Opening the border through class struggle and solidarity
North American capitalism has been transformed into two over-lapping, yet starkly contradictory realities for capital and labor. Nowhere is this more apparent than through observation of what has taken place between the United States and Mexico over the last three decades. Through the aegis of the state, its two major political parties, and its junior counterparts across national boundaries, the US capitalist class has transformed the region into a singular, borderless economy for capital.[1]
Integration in this form has been accomplished through what are mis-characterized as “free-trade agreements” (FTAs). These were imposed under authoritarian conditions. Freedom was conspicuously absent when FTAs were dictated to the Mexican people during economic crisis as conditional in exchange for emergency loans. These “structural adjustment programs” required by outside entities such as the International Monetary Fund and backed by US government policy have been devastating. The ensuing decades of privatization, austerity, foreign economic re-colonization, displacement and out-migration have resulted in social and political turmoil that ravaged whole generations of the population. These were certainly not the result of Mexicans freely exercising their democratic rights.
Furthermore, since labor is central to the production that enables trade across borders, it cannot be not freedom when money and goods can move unhindered between nations and workers are persecuted for doing the same. Rather, misnamed trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its forthcoming expansion of corporate handovers embedded in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) can be better understood as “capital-mobility agreements” (CMAs). These accords are the new constitutions that sanctify transnational rights for finance capital (investors) in their search for profit.
This method of capitalist accumulation, which I will refer to as the “North American Model” (NAM), enforces inalienable rights for capital mobility while criminalizing the movement of labor. Border enforcement policies are enabling the maximum exploitation of the regional working classes as they are being simultaneously fused together through different forms of transborder production.
This method of capitalist accumulation, which I will refer to as the “North American Model” (NAM), enforces inalienable rights for capital mobility while criminalizing the movement of labor. Border enforcement policies are enabling the maximum exploitation of the regional working classes as they are being simultaneously fused together through different forms of transborder production.
This includes the hyper-policing and repression of undocumented workers within the US, and the maintenance of segmented labor markets across nations. In practice, these serve to maintain a super-exploitative low-wage threshold within the regionalized economy. By restricting citizenship and national origin within the US economy, this allows for different labor status conditions which undergird wage differentiation within the nation. Furthermore, policed borders then serve as a bulwark to maintain wage differentials between nations, even as workers increasingly perform the same labor, work for the same firms, and contribute to the same products.
While the NAM has carefully constructed new labor regimes predicated on depressed and differentiated labor markets, it is also yielding unintended contradictions. Supply-chain production, common transnational employment, and other production linkages within this model are concurrently interconnecting and integrating workers in unprecedented ways. The potential for transnational solidarity, class struggle, and union organization is pointing a way forward for labor in this era, as well as showing a road map for how we can build a movement to open the borders.
The North American Model: Open borders for capital, closed borders for workers
The triumphal ascendancy of “globalization”, in practical terms, means that borders have been opened for capital. Money in the form of investment moves seamlessly across the globe. It searches for profit, settles across boundaries without checkpoints, apprehension by armed agents, or detention and cruel and discriminatory treatment.
Capital moves at fiber-optic speed across borders to seek out profit across the economic spectrum. Through investment in ownership and control over whole transnational industries, capitalist firms leverage their operations into an international economy of scale. Nevertheless, they can only profit through the exploitation of labor, and therefore rely on borders to differentiate, divide, and further subdivide workers along national and international lines. Once profits are accrued, they freely return and overflow bank accounts without need for passports or papers.
While the most powerful states have enabled the rise of a system where capital has become untethered and all-pervasive, they have also simultaneously constrained the movement of large swathes of the international working class. This has become reality through the growth and ossification of militarized border zones and the building up of various legal and political regimes to repress migrant people.
Along the US-Mexico border, migrating people die crossing deserts attempting to circumvent border walls and guards. They are killed by bullets, extreme temperatures, suffocation, or felled by preventable infections borne of squalid conditions intentionally gestated in concentration camps as part of a program of intentional cruelty. Life is squeezed from men, women, and children in the course of desperately trying to cross a border.
Without papers, they live in fear of arrest and detention while they work. They look in all directions and keep their heads low in public spaces, to account not only for police presence, but also for those whose racial and xenophobic hatred for migrants leads them to orchestrate violence. Life passes by in large installments of time, without basic opportunities or rights, and with diminished hope for a progressive future.
This precarious condition adds value for capitalism. It breaks down and undermines class and political organization, and with it the confidence and ability to resist state violence. This creates optimal conditions for the super-exploitation of their labor. Within the boundaries of the US, the criminalization of their mobility and labor engenders poverty and social isolation.
Racialized violence and inequalities intrinsic to border militarization and labor control through the manipulation of citizenship have been on-going features of modern US capital accumulation, and are becoming more important to its everyday functioning. They are the hardening joints of a sclerotic system, increasingly dependent on the force of institutional violence to extract surplus value from a growing and subjugated population that is interconnected to the population by class position, but disarticulated from the nation-state through “illegalization”. As long as borders are open for capital—while closed for labor—wages, working, and living conditions for all workers will continue to decline.
“Opening the border” for labor means building a movement to decriminalize labor migration through the full legalization of transnational migration. It will also require a new vision of labor internationalism, which like capital, must extend across borders.
Opening the border means the decriminalization of labor migration
The fight to open the border unequivocally supports the free movement of poor, working class, and refugee peoples across borders, as well as the guarantee of all attendant rights currently restricted to territorially-based “citizens”. It rejects the embedded reactionary logic that migrants are an inherent threat, and challenges the unquestioned rights of capital embedded in CMAs by recognizing their destructive impact on workers on an international level. Like CMAs do for capital, the movement for open borders refers for the extension of sovereignty across national boundaries. In the case of labor migration, it means transborder human rights, labor rights, and democratic and civil rights.
Decriminalizing labor migration requires the overturning of the regime of laws and policies that sanction and anoint state violence. It means the de-legitimization and demolition of the apparatus that has been constructed solely to obstruct, disrupt, oppress, and control a stratum of the working class who are denied the legal means to cross borders.
Decriminalizing labor migration requires the overturning of the regime of laws and policies that sanction and anoint state violence. It means the de-legitimization and demolition of the apparatus that has been constructed solely to obstruct, disrupt, oppress, and control a stratum of the working class who are denied the legal means to cross borders.
The machinery of state violence has to be dismantled. This begins with the demilitarization of the border, removal of the walls and other anti-human technologies. It necessitates the abolition of the assemblies of armed agents of the Department of Homeland Security and the barbaric complex of detention centers and concentration camps.
Furthermore, abolition must then extend into the architecture of labor repression that holds hostage millions of disenfranchised workers within the economy. A growing number of industries have been sub-tiered with immigrant labor through the state-sanctioned suppression of their wages, conditions, and employment options; creating what are now commonly believed to be “immigrant jobs”. These have been further structured with the introduction of employer-empowering checks and controls such as E-verify, I-9 audits, and a host of other programs. Opportunistic owners that originally mastered the use of these tools for labor super-exploitation compelled their competitors to follow suit, carving out whole sectors and geographies of the economy. “Open borders” requires the eradication of these regimes, and the extension of the rights to unionize and collectively bargain. This is something immigrant workers have shown a propensity to support, and that is imperative for the advance of US unions and the labor movement.
As migrant labor has been functionally necessary for the US economy as a form of labor reproduction, the perpetuation and maintenance of disenfranchised labor demonstrates its political function. There is precedent for creating legal pathways to citizenship for migrant workers, i.e. amnesty, but as these have historically led to integration, democratization, and unionization. As a result, employers within the NAM, no longer see it as viable. Migrant criminalization is now an objectified and operational branch of capitalist accumulation.
Under the system of capitalism, “freedom” for both capital and labor mobility cannot coexist, as this model of accumulation is dependent upon explicit forms of labor control and disorganization. This contradiction means that labor can only free itself through struggle, and ultimately the negation of the capitalist mode of production.
The NAM can only function through implanting ideological division within the working classes within and across the border. The call for the free movement of labor lays the basis for a universal working class consciousness and vision of solidarity that can transcend the self-defeating function of bourgeois nationalism and its illogicality in the face of capitalist globalization. Proportional to its own crisis of rationality, reactionary nationalist ideology is imputed in the working class to facilitate division and foster racism and xenophobia at a time of economic deterioration. It ultimately instills a sense of impotence and powerlessness as it conveys that workers themselves cannot change their declining conditions, and instead must align with their own oppressors to defensively cling to an ever-shrinking share of the pie. Breaking with the appeal of these ideas is made easier by the changing contours of class formation and coordination within the NAM, where the working class has become more increasingly international and transnational.
Workers can only strengthen their position through class struggle that can overcome the divides within national boundaries, and along the nodes of transnational capitalism across borders. This contains the possibility for building solidarity, and politically aligning workers who are already situated in the same workplaces and industries, and who are being interconnected through transnational supply chains and employment for the same multinational employers. This lays the basis for international union organization and affiliation, common strike demands, equalization of rights, wages, and conditions across borders. Ultimately, this trajectory could also create the basis for exerting class power on an economy of scale capable of bringing down altogether the migrant repressive apparatus.
Transnationalization of the North American working classes
North American capitalism has had to reinvent itself by killing off outdated arrangements and constructing new ones, driven by an insatiable and compulsory need to accumulate. Nevertheless, each revamping of the capitalist mode of production inevitably engenders new contradictions and heightens class antagonisms, as it is eternally contingent on labor exploitation regardless of form.
In the last three decades, the natural rights of capital have been encoded in the international agreements and enforcement agencies that define and regulate the operations of the global economy. “Free markets” are then aggressively promoted across national boundaries by states, transnational enterprises and organizations, armies of enforcers, and ranks of functionaries, intellectuals, consultants, and other front-line intermediaries.
Within the North American pole of the global system, US capitalism has reorganized and re-wired a regional economy by facilitating, seeking out, and shifting production to the least defended sections of workers across southern borders. While extending beyond its own national territory, primary production centers and investment zones are still situated within proximity to indispensable, US-based consumer markets.
Geographically, this has contributed to what David Harvey calls capital’s “spatial fix”. This refers to the mobility of capital to seek a “fix” for falling rates of profit where it is currently situated, and towards new locations where it can operate more profitably. Crossing borders into Mexico to seek lower wages and evade unions are an example of this phenomenon. Capital export into Mexico has also fueled geographic reorganization. It has fueled internal economic displacement and migration (in a context of illegalized external migration) and contributed to the growth of concentrated industrial clusters and population centers along the border and into the interior connected through international transportation hubs. This illustrates the one-dimensional form of current open borders, for capital and products only, which has substantially changed the relations of production within the region.
The NAM has facilitated a type of segmented manufacturing process known as “supply-chain production”. Through the subdivision of production across borders, capital can intensify the rate of exploitation of all segments by lowering the wage threshold to the lowest possible denominator. This is made possible by reinforcing national boundaries, which in turn maintain the differentials between the two nations embodied in such factors as: balance of class forces, union density, extant forms of labor repression and control, and other factors that determine wages levels within any particular region or industry. Capitalists then use the differentials to ideologically divide the workers along national lines by making them compete with each other for jobs.
Through the forceful implementation of CMAs, previously restricted capital markets in Mexico and Central America have been opened and saturated with US and other foreign investment. This massive influx of international capital has displaced and consumed state and domestic capital across the economies, evoking a semi-colonial reality. This includes taking ownership over privatized industry, acquiring large tracts of arable land, subsuming local production centers, restructuring and segmenting production across borders, and dominating national markets for capital, financial, and consumer goods.
An unintended by-product of this historic process has become the unprecedented amalgamation of the regional proletariat. Sections of the working classes in the US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean have been fused into unitary, transnational production lines, interconnecting supply-chains, linked transportation, logistics, and distribution networks, and into common employment for the same multinational corporations and investment firms.
An unintended by-product of this historic process has become the unprecedented amalgamation of the regional proletariat. Sections of the working classes in the US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean have been fused into unitary, transnational production lines, interconnecting supply-chains, linked transportation, logistics, and distribution networks, and into common employment for the same multinational corporations and investment firms.
This exposes a sizeable contradiction for this model of capitalism. While it depends on the use of enforced border restriction, national economic differentiation, and the immobilization of sections of workers within national boundaries in order to maintain unequal wage differentials; it also lays the basis for new forms of cross-border solidarity, and transnational unionization. Understanding how the NAM has brought workers together—even as it works aggressively to divide them—illustrates how workers can begin to see themselves as having common cause. Recent strikes in the Mexican and US automotive industries are a case in point.
NAM case study: automotive production
Since the turn of the 21st century, Mexico has become one of the largest centers in world automotive production. Between 1998 and 2004, the total neoliberalization of Mexico’s auto industry was completed. All import/export duties for auto-associated products were reduced to zero and the legal barriers for 100% foreign ownership in the industry were removed.
Asian, European, and US automakers have shifted production and exported capital to Mexico on an enormous scale. US investors especially have focused on extending auto parts manufacturing south of the border as a strategy of supply chain reorganization. By the end of 2018, the automotive production became the largest manufacturing industry in the nation, accounting for 20.7% of Mexico’s total gross domestic product. Exports of automotive products amounted to $142.18 billion, while imports were $59 billion, creating a surplus of $83 billion in 2018. Automotive exports are the single largest source of foreign income reserves for the Mexican government, generating more than oil exports, tourism, and migrant remittances combined.
Between 2009 and 2018 international capital has invested $124 billion in North American automotive production, with 20% going into Mexico (US 73%, Canada 7%), averaging about $2.5 billion per year. In the years 2016 and 2017 alone, there was a total investment of $49.2 billion dollars in the Mexican auto industry. Automotive production in Mexico doubled between 2007 and 2015 from 2 million to 4 million vehicles. It is poised to reach 6 million by 2022.[2] This would propel Mexico forward as the fifth-largest auto producer in the world, and second largest in North America behind the US (roughly ½ the size of the US market).
Furthermore, it is the fifth-largest auto parts producer worldwide, with $92 billion in revenues annually, and the second-largest export market for US auto parts. Around 88 percent of the vehicle production in Mexico is devoted to exports with the remaining 12 percent destined for the domestic market. The lion’s share of exports, 84.9%, goes to the US.[3]
The primary reason for the influx of international capital to Mexico is to increase profit. The exploitation of Mexican labor reaps substantial reward. Labor costs for automotive assembly are approximately 80 percent lower in Mexico than in the United States, taking wages, benefits, and other forms of compensation (such as health care) into account.[4] By 2015, suppressed wages in Mexico’s manufacturing sector fell 30% below those in China.
Through the construction of capital-mobility agreements (CMAs), investors found a way to further increase profits by decreasing even more the threshold for wage and working conditions by crossing the border. The corporations relied on mobility to first shift production from higher wage to lower wage areas within the US. This advantageous approach to increasing labor exploitation was observed in the Washington Post,
Back in the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry went through a major upheaval. Foreign automakers started opening up more and more plants in the South, taking advantage of the region's weaker unions and lower labor costs. That, in turn, undercut the historically dominant position of Detroit and the Midwest.
They then pursued CMAs through the state to facilitate the permeability of national borders for capital, looking directly at Mexico. As they moved operations into Mexico through the aegis of state-negotiated trade regimes, they effectively redefined and pushed out a new set of international boundaries for the free movement of capital and for the rich. Nevertheless, the physical border and the repressive architecture of migrant labor enforcement remains intact.
Furthermore, Mexico’s neoliberal trade law and practices are riddled with generous pro-corporate incentives, tax exclusions, and exclude technology transfer requirements. These embed a multitude of benefits which transfer an even larger share of the value of production from the domestic population to the owners of capital. Another major factor is the close proximity and reduced logistics and transportation costs to the United States, which is the largest market for automobiles and auto parts in the world.
The Mexican government maintains unusually high interest rates for capital investment, invests in workforce development and training programs, subsidizes energy costs, and maintains an array of tax incentives and benefits for capital. It has extended “free-trade zones” (FTZ) into all areas of the economy, providing tax-free benefits for exported products. State governments are allowed to establish their own FTZ arrangements, turning the country into a multi-layered investment zone with multiple and overlapping blandishments for international capital.[5] Furthermore, the declining value of the peso against the U.S. dollar means that the manufacture of vehicles and parts in Mexico is less expensive relative to the United States. Lastly, Mexico collects the least amount of taxes of all 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), making it a virtual tax haven for US investors.
This set of highly lucrative arrangements for capital has resulted the construction of a matrix of transnational production zones and supply chains that crisscross a unidimensional open border. Through and across this matrix, the NAM has also situated a highly condensed and clustered workforce that assembles and produces the same finished products and typically for the same capitalist firms. The immense workforce on the Mexican side cannot cross freely, although the products they create and the value generated by their labor—have that right.
Through this portal for accumulation, international capital investment poured in.
Auto assembly plants in Mexico more than doubled from 11 in 2004 to 25 in 2020. The number of auto parts production facilities (maquiladoras) increased from 187 in 1990 to 313 in 2006, and then more than quadrupled to more than 1,300 factories in 2019. US investors own a third, or about 750 of these plants, followed by Mexican, European, and Asian capital. Much of this recent investment in Mexico has been in current technologies and equipment, making the production interchangeable with that of its North American, European, and Asian counterparts.
All major international automotive corporations now operate interconnected and interdependent automotive assembly, production, and logistics and distribution supply chains across North American borders. According to one study of this growth trend explains:
By 2020, all of the 11 carmakers operating in Mexico will have other production facilities in North America. They tend to run their North American operations in a geographically integrated fashion. This applies especially to their respective supply chains, which extend across national borders in North America.
Mexican workers are central to the whole operation of North American auto production. Mexico has about 900,000 auto manufacturing workers (over 90% in parts and component production), accounting for 45% of the North American total auto production workforce, and 15% of the total industrial labor force in the country. By comparison, the US has slightly over 1 million auto workers (49%), and Canada has 125,000 workers (6%).
The movement of manufactured goods through transborder supply chains also links workers in other ways. An estimated 80–85 percent of motor vehicles assembled in Mexico for United States and Canadian markets are transported by rail, directly linking production centers with northern markets. This is a legacy of how US-invested industry in Mexico over the last century was constructed to extract and repatriate Mexico’s wealth and resources north of the border. The remainder are moved by shipping, linking Mexican and US ports. Taken together, the logistics of this system are contingent upon rail workers and dockworkers on both sides of the border.
From the capitalist state’s point of view, it is imperative that the NAM economic model retain its differentiated national character through the regional immobilization of labor. This in order to maintain Mexican labor subordinated and wages artificially depressed, even as the economy becomes more directly integrated through the trans-nationalization of capital—and as the transnational working class more uniform, interconnected, and interdependent. The criminalization of migrant labor once it crosses national boundaries, serves as an instrument to maintain this imbalance. The organization of transnational unions, cross-border labor solidarity, and coordinated strikes is the only way to upset this predatory framework—and with it, lay the basis for overturning the anti-worker, repressive border regime that criminalization depends on.
Workers shut down transnational auto production
Strikes in the supply chain across the US-Mexico border in 2019 showed the power that workers have within the NAM model, and why it is necessary to organize common unions and strike demands.
Over 35,000 workers in over 48 mostly auto parts production and assembly plants in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas launched simultaneous, consecutive, and rolling wildcat strikes over the course of a month and a half in early 2019. The workers were affiliated with four different charro unions. In Mexico, these refer to various types of degenerated unions and company-created, paper unions that enforce “protection contracts”, often affiliated to the venal and discredited Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Confederation of Mexican Workers). The leaders of these so-called unions are corrupt, bought off, and used to discipline their workers and prevent labor stoppages to protect the profits for the company in exchange for pay-offs and occasional concessions to the workers that are trivial or symbolic in nature.
Despite the official opposition of the charro leadership of these “unions”, the workers coordinated their own strikes actions and won against disproportionate odds and asymmetrical opposition. The contending forces extended from paid thugs, to the police, the state government, and a constellation of local, statewide, and national business federations and their political enforcers at every level of government.
Parts buyers in the U.S. and Mexico were hit with immediate shortages, disrupting their “just-in-time” deadlines. Because of the high level of solidarity between the workers and significant disruption of the auto supply chains, which caused an estimated loss of between $50 and $100 million, the companies were forced to quickly settle and concede to the strikers’ uniform 20/32 demands.
That same year, GM workers affiliated with the United Autoworker’s Union conducted a 40-day strike, the longest strike by the UAW in over 50 years. The strike shut down 33 manufacturing plants and 22 parts distribution warehouses across nine states across. It had similar multiplier effects in Mexico and Canada. Initially, the corporation initially compelled its Mexican plants to speed-up production to pick up the slack, but was ultimately forced to shut them down as the strike was prolonged.
About 49,000 GM workers in the US, over 6,000 in Mexico, and an equal number in Canada were idled during the GM strike. Furthermore, 25,000 of GM’s staff and an estimated 75,000 auto parts workers across the borders in the supply and production chains. All told, according to one estimate, over 150,000 north American workers were affected by the strike.
For example, GM workers at two assembly plants located in Oshawa and St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, had to down their tools or stay home after a ripple effect of the strike disrupted their places along GM’s transnational assembly lines. Parts coming into the plants dried up, while demand for the essential components further down the chain (such as drive trains destined for US manufacturers) was abruptly cut.
GM was eventually forced to stop its operations in Mexico. It halted production workers at its plant in Silao, Guanajuato, after necessary components coming from the US ran out. This further rippled through the Mexico-based part suppliers triggering further shut-downs. If the strike persisted, it could have also had deeper reach, hindering the procurement of replacement parts for an estimated 30 million GM vehicles on the US roads.
All told, GM was dealt $1.1 billion in lost income, at least 165,000 fewer cars and trucks produced. The strike disrupted steel and aluminum sales, cut demand for an estimated 1,820 tons of steel and 340 tons of aluminum. The total multiplier effects added up to an estimated $3 billion overall loss to the economy, with proportional multiplier effects in Mexico and Canada as well.
The GM strike took place on the heels of efforts by Mexican autoworkers to build new, independent unions across the automotive industry. Organizers and workers who led the successful strikes in the auto parts maquiladoras in Matamoros, launched an independent and militant union called the Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y de Servicios (SNITIS)/Movimiento 20-32 to challenge and replace the corrupt CTM-led charro unions. There have also been attempts to organize independent unions in the auto assembly plants. In fact, there has been a surge of new union organizing campaigns across Mexico.
Even though GM is the largest auto manufacturer in Mexico, workers are not part of the UAW and have no authentic union representation. Unlike in Canada, where the United Autoworker’s Union crosses the border, they have no relationship to Mexican workers. GM Mexico relies on protection rackets and phony unions to police, discipline, and punish workers who step out of line.
In fact, Mexican autoworkers have been clamoring for real union representation. In GM’s Silao plant in Guanajuato, workers had been organizing an independent union on the shop floor to evict the corrupt CTM-affiliated union. In the weeks before the GM strike, the company and the CTM collaborated to fire a group of eight worker-organizers at the plant. The company conducted a “random” drug test that was applied to those identified as organizers and sympathizers, and then fired them after falsely claiming they tested positive.
Opening the border means transnational labor solidarity and organization
Despite their victimization in the lead up to the strike, the Silao organizers went on to build and lead an international solidarity campaign for their striking US counterparts. They called for the strike to spread across the borders to GM plants in other countries in order to prevent GM from increasing production internationally to weaken the US-based strike. They also called for the international strike as a collective action to stop GM’s “restructuring plans.” Announced in 2018, this downsizing project included the planned closure of seven manufacturing plants worldwide, five plants in North America, and two others elsewhere, with the goal of eliminating 14,000 jobs. This overture is especially meaningful and prescient coming from the Mexican autoworkers, as the closure of US plants in the US as production increases in Mexico indicates that the company will likely shift even more operations to Mexico in the coming years.
According to one report, they
promoted assemblies where workers from the Silao plant in Mexico, Brazil, and Canada, communicated their support for the Americans. Their intention is to globalize the conflict, because if production is forcibly increased elsewhere, the effect of the strike is lost and with it the ability to stop the company's intention to close seven plants globally.
The effort led by Mexican autoworkers demonstrated the capacity and potential for GM workers across borders to issue joint demands, prevent the company from playing one against the other, and to lay the foundation to create a genuine international union movement responding to and challenging the 21st century neoliberal capitalism.
The effort led by Mexican autoworkers demonstrated the capacity and potential for GM workers across borders to issue joint demands, prevent the company from playing one against the other, and to lay the foundation to create a genuine international union movement responding to and challenging the 21st century neoliberal capitalism.
Furthermore, there is an urgent need for organizing auto assembly workers and parts producers into the same unions, whose complex arterial networks also cross borders.
While UAW strategists have come to recognize the importance of deploying the strategy of the “bottleneck strike”, targeting selected locations in the supply chain for their ability to disrupt larger operations, they have yet to deploy this strategy across borders or fully appreciate its international dimensions. “Just-in-time production” means shortages of key parts can quickly force an automaker to halt or slow production at many of its plants, including across borders. Nevertheless, the corporation can manipulate its economy of scale across national boundaries to leverage different national operations against a strike, and use unorganized workers to undercut those in unions.
Despite the show of solidarity and evident logic for supporting the Mexican call for at least attempting to expand the strike across the borders, the UAW leadership did not even consider it. They contained the strike to achieving only minimal gains for its vastly shrunken membership, which has dropped from 1.5 million in 1979, to 500,000 in 1998, and to about 390,000 today. Adding to this decline, the new contract language concedes the company’s main demand: its plan to proceed with multiple plant closures.
While the opportunity was missed for building a renewed labor movement across borders reflecting the realities of the NAM, it will not be the last. Building transnational class struggle is the only way for the declining ranks of organized labor to progress, especially as US capital and its regional partners and affiliates have restructured capitalism to use enforced borders precisely to their advantage.
In an industry like auto production, the success of any strike will ultimately depend on how workers can collaborate within and across borders to confront and defeat a multinational opponent. A trajectory towards cross-border labor solidarity, unionism, collaborative action, and universal demands will create the basis for the raising of all workers’ conditions. It also offers another important benefit: a road map for how we can build the movement necessary to open the borders.
The radically divergent realities between the rights of transnational capital and transnational labor are not incidental or transitory features of the modern nation-state. They will not wither away, be wiped clean at some future point, or jettisoned if the right person is elected. The intensification of labor exploitation through the criminalization of labor migration and enforced borders in North America underscores a crisis of accumulation for capital, and the emergence of a model designed to resolve it. The architects and beneficiaries of this reorganization have been able to enrich themselves in an unprecedented manner, but will also face incurable instability if the workers learn to forge new bonds of unity within and across borders. The NAM has created a symmetrically opposed force that has the capacity and potential to undo it.
[1] This includes Canada, Central America, and Caribbean states, although this essay will focus primarily on the US and Mexico.
[2] Swiecki, Bernard and Maranger Menk, Debbie, “The Growing Role of Mexico in the North American Automotive Industry: Trends, Drivers and Forecasts” Center for Automotive Research, July 2016, p. 2.
[3] Asociación Mexicana de la Industria Automotriz, “Boletín de Prensa: Cifras De Noviembre Y Acumulado 2019”. Bulletins can be accessed online at http://www.amia.com.mx/descargarb.html
[4] Swiecky, Bernard and Maranger Menk, Debbie, Ibid.
[5] Swiecky, Bernard and Maranger Menk, Debbie, p. 26-7.
Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018).
