlin plant, three thousand miles away, showed up at
lunchtime on the grassy strip between the factory and the street.
        When the lunchtruck pulled into the lot that day, sounding its
horn, Friction workers began streaming out of the plant's huge doors into
the parking lot.  A small group took their lunches, walked out of the gate
to the street, and sat down on the grass to hear what the three strangers
had to say.
        Like the majority of Friction's workers, who are immigrants from
Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the strangers spoke Spanish.  They told
the tale of their own factory, a plant in Mexico City with a history of
accidents, where wages are a tenth of those in Irvine, and where a
government-controlled union prevented workers from acting independently to
improve conditions.
        Their story was not a complete surprise to Friction workers.  "We
used to get boxes of parts from their plant," explains union shop steward
Ruben Cabrera.  "When we'd open them up, the parts were covered in dust."
Brake pads are made from asbestos.  Friction workers thought the dust in
the boxes was that fibrous mineral which causes mesothelioma, a kind of
lung cancer, when it's inhaled.  Dust in the boxes, they say, already gave
them the idea that conditions in the Mexico City plant were not healthy.
        Nevertheless, "we were surprised by what they said, and some of us
got pretty mad," Cabrera remembers.  "The situation they described was very
unjust -- I felt they were being treated like slaves."
        As the quiet lunchtime discussion wore on, Friction workers
described to their Mexican visitors the improvements they'd been able to
make in Irvine after organizing their union.  The Mexicans, on their part,
explained that they were starting an effort to organize their own
independent union, and get rid of the government-affiliated union the
company favored.
        Many Friction workers, who as Mexican immigrants were already
familiar with the country's system of "charro" or management-friendly
unions, identified with the effort in Mexico City to win a democratic
union. "We wanted to help the workers there win their rights," says Maria
Villela.

        In February, Echlin Corp. formally notified Villela's union it was
closing the Friction plant.  By August 31, the gate into the Irvine factory
will shut for the last time. The ovens will be turned off.  The machinery
that churned out brake pads and auto parts for over two decades will be
loaded onto trucks and hauled away. The plant's 110 production workers will
give the boxy building a last look, and move on with their lives.
        Friction will be gone.
        Echlin spokesperson Paul Ryder says only that the work is
being moved, and claims it's only going to other U.S. factories. "We have
overcapacity for that product line," he says.  "The closure is just the
normal course of business."
        But Friction workers are convinced that their desire for a common,
human bond of sympathy and support for their lunchtime visitors is the
reason why Echlin is shutting Friction's doors.  Friction managers, they
say, interpreted their desire as a danger signal.
        The move came as a shock to Friction workers, who have an average
of 11 years on the job.  "We think it's revenge," Villela declares. "We
work like crazy here, and make the best product in the industry.  Now they
say they're transferring the work to other plants."
        According to Cabrera, a couple of years ago Sears Roebuck, one of
Friction's principal customers, was so pleased with the quality of the
factory's product that it gave the company money to reward its employees.
Each worker took home a $100 bonus.
        At lunchtime last week, a group of workers eating on the small
grassy strip next to the street speculated that the company would actually
sacrifice quality and efficiency by transferring the work to other plants.
"We hear that in Virginia" one reported, "where some of the work's going,
that they have eight people working on each oven.  Here we only need two."
        It seems evident that economic motives are not the only ones
driving the plant's closure.
        According Leanna Noble, a representative for the United Electrical
Workers (UE), the parent union for the local at the Friction plant, "the
company also told us that the closure reflected a change in corporate
management, that it was an effort to reorganize the production mix and the
location of production. It's clear that the company isn't cutting
production back - it's moving it."
        "I think it's likely that the company found out about the Mexico
City workers' visit to Irvine, and concluded that the Irvine workers had
a special role in encouraging the organization of their independent
union," speculates Bob Kingsley, the UE's organizing director.
        That conclusion is supported by conversations with supervisors that
workers reported to Cabrera.  "They were told that 'this is what you get
for what you've done,'" he says.  "What hurts isn't just the shock of
losing a job.  It's losing friends and people you've known and worked with
for years.  I came here from a small town in Michoacan seventeen years ago.
I got a job here right away, and I've been here ever since.  Working at
Friction has been a big part of my life."

        Encouraging workers from the Mexico City plant to organize an
independent union was not the first time that the employees of the Irvine
factory found themselves mired in serious conflict with the company.
        Echlin has a reputation as an extremely union-hostile employer.
        On March 13, 1998, Echlin senior vice-president Milton Makoski made
perfectly clear the company's raging antipathy to unions.  In a letter to
Teamster Union vice president Tom Gilmartin, who proposed that Echlin
negotiate a corporate code of conduct, Makoski wrote, "We are opposed to
union organization of our current non-union locations ... We will fight
every effort to unionize Echlin employees who have chosen not to be
represented by a union."  He went on to note approvingly that, despite "60
years of determined and relentless efforts" by unions, a majority of its
employees are still unorganized.  "There is only one [operation] in
existence," he regrets, "where the employees, while they were part of the
Echlin organization, have elected to be represented by a union." (The
company's other unionized plants were already union at the time that Echlin
bought the companies.)
        That operation was the Friction plant.
        In the Irvine factory, workers had formed their union, UE Local
1090, in a fierce organizing battle in 1994.  "We got tired of having
supervisors tell us, 'do this or there's the door,'" Cabrera recalls.  "If
we stopped our machine just to go to the bathroom, they'd yell at us.  Even
those of us who had been here for years were only making $6.00 an hour."
        Cabrera is a heavyset, softspoken man.  It's not hard to see why he
might inspire confidence in other workers trying to speak up to a hostile
management, or why they might later have chosen him as steward.  As he
desribes these conditions there's no whine in his voice.  He speaks
carefully and slowly.  It's a demeanor that would carry credibility even
with the foremen themselves.
        But had union depend simply on the credibility of leaders like
Cabrera, or the bravery of the other workers inside the plant, it still
might not have succeeded in overcoming the company's intense opposition.
The union tried to back them up by finding support for them from other
factories in the Echlin chain.
        "We put one of our organizers on the road," Kingsley explains,
"meeting with workers and unions at other Echlin plants.  Workers in one
Virginia factory where the Amalgmated Clothing Workers (now UNITE) had a
contract, and at various Teamster locals around the country signed
petitions, sent letters of support, and wore buttons at work supporting the
local in Irvine.  That was the origin of what grew to be the Echlin Workers
Alliance."
        The effort was successful.  Echlin signed a contract and recognized
the union in the Friction plant.
        Two years later, during a second round of contract
negotiations, unions in the Echlin alliance again sent faxes and petitions
to plant managers throughout the company in support of the Irvine workers. 
Villela, who was elected president of the Local 1090, credited
the alliance's involvement with helping them win a sizable raise.
        Given the company's stated attitude towards unions, these actions
may have won the company's respect, but not its goodwill.  Nevertheless,
the union organizing alone was probably not sufficient to provoke the
closure of the Friction plant.