The fix was in once they found out Canadian Tie money was not the real deal. That and they found out you could claim a chicken as a beloved member of the family and get paid more should it get run down by a Yankee tourist.
Since NAFTA there has been no change in Mexican Poverty
- Thread starter tay
- Start date
NAFTA isn't the FTA so don't expect much other than vanished Canadian jobs returning from Mexico.
Mexicans can return to velvet paintings, terracotta chimneas and copper pots and pans.
Mexicans can return to velvet paintings, terracotta chimneas and copper pots and pans.
Given that Mexicans have shown themselves to be just as good at manufacturing automobiles and other goods as Canadians and Americans I don't expect any changes. Besides, if you want Mexicans to stay in Mexico they had better have a good reason to stay there.
How Mexico’s Unions Sell Out Autoworkers
Wage contracts are inked years before plants open and workers never get a say.
At a ceremony at Mexico’s Los Pinos presidential residence in July 2014, BMW Chief Executive Officer Harald Krüger pledged to spend $1 billion to build a factory in the northern state of San Luis Potosí that will employ 1,500 workers. To mark the occasion, he presented President Enrique Peña Nieto with a model of a silver BMW race car.
The German automaker had unwrapped its own gift two days earlier, a labor contract signed by a representative from the state chapter of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), the country’s largest union confederation, and notarized by a Labor Ministry official. The document, which Bloomberg reviewed, sets a starting wage of about $1.10 per hour and a top wage of $2.53 for assembly-line workers. The starting rate is only a bit more than half the $2.04 an hour that is the average at Mexican auto plants, says Alex Covarrubias, a lecturer at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo.
The paperwork was filed two years before BMW broke ground on the new plant, which will turn out $45,000 3 Series sedans. When workers begin to stream into the factory sometime next year, there’s a good chance most won’t know they belong to a union.
Mexico’s union bosses and politicians are more interested in keeping corporations happy than in raising the living standards of workers, Covarrubias argues. “Protection contracts are a way to keep wages artificially low,” he says.
Since 2010, automakers have announced $24 billion in investments through 2019, while parts makers have committed another $3 billion, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Companies often cite the trade agreements Mexico has signed with 45 countries as a key reason they want to locate their plants there. Auto executives will rarely say they chose Mexico because its workers are among the cheapest in the world.
Mexican assembly-line workers earn about one-tenth of what their U.S. counterparts make. Adjusted for productivity, base wages for workers in plants that make transportation equipment rose 20 percent in Mexico between 2006 and 2016, according to calculations by Boston Consulting Group Inc.; in China, they climbed 157 percent over the same period.
Alejandra makes about $1.45 an hour working at a factory in Guanajuato state owned by Hirschmann Automotive GmbH, an Austrian parts maker. The machine operator, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of retaliation, says she has no idea
more
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-05/how-mexico-s-unions-sell-out-autoworkers
Wage contracts are inked years before plants open and workers never get a say.
At a ceremony at Mexico’s Los Pinos presidential residence in July 2014, BMW Chief Executive Officer Harald Krüger pledged to spend $1 billion to build a factory in the northern state of San Luis Potosí that will employ 1,500 workers. To mark the occasion, he presented President Enrique Peña Nieto with a model of a silver BMW race car.
The German automaker had unwrapped its own gift two days earlier, a labor contract signed by a representative from the state chapter of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), the country’s largest union confederation, and notarized by a Labor Ministry official. The document, which Bloomberg reviewed, sets a starting wage of about $1.10 per hour and a top wage of $2.53 for assembly-line workers. The starting rate is only a bit more than half the $2.04 an hour that is the average at Mexican auto plants, says Alex Covarrubias, a lecturer at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo.
The paperwork was filed two years before BMW broke ground on the new plant, which will turn out $45,000 3 Series sedans. When workers begin to stream into the factory sometime next year, there’s a good chance most won’t know they belong to a union.
Mexico’s union bosses and politicians are more interested in keeping corporations happy than in raising the living standards of workers, Covarrubias argues. “Protection contracts are a way to keep wages artificially low,” he says.
Since 2010, automakers have announced $24 billion in investments through 2019, while parts makers have committed another $3 billion, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Companies often cite the trade agreements Mexico has signed with 45 countries as a key reason they want to locate their plants there. Auto executives will rarely say they chose Mexico because its workers are among the cheapest in the world.
Mexican assembly-line workers earn about one-tenth of what their U.S. counterparts make. Adjusted for productivity, base wages for workers in plants that make transportation equipment rose 20 percent in Mexico between 2006 and 2016, according to calculations by Boston Consulting Group Inc.; in China, they climbed 157 percent over the same period.
Alejandra makes about $1.45 an hour working at a factory in Guanajuato state owned by Hirschmann Automotive GmbH, an Austrian parts maker. The machine operator, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of retaliation, says she has no idea
more
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-05/how-mexico-s-unions-sell-out-autoworkers
President Donald Trump, author of “The Art of the Deal,” said this week that China is giving American workers and companies a crummy one. He promised to do something about it.
This occurred within days of his Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, demanding “fair, free and reciprocal” trade in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
At the same time, Congressional Democrats offered a seven-point plan to give workers what they called “A Better Deal on Trade and Jobs.
American workers want all of these proposals achieved. They’ve heard this stuff before and supported it then. That includes ending tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs – something that never happened. It includes the promise to confront China over its steel and aluminum overcapacity – a pledge followed by delay. Talk is cheap. Jobs are not. The factory anchoring a community’s tax base is not. America’s industrial strength in times of uncertainty is not. All the talk is useless unless workers get some action.
President Trump is expected to announce within days the launch of an investigation into China forcing American corporations to transfer technology to the Asian giant’s companies as a price of doing business there. The technology transfer boosts China’s goal of becoming the leading manufacturer within a decade in high-tech areas such as semiconductors, robots, and artificial intelligence. In addition to seizing American research and know-how, Beijing advantages its technology companies by granting them government cash.
This is the kind of unfair competition that Secretary Ross talks about in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. Under so-called free trade rules, governments aren’t supposed to subsidize industry or demand that foreign investors fork over research.
These kinds of violations, not just with China but with other trading partners as well, have occurred for decades now. And the upshot for American workers is lost jobs and stagnant wages.
More than 5 million American manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1997 and 2014. Most of these vanished, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), because of growing U.S. trade deficits with countries like Mexico and China that had negotiated trade and investment deals with the United States.
The United States’ massive trade deficit with China alone accounted for 3.4 million jobs lost between 2001 and 2015, with 2.6 million of those in manufacturing, according to EPI research.
While offshoring manufacturing has often padded corporate profits, it has suppressed wages in the United States and in trading partner countries like Mexico. United Technologies (UT) is a good example.
UT moved to Mexico this year its Electronic Controls unit, which manufactures microprocessors for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. UT did this even though its 700 American workers had produced consistent profits for UT at a factory in Huntington, Ind. UT also moved a big chunk of its profitable Carrier HVAC manufacturing from Indianapolis to Mexico this year. UT’s stock price rose, so the already-rich who have cash to invest, made out.
They did it on the backs of workers in the United States and Mexico, however. The move to Mexico rendered jobless more than 1,000 skilled American workers. Studies show that if they’re lucky enough to land new employment, the pay will be substantially less.
Mexican workers gained the jobs, but the pay they’re getting is little better than before NAFTA. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a figure no different than before NAFTA. The New York Times cited this case: “For 10 years, Jorge Augustín Martínez has driven a forklift for Prolec, a joint venture with General Electric that makes transformers. A father of two, he earns about $100 for a six-day workweek.”
Mexican wages have remained stagnant for a decade.
In the United States, wages have been flat for longer – several decades.
This as corporate profits rise, the stock market skyrockets and CEO pay surges limitlessly.
Trade deals worked great for the already-rich, CEOs and corporations. They’ve crushed workers.
So it’s encouraging that both President Trump and the Democrats are talking about solutions.
The president is right. American corporations shouldn’t have to transfer technology to China to operate there. The United States doesn’t require that of Chinese companies manufacturing here. No such demand was made of Foxconn when it agreed to build a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin last week – though it is true that Wisconsin Republicans plan to force the state’s taxpayers to contribute $3 billion toward the plant, nearly a third of the total cost.
And the Democrats are right about every point in their “Better Deal” plan. Workers need an independent trade cop they can turn to for quick results to combat trade violations before they cost Americans jobs. Corporations like UT and Rexnord should be penalized when they offshore and when they seek government contracts. Corporations that restore jobs to the United States should be rewarded.
So do it. And don’t procrastinate like the administration is doing on its investigation of the national security threat posed to the United States by steel and aluminum overproduction in China. The report in that case originally promised for June 30 now has been indefinitely delayed. Each day’s wait means more American workers without jobs as illegally subsidized, grossly underpriced Chinese steel and aluminum floods the international market.
America’s highly skilled, dedicated steel and aluminum workers perform their jobs faithfully every day with the expectation that their government will enforce international trade regulations. They also expect their government to support their right to join together and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. As right-wingers have eroded workers’ bargaining rights over the past half century, unions have declined, and with them, workers’ ability to secure raises. This is true in Mexico too, where there are virtually no legitimate, worker-run unions.
Timothy A. Wise, a research fellow at Tufts University, put it this way to the New York Times: “Mexico is seeing exactly the same phenomenon as in the United States. Workers have declining bargaining power on both sides of the border.”
To ensure there are no more crummy trade deals, workers must be at the table when these pacts are negotiated. To get better wages, workers in all the countries involved in these deals – from China to Mexico to the United States – must be able to form real, worker-controlled labor organizations to bargain with corporations.
https://www.usw.org/blog/2017/workers-need-better-trade-deals-not-more-talk#skip_intro
This occurred within days of his Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, demanding “fair, free and reciprocal” trade in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
At the same time, Congressional Democrats offered a seven-point plan to give workers what they called “A Better Deal on Trade and Jobs.
American workers want all of these proposals achieved. They’ve heard this stuff before and supported it then. That includes ending tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs – something that never happened. It includes the promise to confront China over its steel and aluminum overcapacity – a pledge followed by delay. Talk is cheap. Jobs are not. The factory anchoring a community’s tax base is not. America’s industrial strength in times of uncertainty is not. All the talk is useless unless workers get some action.
President Trump is expected to announce within days the launch of an investigation into China forcing American corporations to transfer technology to the Asian giant’s companies as a price of doing business there. The technology transfer boosts China’s goal of becoming the leading manufacturer within a decade in high-tech areas such as semiconductors, robots, and artificial intelligence. In addition to seizing American research and know-how, Beijing advantages its technology companies by granting them government cash.
This is the kind of unfair competition that Secretary Ross talks about in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. Under so-called free trade rules, governments aren’t supposed to subsidize industry or demand that foreign investors fork over research.
These kinds of violations, not just with China but with other trading partners as well, have occurred for decades now. And the upshot for American workers is lost jobs and stagnant wages.
More than 5 million American manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1997 and 2014. Most of these vanished, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), because of growing U.S. trade deficits with countries like Mexico and China that had negotiated trade and investment deals with the United States.
The United States’ massive trade deficit with China alone accounted for 3.4 million jobs lost between 2001 and 2015, with 2.6 million of those in manufacturing, according to EPI research.
While offshoring manufacturing has often padded corporate profits, it has suppressed wages in the United States and in trading partner countries like Mexico. United Technologies (UT) is a good example.
UT moved to Mexico this year its Electronic Controls unit, which manufactures microprocessors for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. UT did this even though its 700 American workers had produced consistent profits for UT at a factory in Huntington, Ind. UT also moved a big chunk of its profitable Carrier HVAC manufacturing from Indianapolis to Mexico this year. UT’s stock price rose, so the already-rich who have cash to invest, made out.
They did it on the backs of workers in the United States and Mexico, however. The move to Mexico rendered jobless more than 1,000 skilled American workers. Studies show that if they’re lucky enough to land new employment, the pay will be substantially less.
Mexican workers gained the jobs, but the pay they’re getting is little better than before NAFTA. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a figure no different than before NAFTA. The New York Times cited this case: “For 10 years, Jorge Augustín Martínez has driven a forklift for Prolec, a joint venture with General Electric that makes transformers. A father of two, he earns about $100 for a six-day workweek.”
Mexican wages have remained stagnant for a decade.
In the United States, wages have been flat for longer – several decades.
This as corporate profits rise, the stock market skyrockets and CEO pay surges limitlessly.
Trade deals worked great for the already-rich, CEOs and corporations. They’ve crushed workers.
So it’s encouraging that both President Trump and the Democrats are talking about solutions.
The president is right. American corporations shouldn’t have to transfer technology to China to operate there. The United States doesn’t require that of Chinese companies manufacturing here. No such demand was made of Foxconn when it agreed to build a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin last week – though it is true that Wisconsin Republicans plan to force the state’s taxpayers to contribute $3 billion toward the plant, nearly a third of the total cost.
And the Democrats are right about every point in their “Better Deal” plan. Workers need an independent trade cop they can turn to for quick results to combat trade violations before they cost Americans jobs. Corporations like UT and Rexnord should be penalized when they offshore and when they seek government contracts. Corporations that restore jobs to the United States should be rewarded.
So do it. And don’t procrastinate like the administration is doing on its investigation of the national security threat posed to the United States by steel and aluminum overproduction in China. The report in that case originally promised for June 30 now has been indefinitely delayed. Each day’s wait means more American workers without jobs as illegally subsidized, grossly underpriced Chinese steel and aluminum floods the international market.
America’s highly skilled, dedicated steel and aluminum workers perform their jobs faithfully every day with the expectation that their government will enforce international trade regulations. They also expect their government to support their right to join together and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. As right-wingers have eroded workers’ bargaining rights over the past half century, unions have declined, and with them, workers’ ability to secure raises. This is true in Mexico too, where there are virtually no legitimate, worker-run unions.
Timothy A. Wise, a research fellow at Tufts University, put it this way to the New York Times: “Mexico is seeing exactly the same phenomenon as in the United States. Workers have declining bargaining power on both sides of the border.”
To ensure there are no more crummy trade deals, workers must be at the table when these pacts are negotiated. To get better wages, workers in all the countries involved in these deals – from China to Mexico to the United States – must be able to form real, worker-controlled labor organizations to bargain with corporations.
https://www.usw.org/blog/2017/workers-need-better-trade-deals-not-more-talk#skip_intro
Wrong. Mexico will remain a starvation wage economy until many other things are fixed.
In other words, forever.
And was NAFTA about trade, or massive transfers of money from 1st world to the 3rd. ?
Why are we being held responsible for Mexico ?
Workers Say NAFTA’s Neoliberal Foundations Need to Be Dismantled from the Left—Not the Right
Last week, nearly 60 representatives of unions and civil society organizations from Mexico, Canada and the United States gathered in Chicago for a two-day meeting to discuss strategies for collaboration as their governments renegotiate the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The meeting was coordinated by the United Electrical Workers (UE), UCLA Labor Center and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, an international civic education institution affiliated with Germany’s Left Party. While many Mexican unions are dominated by the government, only the country’s more independent and democratically run labor organizations attended.
“We’re discussing what kinds of relationships can be built, either bi-nationally or tri-nationally,” Benedicto Martínez, a national co-coordinator of Mexico’s Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, or Authentic Labor Front (FAT), told In These Times. “At the forefront of our vision would be the rights of people, including better wages, better education, better healthcare and immigration rights.”
Quiñones explained that maquila workers often face sexual violence from their managers, are exposed to dangerous chemicals, work 12- to 14-hour days and are frequently fired or blacklisted for trying to organize.
“Nobody benefits from these trade deals other than corporations,” said Kari Thompson, UE’s director of international strategies, in an interview with In These Times. “Not working people, not the environment, not women, not people of color, not farmers.”
In particular, the consulate protesters demanded Mexico raise its minimum wage. They argue that the increase would not only benefit Mexican workers, but also workers in the United States and Canada, by making it less profitable for companies to move production to Mexico. The current minimum wage in Mexico is roughly $4 per day.
Abraham Garcilazo Espinosa, a mineworker from Mexico City and representative of the Sindicato Minero (the National Union of Miners and Metalworkers), told In These Times that the wage disparity in the mining industry is especially glaring.
“We think NAFTA is a bad deal, absolutely,” Thompson says. “But just because Trump wants to renegotiate this deal doesn’t mean he actually has the interests of working people in mind.”
Two key demands of the organizers who gathered in Chicago—ending corporate protections like the undemocratic Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and making it easier for workers in all three countries to form unions—are not on the Trump administration’s agenda.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has complained that the hostile legal environment for unions in the United States compared to Canada creates unfair labor market competition between the two countries. In response, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill last month that would prohibit states from passing anti-union “right-to-work” laws.
Although Canada has fewer legal obstacles to forming unions, activists there say guest workers from Mexico and other countries are routinely exploited.
“Canada bills [its guest worker program] as a best-practice model of labor mobility, but the workers have no mobility. They get fired if they speak up and have no recourse,” said Evelyn Encalada, a founding member of the Canadian nonprofit Justice for Migrant Workers who participated in last week’s meeting. “We want all workers in North America to have mobility, labor rights and the right to have rights,”
more
Jeff Schuhrke - Profile - In These Times
Last week, nearly 60 representatives of unions and civil society organizations from Mexico, Canada and the United States gathered in Chicago for a two-day meeting to discuss strategies for collaboration as their governments renegotiate the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The meeting was coordinated by the United Electrical Workers (UE), UCLA Labor Center and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, an international civic education institution affiliated with Germany’s Left Party. While many Mexican unions are dominated by the government, only the country’s more independent and democratically run labor organizations attended.
“We’re discussing what kinds of relationships can be built, either bi-nationally or tri-nationally,” Benedicto Martínez, a national co-coordinator of Mexico’s Frente Auténtico del Trabajo, or Authentic Labor Front (FAT), told In These Times. “At the forefront of our vision would be the rights of people, including better wages, better education, better healthcare and immigration rights.”
Quiñones explained that maquila workers often face sexual violence from their managers, are exposed to dangerous chemicals, work 12- to 14-hour days and are frequently fired or blacklisted for trying to organize.
“Nobody benefits from these trade deals other than corporations,” said Kari Thompson, UE’s director of international strategies, in an interview with In These Times. “Not working people, not the environment, not women, not people of color, not farmers.”
In particular, the consulate protesters demanded Mexico raise its minimum wage. They argue that the increase would not only benefit Mexican workers, but also workers in the United States and Canada, by making it less profitable for companies to move production to Mexico. The current minimum wage in Mexico is roughly $4 per day.
Abraham Garcilazo Espinosa, a mineworker from Mexico City and representative of the Sindicato Minero (the National Union of Miners and Metalworkers), told In These Times that the wage disparity in the mining industry is especially glaring.
“We think NAFTA is a bad deal, absolutely,” Thompson says. “But just because Trump wants to renegotiate this deal doesn’t mean he actually has the interests of working people in mind.”
Two key demands of the organizers who gathered in Chicago—ending corporate protections like the undemocratic Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and making it easier for workers in all three countries to form unions—are not on the Trump administration’s agenda.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has complained that the hostile legal environment for unions in the United States compared to Canada creates unfair labor market competition between the two countries. In response, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill last month that would prohibit states from passing anti-union “right-to-work” laws.
Although Canada has fewer legal obstacles to forming unions, activists there say guest workers from Mexico and other countries are routinely exploited.
“Canada bills [its guest worker program] as a best-practice model of labor mobility, but the workers have no mobility. They get fired if they speak up and have no recourse,” said Evelyn Encalada, a founding member of the Canadian nonprofit Justice for Migrant Workers who participated in last week’s meeting. “We want all workers in North America to have mobility, labor rights and the right to have rights,”
more
Jeff Schuhrke - Profile - In These Times
THere is a misconception here that NAFTA is why cars are being built in Mexico. In fact car manufacturing was moving down there way before NAFTA happened. I personally owned a 1991 VW PAssat that was assembled there. It was a POS.
Actually let me qualify that - the 1.8L engine was and is legendary. No engine problems at all. The problems were the door handles not working. The windows not closing. Things falling off the car. Exactly what you would expect with a poorly assembled vehicles.
Actually let me qualify that - the 1.8L engine was and is legendary. No engine problems at all. The problems were the door handles not working. The windows not closing. Things falling off the car. Exactly what you would expect with a poorly assembled vehicles.
If you knew your assshole from your elbow you'd know almost all those 'illegals' are from Central American countries-you can't tell the difference because unlike me you've never visited and don't speak the language.
The Good News that the kind of abject ignorance you're so proud is quite commonplace-that's also the Bad News.
Was there sup[posed to be. It is cheaper for the US to buy from Mexico than it is from Canada. You mush have an inkling of what is going to happen in the future? Such as Mexico becoming their most important trading partner.