BOOK REVIEW: “Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S. Mexico Border” by David Bacon. University of California Press, 2004, 348 pages.

Reviewed by Fred Glass

It has been ten years since NAFTA codified a new set of rules for trade among the United States and its immediate neighbors to the north and south. Hailed by post-Keynesian economists as the road to a prosperous future for all three nations, NAFTA was pushed hard by the Clinton administration over fierce opposition by organized labor and its allies in Congress. In “Children of NAFTA,” Berkeley-based photojournalist David Bacon examines the balance sheet for working people in two of the three countries a decade after the treaty’s signing. He finds that while corporations have exploited the loosened border for the benefit of their shareholders, the human beings that do the work for them haven’t fared nearly so well.

Take, for instance, Honorina Lopez, who works in the onion fields of the Mexicali Valley with other members of her family. Bacon describes her activities: “Her hands are very quick. She lines up eight or nine onions, straightening out their roots and tails. Then she knocks the dirt off, puts a rubber band around them, and adds the bunch to those already in the box beside her. She’s too shy to say more than her name, but she’s obviously proud to be able to perform a task at which her brother Rigoberto, at thirteen, working near her, already excels.” Honorina is six. The company she works for, Muranaka Farms, shut down operations near Oxnard and Coachella in southern California and moved to Mexico after NAFTA passed, setting up one of many “maquilas in the fields.”

Tijuana  A young worker pulls plastic parts from a plastic molding machine which will be assembled into coathangers for the garment industry, in the Tijuana maquiladora of Plasticos Bajacal. Workers tried unsuccessfully to organize an independent, democratic union there in 1993.

Child labor is as illegal in Mexico as it is in the United States. That doesn’t prevent 3,000 kids under the age of 14 from working in the Mexicali Valley’s green onion harvest. The Mexican government estimates that between 800,000 and 2.5 million children work instead of attending school throughout Mexico.

Not all of these truancies can be laid at the doorstep of NAFTA. But the treaty has, according to Bacon, exacerbated the need for families to bring children to work as their traditional economies have been overcome by global capital regimes. Recent academic surveys and studies of communities on the Mexican side of the border determine that a family of four requires a weekly income of 1,500 pesos to survive. The average maquila-dora worker makes but 350 pesos, requiring as many family members as possible to work, and two and three families to share accommodations.

Bacon isn’t an academic, and he isn’t just a reporter with a camera. Engaged with the struggles of the people he’s documenting, his work stands in a tradition of photojournalistic advocacy that, regrettably, has all but disappeared from mainstream reporting. At the turn of the last century muckraking writer/photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine combined careful reportage, documentary photography and a talent for publicity to help mobilize public opinion in battles to change the living and working conditions at the bottom of society. Today’s journalism environment is defined by an ever-shrinking number of giant media conglomerates disinclined to pursue hard news, let alone social justice reportage.

This makes Bacon’s achievement in “Children of NAFTA” all the more remarkable. His book originated in articles he wrote for mainstream publications as well as union newsletters about the people working in the new economy. (Full disclosure: some of his articles were written for union publications I edit.) In his travels Bacon found that as globalization transformed production and distribution of goods and services, workers in each country have been discovering they have more in common than they used to. “Children of NAFTA” reveals what’s happening below the media radar screen, where workers have begun to act on the basis of their newfound shared interests.

You can see this not only in what Bacon reports but also in the images recorded by his camera. Adhering to a classical black and white social documentary approach, Bacon’s rigorous, uncropped wide-angle photographs make no bones about his pro-worker biases. A single glance tells us that whether he has snapped an injured worker, the patterns of ruts in the rain-wrecked streets of a colonia, or a demonstration of flag-waving trade unionists, this is photography as a weapon in the class struggle.

His orientation is appropriate to its subject matter. More than a million workers produce everything from microelectronic components to medical supplies to car parts in the maquiladora factories along the southern rim of the border. While many are covered by union contracts, most of these are worthless “protection contracts,” signed behind the backs of the workers by the companies and round-heeled unions affiliated with Mexico’s corrupt official labor federations. These conditions make the maquilas an inviting locale for transnational corporations seeking cheap labor and uninterrupted production.

Mexicali Honorina Ruiz, 6 years old, ties bunches of green onions together in a field farmed by Muranaka Farms, a U.S. grower. Her mother Esperanza and brother Rigoberto (at right) work with her.

Bacon details many thwarted efforts by maquila workers to organize independent unions. Fearful of losing international investment—especially when their economy is struggling—Mexican authorities collude with the local managers of foreign companies and the official union confederations to keep their enterprises closed to independent unions and fair union elections. Such practices come with the cost of serious health and safety violations inside workplaces, and often tragically dangerous environmental damage to the surrounding colonias and the people attempting to live in them. Bacon documents the spectacular failure of appeals by Mexican and American unions alike through NAFTA’s ad-ministrative machinery, even in the most egregious instances.

“Children of NAFTA” isn’t all about Mexico. Soon after workers at the Friction auto parts plant in Irvine, California, protested the treatment of the company’s workers in Mexico, their union local was notified that Friction was shutting its doors for the last time. Supervisors told them, “This is what you get for what you’ve done.” The company officially denied any retaliatory motive. Bacon also takes us through a number of other case studies north of the border, including more cheerful episodes like the Nebraska meatpacking plant successfully organized by its mostly Mexican immigrant workforce with the support of local churches and community groups.

An optimist, Bacon finds NAFTA’s silver lining in heightened cross-border solidarity efforts. In one of these, cooperation with U.S. activists helped maquila workers to form an independent union. At Kuk Dong, a modern Korean-owned garment factory in Atlixco, abusive supervisors yelled at and hit the workers, many of whom were as young as fourteen. Workers couldn’t eat the cafeteria food, which ranged from merely bad to putrid, with worms in the meat (shades of Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potem-kin”). Protests and retaliations escalated until the young workers occupied the factory on January 9, 2001. It took days before strikers were removed by club-wielding police.

Even then the workers didn’t admit defeat. Regrouping, they contacted worker support groups and student anti-sweatshop organizations in the U.S. The latter pressured Nike, one of Kuk Dong’s largest customers, to honor the company’s own code of conduct. When the Kuk Dong workers formally established their own independent union, the company agreed to recognize it, eventually signing a union contract.

“Children of NAFTA” is a real contribution to our understanding of the changing human face of the economy. Bacon’s perspective and on-the-ground research lead to the conclusion that efforts by workers themselves to find solutions to their problems—by reaching out to their counterparts on either side of the increasingly porous border—offer more hope than does NAFTA’s toothless enforcement machinery for resisting predatory neo-liberal economic policies. Capital ignores borders. “Children of NAFTA” shows that, in defense of their own interests, workers need to erase the dotted lines as well. Indeed, they are already beginning to do so.

Fred Glass serves as Communications Director for the California Federation of Teachers and teaches Labor Studies at City College of San Francisco.