THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 2004 (Redacted version)

The Hearing was held at 9:00 a.m. in Room N-4437 in the Frances Perkins Building, 200 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Lewis Karesh, Acting Secretary, NAO, presiding.

NAO:

LEWIS KARESH, Acting Secretary, NAO
GABRIELLA RIGG
CARLOS QUINTANA
CHANTENIA GAY

WITNESSES:

NILAY VORA -- USAS
BOB JEFFCOTT -- MSN
SALVADOR GARCIA SANCHEZ -- Former Worker, Tarrant Mexico
MARIBEL RAMIREZ TORRES -- Former Worker, Tarrant Mexico
SCOTT NOVA -- WRC
SHAILA BALDERAS TOLEDO -- CAT
BLANCA VELAZQUEZ DIAZ -- CAT
ALEJANDRA CONSTANZA -- Human and Labor Rights Attorney
BENJAMIN COKELET -- Liaison to CAT

Nilay Vora, USAS

Bob Jeffcott, MSN

Salvador Garcia Sanchez, (Former Worker, Tarrant Mexico)

Maribel Ramirez Torres, (Former Worker, Tarrant Mexico)

Scott Nova, WRC

Shaila Balderas Toledo, CAT

Blanca Velazquez Diaz, CAT

Alejandra Constanza Ancheita Pagaza, Human and Labor Rights Attorney

Benjamin Cokelet, Liasion to CAT

(9:15 a.m.)

SECRETARY KARESH: Good morning. We’re going to try to get started if everyone wants to take their seats. Thank you for being with us this morning. My name is Lewis Karesh. I’m the Acting Secretary of the U.S. National Administrative Office and I’ll be conducting today’s hearing with my colleagues. I’m accompanied by Carlos Quintana from the Office of the Solicitor, and Gabriella Rigg and Chantenia Gay from the Administrative Office.

For interpretation purposes, headsets are available in the back of the room. You’ll also find copies of documents pertaining to the hearing in the back of the room and please feel free to take one of those copies. I’m told that as far as interpretation, English is on Channel 4 and Spanish Channel 5.

This hearing is being conducted in accordance with the procedural guidelines issued by the U.S. National Administrative Office pursuant to Article 16 of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. Procedural guidelines were duly published in the Federal Register on December 30th, 1993 and were subsequently revised and published again in the Federal Register on April 7th, 1994. Notice of today’s hearing was published in the Federal Register on March 2nd, 2004.

The purpose of today’s hearing is to gather relevant information that will assist the U.S. National Administrative Office in preparing a public report with respect to U.S. Submission 2003-01. U.S. Submission 2003-01 was filed with the NAO on September 30th, 2003 by the U.S. based United Students Against Sweat Shops, the Mexico based Centro de Apoyo al Trabajador, and was later joined by the Canadian based Maquila Solidarity Network.

The US NAO accepted the submission for review on February 5th, 2004, notice of which was duly published in the Federal Register. The review of the submission is intended to further the objectives of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation as set out in Article 1, which include improving working conditions and living standards in each party’s territory, promoting to the maximum extent possible the labor principles set out in Annex 1 of the agreement, among them freedom of association and the protection of the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, minimum employment standards and prevention of occupational injuries and illnesses.

Providing compliance with an effective enforcement by each party of its labor laws and fostering transparency in the administration of labor law. Submission raises issues concerning protection of the right to freedom of association and protection of the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, occupational safety and health and minimum employment standards, among others, minimum wage and overtime pay requirements.

The Submission also raises issues concerning access for workers to fair, equitable and transparent labor tribunal proceedings and asserts that the allegations represent an overall and persistent pattern of non-enforcement of labor laws. The Submission alleges that the Mexican government has failed to fulfill its obligations with respect to NAALC principles 1, 2, 6 and 9. The Submission also alleges the failure of the Mexican Government to fulfill its obligations with respect to NAALC Articles 4 and 5 regarding access to workers for fair, equitable and transparent labor tribunal proceedings.

The objective of today’s hearing is to gather information to assist the NAO to better understand and publicly report on the Government of Mexico’s promotion of and compliance with its labor laws and whether it has taken appropriate government action to do so. The purpose of this hearing is not to adjudicate individual rights and therefore, it is not an adversarial proceeding. As such, the rules of evidence are not in effect and there will be no direct or cross examination of witnesses. The hearing format is intended simply as a means providing the public with an opportunity to present information relevant to our review of the submission.

I’ll be the only person questioning witnesses today. In accordance with the procedures established by the NAO, witnessed filed timely requests to testify and provide the NAO with summaries or outlines of their testimony. Submitted testimony has to be reviewed by the NAO. Therefore, I would ask witnesses to please supplement their written testimony rather than just rereading it for the record. I will permit 10 to 15 minute presentations by each witness unless I deem it appropriate to extend the time and IU would ask that you please keep to your allotted time so that all witnesses will have ample opportunity to make their presentations today.

These oral presentations and written statements will be entered into the record and will be considered by the NAO in the formulation of its public report. Pursuant to the NAO’s procedural guidelines, the hearing record and documents therein will be made available to the public. I will call a recess when I think it’s appropriate, most likely midway through our morning session and then we’ll take a lunch break. I ask you to cooperate with times when they’re announced and be back in your seats so that the hearing is ready to resume after any recess.

Should any of you experience trouble with your interpretation receivers, please tell a technician or a member of the Department of Labor staff and they’ll be happy to assist you in fixing it or getting a new receiver. To make life simpler for the interpreters and to allow accurate transcription of our proceedings, I’d ask that everyone try to speak clearly and slowly. Don’t follow my example. ]

We’re now ready to proceed with the first panel. The first panel includes Nilay Vora of the United Students Against Sweat Shops and Bob Jeffcott of the Maquiladora Solidarity Network. I’d ask everyone here today before you start your presentation if you would please identify yourselves for the record. Mr. Vora?

MR. VORA: To introduce myself, I’d like to say that I’m a graduating senior at the University of Southern California majoring in math and human rights. I became involved in United Students Against Sweat Shops about two years ago. Although I started out as pre-med, I’ve always had a great interest in math -- or in law and human rights and I wrote a paper about the NAALC and that NAO process as a process to remedy human rights violations that occurred as a result of increased free trade.

When the United Students Against Sweat Shops brought my attention to the Matamoros garment case, and where the workers were fired and the union was denied, I brought up the idea that we should write this complaint. When a critical mass developed, we wrote the complaint and I was honored to be involved in such a dedicated voluntary effort. With USAS I’ve traveled to the Dominican Republic, to Sri Lanka and to India where I’ve met with workers who worked in export processing zones.

One thing has struck me throughout all of my delegations, while taking testimony from workers how young they are. In Mexico and the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka and India, the story remains the same; young women and men that are trapped in abusive work environments with little opportunity for improvement. My parents are immigrants from India and they left India under the impression that they had little economic opportunity there for success.

They came here with admission to graduate schools and through extremely hard work and a good start and a lot of luck, they’ve made a great life for themselves and our family. They’ve also given me excellent opportunities for which I am grateful but I’ll never forget that I shouldn’t take these opportunities for granted and that is why I’m here to testify today. Too many young people in the world will never be provided with these opportunities. There are too many young people who are robbed of their culture, robbed of their youth, robbed of their education.

This is why United Students Against Sweat Shops wrote this complaint. We came to the United States National Administrative Office and the Canadian National Administrative Office only as a last resort. Having exhausted all local remedies available to the workers, through the Mexican Government’s legal process, we were forced to seek international intervention. This case covers several recent cases in Mexico. The cases mentioned are Kukdong, Matamoros Garment, and Tarrant, factories in Puebla, Mexico. These factories saw violations of Principle 1, the right to freedom of association, Principle 2, the right to a collective bargaining process, Principle 6, obligation to enforce minimum employment standards and Principle 9, the obligation to prevent occupational injuries and illnesses. The failure of the Mexican Government to enforce Mexico’s Federal Labor Law is a key complaint that USAS hopes to address in this process.

In the past, United Students Against Sweat Shops has addressed labor rights violations by putting pressure on factory management and brands and the administration of the schools which are placing orders in the given factories. This system has worked reasonably well and we have had a positive effect upon factory conditions while maintaining the placement of orders in factories to insure their economic livelihood. In the case of Matamoros garment and Tarrant the pressure that we have placed upon factory management and brands has yielded precious little result. When pressured by brands themselves upon factory management failed, United Students Against Sweat Shops relied upon the Mexican Government to fulfill their obligation to enforce their own laws and provide justice through official means. The Mexican Government has abducted its responsibility in the cases of Matamoros garment and Tarrant de Ajalpan.

Indeed they have condoned illegal behavior failing to act even when they observed first-hand workers paid wages below the legally required minimum wages and failing to conduct fair and impartial registration and appeals processes. The obligation of the Mexican Government to enforce its own laws comes from the Mexican Constitution, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation but most importantly, from a common sense understanding of how a government is supposed to function. When the Mexican Government fails to administer its own laws, justice it being denied from the very system that is in place to insure its existence.

The complaint is an attempt by United Students Against Sweat Shops, the Maquila Solidarity Network and the Centro de Apoyo al Trabajador and workers at these factories to force an investigation into Mexico’s failure to enforce its own laws. Until the Mexican Government enforces its own laws, it cannot claim to be responsible for the livelihood of its citizens. I sincerely hope for Mexico’s sake as well as for the workers, that the barriers to effective law enforcement and justice are properly cleared as a result of recommendations made by the United States Secretary of Labor to the Mexican Minister of Labor.

With these goals in mind, we the Petitioners hope that the National Administrative Office and the United States Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chow (ph) will offer the following recommendations to the Mexican Government. First, that the Secretary of Labor’s recommendations remind the Mexican Government of its obligations with respect to its own national laws and the principles stated in the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. Second, that I recommend that all federal and specifically the Puebla Local Labor Boards publicly disclose registros and collective bargaining agreements and also that they grant registros in a transparent manner and in strict accordance with Mexico’s federal labor law.

Third, that I recommend the establishment of a tri-national oversight committee composed of labor rights experts with the power to investigate and issue reports regarding allegations of violations of the first three principles of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, namely freedom of association and protection of the right to organize, the right to collectively bargain and the right to strike and specifically, denial of registros, use of black lists and denial of secret ballot votes in their quento (ph) elections. Fourth, that I recommend the holding of a public cooperative activity in Puebla on the theme of freedom of association and specifically the right of a union to receive its registros under federal labor law with the participation of the governor, the local labor board and the organizations that have presented the submission.

Additionally, we seek the assistance of the United States Secretary of Labor in insuring that the issues in this submission are subject to review by an evaluation committee of experts, namely those with relation to safety and health, forced labor, and minimum wages be reviewed by such a committee. We sincerely feel that these recommendations and actions will strengthen Mexico’s ability to enforce its own labor laws and to insure adequate oversight, to investigate and hopefully deter any possible future derogations from justice. We look forward to working with the Mexican Government in order to insure that justice is provided to its hardworking citizens.

Thank you.

SECRETARY KARESH: Thank you, Mr. Vora. Mr. Jeffcott.

MR. JEFFCOTT: My name is Bob Jeffcott and I work as a policy analyst with the Canadian Maquila Solidarity Network. I’d also first like to thank the NAO for the opportunity to testify at these hearings today on behalf of the Maquila Solidarity Network. The Network is a network of 400 organizations and individuals across Canada. We were founded shortly after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and 2004 is our tenth year of advocating for the rights of Maquiladora workers in Mexico and in other countries as well.

MSN is also the secretariat for a coalition of labor, faith, non-governmental organizations, overseas development organizations called the ethical trading action group which is Canada’s anti-sweat shop coalition. Since 1994 MSN has been involved in a number of campaigns in support of Mexican Maquiladora workers’ rights. These include the Itapsa case in 1997, Han Young, in 1997/’98, Custom Trim Auto Trim in 1999, Duro-Bag in 2000/2001, Kukdong in 2001 and 2002, Alcoa in 2002, Matamoros Garment in 2003 and Tarrant in 2003/2004. Through our involvement in these solidarity campaigns we have witnessed a systematic pattern of violations of Mexican workers’ rights particularly the right to freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively.

We’ve also witnessed the failure of the Mexican governmental institutions to enforce national labor legislation and a pattern of improper and bias decisions by Mexican labor tribunals. As you know, many of these cases have come before the NAO. Yet, despite serious concerns being raised at ministerial consultations, very little has changed in the past 10 years. The 2000 election of President Vicente Fox raised hopes that democratic, federal elections would open up the door to democratization of Mexican society and particularly democratization of the country’s industrial relations system.

When the newly elected president visited Canada, shortly after his election, the Globe and Mail published an opinion piece that was authored by Linda Yantz, who is the coordinator of the Maquila Solidarity Network, and that opinion piece was titled “Mr. Fox, does Mexican Democracy include workers”. The article pointed to the Han Young, Custom Trim and Duro cases as examples of the failure of the Mexican governmental institutions to enforce that country’s labor legislation.

The article concluded whether a Mexican democracy will include Mexican workers depends to a great extent on the willingness of Mr. Fox to challenge the mechanisms of social control created by the old ruling party and the monopoly of power of corrupt official unions.

At that time President Fox promised that the right of workers to be represented by unions of their choice through secret ballot votes and union representation elections would be guaranteed in upcoming reforms to the federal labor law. However, as many legal experts have pointed out, Mexican workers should not and do not have to wait for new labor laws some time in the indefinite future, legislation that may or may not provide improved protections for workers. Nothing prevents the Mexican Government from acting today to insure fair, impartial rulings by labor tribunals, democratic secret ballot votes in union representation elections and the publication of union registrations and collective bargaining agreements.

In 2001 and 2002 MSN and the Human and Labor Rights Commission of the Tehuacan Valley carried out joint research on the blue jeans manufacturing industry in that region and also on working conditions and labor practices in jean assembly plants and laundries. Our visits to Tehuacan and other communities in the State of Puebla and worker interviews carried out by the Commission have convinced us that the events described in the testimonies you’ll hear today and the written submissions are not isolated incidents. Protection contracts negotiated by official unions without worker knowledge or participation are the norm rather than the exception in Puebla’s garment industry.

Workers do not have access to these agreements and in many cases they’re not aware that represented by a union. The role of the official unions in local and state conciliation and arbitration boards is an institutionalized barrier to fair, equitable and transparent labor boards and processes, nor are these practices isolated in the State of Puebla as we have seen from the other cases I’ve mentioned above. I should mention at this time that the director of the Human and Labor Rights Commission of the Tehuacan Valley was recently assaulted by an unknown assailant. This happened on December 30th and since then has actually received death threats as well.

And his organization, the Commission, has made a formal complaint to the local authorities but this assault occurred outside of his office. It occurred not that long after his organization had been providing support and advice to workers employed by Tarrant in the Tehuacan area as well as to other local maquilas. This at least, I think, gives a sense of the kind of atmosphere and the problems faced by local NGOs and human rights groups when they advocate on behalf of workers’ legal rights.

In 2001 MSN also joined with the Worker’s Support Center, CAT, USAS and a number of other labor rights groups in the U.S. and Europe in an international campaign in support of workers at the Kukdong factory which was later renamed MexMode in Adlesco (ph) Pubela. After a long and difficult struggle local organizing combined with international solidarity on -- and pressure on brand name buyers was successful in achieving employer acceptance of the independent union or of an independent union.

However, it’s worth noting that the Pubela Conciliation Arbitration Board initially rejected the workers’ first application for union registration and only approved a second application in the name of a different union after the employer had recognized and accepted the independent union. The precedence set at Kukdong, MexMode, raised hopes that there would be changes in how state authorities and conciliation and arbitration boards responded to worker applications for registration of independent unions. Unfortunately that has proved not to be the case. The CAB’s response to subsequent applications for the registration of independent unions at Matamoros garment and Tarrant confirm that despite this important precedent, very little has changed. The Conciliation and Arbitration Boards continue to block workers’ legitimate and legal attempts to be represented by the union of their choice and the state and federal governments turn a blind eye to these practices.

We will hear more about these recent cases later on today. Given the Maquila Solidarity Network’s 10-year history promoting respect for Maquila workers’ rights, we are extremely concerned about recent violations of workers’ rights in Puebla’s garment industry and the failure of the Mexican Government to insure that its labor laws are in force. As a Canadian network we are also concerned about how the lack of labor standards enforcement in Mexico impacts on Canadian workers.

It’s worth noting that the Canadian apparel manufacturer, Peter Nygard, is an important shareholder in Tarrant. While Nygard’s employees in Canada have been able to make use of legal processes to gain recognition of their union, Tarrant workers in Mexico are denied that same right because of the lack of labor standards enforcement by our NAFTA partner.

In addition, the Canadian retailer Licensa and it’s CEO and President are major shareholders in Wet Seal, which has been sourcing from Tarrant’s Puebla factories. As you listen to the testimonies today, I would urge you to view them as part of a pattern of practices that are not isolated to one city, region or state of Mexico. While these testimonies focus on specific incidents that took place in three factories in the State of Puebla, they are symptomatic of general -- the general failure of the Mexican governmental institutions to insure respect for workers’ fundamental rights.

Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to discuss these important issues with you today. I urge you to take appropriate action to insure that the Mexican Government fulfills its obligations under the North American agreement on labor cooperation and I would like to lastly just express the Maquila Solidarity Network’s support for the recommendations that were put forward by my colleague from USAS. Thank you.

SECRETARY KARESH: Thank you, Mr. Jeffcott, Mr. Vora. I’m interested in talking with both of you a little bit more about an issue that both of you brought up about patterns and that this isn’t just in Puebla or just in these two particular companies but it’s other companies in Puebla as well as other regions in Mexico and you mentioned a couple of the cases which we’re familiar with but maybe we can talk a little bit more about others. But before we kind of have that general discussion, let me ask a couple of specific questions.

You talked about -- and either of you can answer these and feel free if you have a response. You talked about the idea of public disclosure of union registrations. Let me ask you a couple things about that. One, whether you are aware of this list that the Mexican Labor Department has prepared and I believe is on its website and if so, you know, if you’ve looked at that, what your view of that is and whether that’s of any help. And then the second part of that would be what type of information and how should that be made available to the public would you think would be the most beneficial and what is it that workers would need to know and who should make that information available, what your views on that might be.

MR. JEFFCOTT: Well, maybe I can comment first. I mean, our experience has been that many times when we interviewed workers or actually when the Commission that I spoke of interviewed workers for the report that we did, the study that we did, many workers are not aware that they’re represented by a union at all and often times what happens is when workers attempt to organize a union, when they first protest conditions in a factory, that becomes the first time that they learn that they are supposedly represented by a union.

When they approach the management of the factory or union officials and ask for a copy of the collective agreement, they are told that they cannot have a copy of the collective agreement. In some cases workers are told that, “Go to management, they’ll give you a copy of the agreement”, and management says, “Go to the union, they’ll give you a copy of the agreement”, and sometimes they’re told, “Go to the Conciliation Arbitration Board, they’ll give you a copy of the agreement”, and none of these bodies are willing to give them copies of the collective agreement.

So in addition to the issue of registrations, there is the issue of collective agreements and the fact that workers don’t have access even to collective agreements. These agreements, in many cases in the State of Puebla are negotiated without worker participation, without worker knowledge and they become what we call protection contracts. In fact, the term usually used in Puebla for the unions is “protection unions” and for the contracts is “protection contracts”.

In some cases, these contracts are negotiated between an official union, one tied to the pre-party prior to the hiring of any workers, sometimes when very few workers have been hired, usually without the knowledge or participation of workers. So this becomes a fundamental problem because the cycle is one in which workers, in the process of processing bad working conditions find out that they’re represented by a union. Then, they, in many cases try to democratize that union, elect union officials democratically. When that fails, they attempt to form an independent union.

Then they, you know, run into the obstacle of the fact that they’re told that, “You already have a union, you should be dealing with the union that you have”. Then the go to the Conciliation Arbitration Boards. The Conciliation Arbitration Boards basically find pretext -- I wouldn’t even say technicalities because in many cases I don’t even think these are technicalities by Mexican labor law, and they find pretext to refuse the applications of the independent union.

When workers eventually do get a registration for an independent union, then they have to go through another process called a recuento, union representation election and in a recuento, often times they have to vote publicly in front of government officials, in front of official union officials and they are quite aware that if they vote the wrong way they will be fired and that has happened in many instances. Once case that I think was brought to your attention but was not taken up was the Duro-Bag case. So there are many of these instances.

And then -- and so for workers, first of all they need to know whether they have a union, they need to know what the collective bargaining agreement, if you can call it that, is. They need access to that and they also need to know, you know, whether there is a registration for a union in that particular factory. And in many cases it seems very strange, but in many cases it seems as if a union is suddenly discovered after workers attempt to organize an independent union, so there really, in my view is some suspicion about whether there really was a registration prior to the workers’ act of attempting to organize an independent union or that registration is, in effect, dormant. It’s -- there really is no union in that case.

So I think that the two things that would be extremely valuable for workers is one, to have access to information about whether or not there is a union in the factory, there is a union registration or more than one and secondly, what is the content of the collective bargaining agreement. This seems very basic. It seems like something every worker has a right to but in Mexico, in the State of Puebla in particular, this is not always the case.

In terms of how it would be made public, I think that, you know, the Conciliation and Arbitration Boards in themselves should be providing access to workers with that information. It should be something that’s on a website. I’m not as familiar with what is on the Mexican Government’s website currently but I know that workers in Puebla and in other states have a great deal of difficulty gaining that kind of information prior to attempting to organize.

SECRETARY KARESH: Thank you. Mr. Vora, did you want to add anything to that?

MR. VORA: I just wanted to say that I think the main reason that we were requesting this kind of action was because of exactly what Bob said, was the protection contracts with unions, you know, it seems really unfair for a worker to try to form a union and then discover suddenly that their union is already an affiliate of the CTM or the CROC and you know, this is particularly the case which you can ask the workers about during their testimony but you know, they find out that they’re under -- they already have a union that represents them, their interest supposedly and not only that but that their union has connections with the junta and then the question is, “Well, why is it that we have so much trouble with the junta then if our union is already well-connected with the local labor board”.

These are the kinds of questions that seem more obvious to ask and I think that the purpose of publicly disclosing exactly, you know, what the union is already and being able to easily find out what exactly your collective bargaining agreement is, is something that’s fundamental to any sort of labor law. And I think that additionally, that the vast spreading of protection contract unions is well-documented in academic literature.

SECRETARY KARESH: In this particular case with Matamoros Garment and Tarrant, was there an existing union at both of those facilities or just one? Do you know? And what was that union and was there -- and what was the affiliation of the Puebla Labor Board union member?

MR. VORA: I’m not particularly sure in both the cases. I know that in one of the cases there was a protection union and that it wasn’t just -- and I’m not sure exactly as far as the protection union’s affiliation to the local labor board, but I am aware that it was -- since it was a contract union, that is was -- that the factory management is also alleged to have ties to the ruling party in Puebla and since the factory management signed the exact same protection contract with the current union that they obviously had connections to the local labor board as well.

SECRETARY KARESH: I see some people indicating they think they know that answer, but we’ll come back to that and we’ll ask that of other panelists as well so we’ll have the opportunity to talk more about that.

You mentioned black listing of workers. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what you’ve seen in this particular case? Are there other places in Mexico in the sense of how that has worked or is that just a word of mouth or are there actually written lists of these kinds of things you’ve seen or what’s your experience with that?

MR. VORA: I’ve never actually worked with the people in Puebla so I have never seen anything but from what I -- what they have told me, which you can ask them about further yourselves, is that in fact, somebody has been pointed to a list and seen their name and usually what ends up happening, particular in the case with Tarrant was that they’ve seen signs that say, “If you’re from Tarrant you need not apply”, and things along the lines of, you know, when asking about previous employment whenever Tarrant come up, they’re immediately taken out of the employment possibility pool.

MR. JEFFCOTT: There are very few instances when people actually gain a copy of a black list, in other words, a list with names on it that show that companies are passing this information back and forth. But certainly there are, you know, antidotal evidence that workers, when they apply for jobs at other factories, and they tell them where they have worked previously, that they are not hired. We, in our research into this situation in the State of Puebla we also heard from workers allegations that there was even a list of workers who had moved from one factory to another often.

In other words, in the boom period, workers have the ability to move from one job to the other because there was a need for workers. There was a shortage of labor and therefore, what some companies put together was a list of -- apparently, this is reported by workers -- put together a list of workers who had left jobs often and that therefore, they were on kind of a black list as well. If that’s the case, then it means that even -- you know, there are lists even about things beyond the question of whether you’re attempting to organize a union.

But I think the important thing would be to talk to the workers themselves about what their experience is in attempting to find employment. It’s not uncommon that workers who are engaged -- in many of these cases, workers who are engaged in union organizing attempts find it extremely difficult to find work in the Maquila industry ever again. And in fact, one thing I think that’s quite interesting about Mexico is that many of the local groups, particularly in the border region that are labor rights advocacy groups, are made up of former Maquiladora workers who no longer can maquilas because basically they’ve found themselves on a black list for attempting to organize.

SECRETARY KARESH: What’s your awareness of those issues being brought before Minister of Labor officials or Labor Board officials and if they have been brought before them, what has been the response of those governmental agencies?

MR. VORA: I’m personally not aware of any instances in which that’s the case but I would imagine that’s incredibly hard to do because just as we’ve just discussed in the previous question, finding evidence of this is nearly impossible and it’s very difficult to obtain actually a list that has a series of names on it and then prove that these individuals have applied for employment and been denied.

SECRETARY KARESH: Yeah, but if there’s a sign that says no one from Tarrant need apply, I mean that would seem to me to be a pretty visible thing that could be pointed out to Labor Board officials. You don’t have any knowledge as to whether those kinds of issues, there’s been attempts to bring them before labor officials?

MR. VORA: Personally, I don’t but I’m sure that you can ask the workers or one of the other witnesses bound to testify.

SECRETARY KARESH: Mr. Vora, when you were talking about recommendations, you mentioned ECA and asking for an evaluation from experts and you mentioned several issues and I believe you said forced labor. Can you expand on that a little bit if that’s a specific principle under NAALC and carries with it some different meanings from some of the issues that have been raised in the Submissions. So I’m curious as to your use of that term and if you have specific information related to, you know, how that might be defined under the NAALC.

MR. VORA: My understanding of forced labor is under a use cogent or a custom under international law which would be a situation in which somebody is forced to conduct particular labor or forced labor in some cases would be the most extreme but in addition, forced labor has also been expanded to include things along the lines of being locked in a factory and not being allowed to leave and that’s the issue here.

The issue here is whether or not forced labor has for interpretation for international law is allowed to include the idea of being locked into a factory and forced to work for an entire eight -- an extra eight hours beyond the regular shift. That is clearly a denial of liberty and in my opinion, it’s widely accepted under international law to be a forced labor matter, you know, not perhaps in the egregiousness or in the same level of evil as slavery but it’s certainly accepted.

SECRETARY KARESH: Mr. Jeffcott, I believe you mentioned the Human Rights Commission. If you’re able, can you explain exactly what that commission is? Is it a governmental agency? Is it funded by the government? Is it independent? How is that set up?

MR. JEFFCOTT: Okay, the name of the commission is the Human and Labor Rights Commission of the Tehuacan Valley. It’s a non-governmental organization. It began as an indigenous rights organization and because much or many of the indigenous youth moved into the towns and the City of Tehuacan in order to work in the maquilas the began to put focus on that issue as well on the situation of the young indigenous workers in the factories in the Tehuacan.

SECRETARY KARESH: And it gets no support from the Mexican Government.

MR. JEFFCOTT: I don’t -- it may get some grant money for some of its educational work with indigenous communities. I’m not sure but in terms of its -- it is not a government organization. It’s a non-governmental organization.

SECRETARY KARESH: I just wanted to clarify. Have -- I know individuals from both your agencies have been in Mexico and have visited the facility and talked with workers. Have you two yourselves been down there?

MR. JEFFCOTT: Yes, I’ve been to Puebla, the State of Puebla a number of times, and I have been to Tehuacan quite a few times. My -- well, the coordinator of MSN is the person who does most of that work, but I have been there as well and I have talked to workers outside of factories. I have met with local civil society organizations, so, yes.

MR. VORA: I’ve never traveled personally to Puebla itself but I’ve worked in Mexico. And I just wanted to add, I just thought of something also, with regard to the forced labor. There’s -- you know, there’s a number of examples that have been adjudicated in the United States courts as well as far as the definition of forced labor is concerned under the Alien Torts Claims Act and particularly the one with Unical. That’s being adjudicated right now in federal courts. It’s currently in the Court of Appeals but Unical is under investigation for collaborating with Burma and Burma uses forced labor in the sense of grabbing individuals in villages and then forcing them to work and then releasing them and then again obtaining them and forcing them to work. So things along the lines of what has been happening in Mexico where they’re locked into factories and required to work, albeit, it is their normal employment, is certainly within that realm.

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, let me ask you, if you would, I know you had limited time in making your presentations, but both of you talked a little bit about how you’ve seen issues similar to the allegations made in this submission elsewhere in Mexico. And I wonder if either of you wanted to expand on that a little bit with any specifics in the sense of what labor boards we’re talking about? Was it the Federal Labor Board? Was it other state or local labor boards and what the issues were.

I mean, we’re familiar with the Duro-bag case as you mentioned, but if there’s other particulars and, you know, what the response was from those labor boards when similar issues came before them.

MR. JEFFCOTT: Well, I think you’re all aware of the Han Young case which is a case where there was also an attempt to form an independent union and there also was an NAO complaint in that particular case. And this is one -- this is a long time ago, so I don’t remember all the details, but there were a number of attempts by the workers to gain the independent union. They went to the Conciliation and Arbitration Board and in fact, when the hearing occurred that came out of the NAO process in Tijuana, there was actually a confrontation between the unions and the interpretation I received was that people from the official union literally attacked the members of the independent union right in the midst of the hearings.

So in that particular case, the union was not able to move beyond the case -- you know, beyond the step of applying for registration. There are cases in terms of the -- let’s see, well, the Altepexi case is one that’s well-known as well. That was the one that was heard by the Canadian Government as well as the US NAO, and that’s a case in which workers were literally beaten up inside the factory when they were -- you know, it was a vote and that was a vote for the representation, whether they were going to be represented by the CTM or by an independent union.

And so there was clearly a case in that situation in which the workers’ ability to democratically vote for the union of their choice was disrupted with the collaboration of the company and it was an official union in that case as well. So I mean, there are a number of cases as well. There’s Alcoa is another example in which workers attempted to gain representation by an independent union and that application was denied as well.

Those are the ones that come to mind for me.

MR. VORA: I just wanted to -- yeah, Alcoa was the only one that I’ve also --

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, well, thank you very much. I would ask you that if there is additional information that either of your organizations have, whether it’s in relation to these particular factories or if you’ve had individuals from your organizations who may have visited other areas in Mexico and have information you’d want to provide us, we’d be happy to receive that.

And I see that you both had written remarks, and if you would like to provide us a copy of those, we’ll enter it into the record as well. Thank you.

Okay, we’ll proceed to Panel 2 with Maribel Ramirez and Salvador Garcia. If you wanted to respond to any questions that were raised with the first panel, you’re welcome to do that or just go ahead and make your remarks, whatever you’d prefer.

MS. TORRES: Yes, this is something I had a personal experience about black listing. I went to Azteca (ph) company and there was a sign there saying, “If you come from Tarrant, you can not request any jobs here”. I just wanted to answer what you asked about black listing.

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ: (Through Interpreter) I am Salvador Garcia Sanchez. I am 28 years old. I’m single, no kids. I am a sewer. I work in the Puebla and since 2002 I heard about Tarrant and I started working there in April 2, 2002. They asked for my birth certificate, address certificate and my pink slip from the Social Security Administration. I submitted an application and I was taken to my work area.

I work on Area 2, line 6. I had already worked in other material companies that make trousers and, therefore, I was given a job. A woman hired me. Her name was Guadalupe and she asked me to sign a contract for an indefinite time. Three days later, I was given medical coverage and all the benefits except profit sharing.

The company was not very good ventilated. The chairs were not comfortable. We were very tired because we were sitting all day long. They allowed us to go to the bathroom but we were clocked on that and the bathrooms were very few and we had to stand in line. And they were not very well kept. And when we wanted to drink water, we were clocked on that issue as well. The water was very hot. When I entered in, my salary was 660 pesos and then when I started working more and produce 1,250 garments, I was paid 880 pesos.

When we didn’t produce enough, we had to stay overtime and we were not paid for that. And they said that if we were not stayed, we were not going to be paid for that week. They were threats but if you didn’t stay one day was discounted from your salary. Very few times we were paid overtime and we had to work during holidays as well. We worked 10 hours from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Friday but when the production was not up to par, we had to work on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays and we were not paid for that. They put pressure on us to work very fast and we had to produce high amount of garments. My job was very risky because we had cuts in our hands due to the machines we work with.

I was cut several times and the only thing that they did was to sent to see a nurse. And the only thing that she did was to wash the hand and give us a pill for the pain. We had to go back and keep on working and even if we were hurt, we had to keep up with production. They were not giving us safety equipment, cover for out mouth and the paint could not be removed. They didn’t give us any ear plugs as well.

When I was working there I got sick. I was allergic to moth and some other companies had some problems with the respiratory tract. We were given only half an hour to eat. We were more than 200 people their first shift and we didn’t have time to eat well. We had to go back to work still chewing the food and the food was not good at all. The company accepted people that were 15, 16 years old but everybody in that area needed to work and therefore, the under age go to work falsifying the birth certificate.

We had sexual threats and especially with young ladies. They -- these people caress them and many women were not very happy with this. When I started working there, I met some people that said that we had to have a union to defend the workers because with these we will be benefits not only in our working conditions but the amount of hours that we had to work, but when we tried to get together and submit something to the manager, they said, “If you do something like that, we will fire you”. I chose this work because we didn’t have any other work resources there and even if you are not very well trained, and I realize that my rights were being violated. I saw a lot of people working there during the say, at night, half the following day, and they were not paid overtime.

We were very tired due to all these violations and they didn’t give us the profit sharings and that was the straw that broke the camel back and we decided to go on strike in June to ask for this profit sharing. That stoppage was for three days and we had a coalition for workers to represent us. We went to this local board in Tehuacan to support this coalition. We also submitted a petition with all the complaints from the workers and this board call the company and the coalition. The legal representative from the company, Mr. {  } and {  } were there to try to reach an agreement with coalition. We had a petition and this was signed by everybody but none of the clauses included in that petition were complied with. And that’s why I was very disappointed, because I realized that the authorities were with the patron.

Therefore, we decided to set up an independent union and on July 12th, 2003 we met in Altepexi Puebla, more than 400 workers out of 1100 workers and after that, the people that did not attend said, “We would like to be part of that”, and they signed this petition. Therefore, we had more than 700 workers and the name was Single Union for the Workers of Tarrant.

In July 16th, 2003, the company starts firing the six most important leaders that were part of this committee. When we realized about this, the workers decided to stop work that specific day but the company threatened that we would be fired if we didn’t go back to work, therefore, we went back to work. July 28th, 2003, one newspaper published an article saying that Tarrant was going to fire more than 4500 workers from Ajalpan and Tehuacan and therefore, on August 4th, 2003, we decided to go from Ajalpan which is where the company is located, to the municipal palace in Tehuacan and with the local board. When the company realized who participated in that activities, the leaders were fired on August 7th, 2003.

That day we asked for the union to be registered before the local Conciliation and Arbitration Board in Puebla. After that, we went to Casa {  } and we talked to we talked to the {  } and he promised that he was going to give us his support. We talked to {  }, the President of the local Board, {  }, with the media and with somebody from the Labor Secretary of the City of Mexico and we also went to the Mexico City office of Tarrant and {  }.

We also contacted some of the companies that we made garments for but Levi’s was the only one that answered. They wanted to do something for us but they said that they would not complain with the Levi’s work which allows for the association. But we had somebody come in and check to see whether these violations were true or not. That group is called Verite. And they investigated or tried to see what happened inside the installations but we have not heard about the results.

The Center Portia Jores (ph) has been advised and I was hired August 12th along with 100 other workers that are part of this committee. Of course I was effected negatively. I come from Vera Cruz and I went to Tehuacan with my family five years ago trying to find a job because where I come from, we have no work whatsoever. Here in Tehuacan we have to pay rent, we all work, and when I was fired it was very hard because my family didn’t have enough money with what my father and my sisters brought.

We were fired unjustly. However, everything that we did was not useful because October 6th, 2003 all the members of the committee went to the board to see what our petition’s response was and we were surprised to hear that the union had not been accepted. This is what {  } said. He is the General Secretary of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board of Puebla. He gave us some arguments that something about the local law and the federal law and we asked for the decision of this board to be nullified and to acknowledge our union.

This we were effected because everybody that participated in this fight were very disappointed when the authorities were with the company and not with us and we -- and our rights were violated. It was very difficult. We had been without our salary for four months. It was very sad because we had a lot of single mothers. Some of them carried their kids to the meetings because they had nobody to leave them with and they had to ask for some money to be able to feed their kids and therefore, some of the workers wanted to leave. The company said, “You have to sign that you agreed to leave”, and they told us that due to us, the company was going to close down.

{  } said that we had to renounce of our request to have a union. They said, “If you don’t sign, you’re not going to get your money”, and they signed. They had been without a salary for many months, we had a lot of debts. I and two other people did not sign. After that in February the company closed down and fired more than 500 workers who were still working at the company. They gave them a minimum salary that was not what the law agreed upon. And it’s very difficult for me to get a job right now because we are part of a black list that has been distributed to other companies and they said that we are agitators because we request our rights. I have been out of a job for more than seven months and I’m very concerned that the government does not even hear of our complaints. We have no idea whom else to turn to, to be able to get some justice in this. We ask you to press Mr. {  } not to oppose the unions and talk to the local arbitration board in Puebla especially, {  }, President and the General Secretary, {  } not to be as corrupt and not to defend the company instead of defending us.

We ask all the companies that go and work in our country to respect the Mexican law, especially the freedom of association and to press the President of Mexico, {  } and {  }, the Social Security Administration, to respect the rights of all the workers in the country, to respect our right to organize and have a dignified salary and therefore, we can have a dignified live. Thank you very much.

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) I am Maribel Ramierz Torres. I’m 21 years old, single. I live in San Diego Chalma in Puebla State. I work in the final checking in the Maquila industry. I found out about this job through people who were already working at that company and I started working at the company on January 3rd, 2000 when its name was still Confecciones Jamil. I was asked for my birth certificate, proof of residence and my pink slip from IMSS.

I was hired by a secretary, {  } and she gave me a contract three days after I started working and all the benefits except for profit sharing with a salary of 600 pesos per week and eventually that went up to 750 pesos per week, because I was producing more. In the factory it was very hot because the air conditioning was not sufficient for such a large place. When we wanted to use the rest rooms, they would take our time, they would time us and we had very few rest rooms for so many workers.

The work load was excessive. I had to check 850 garments per day. This is work for two people because it involves checking and taking the threads out and the material was not in good condition and we had to rush to get the work done and all day we had to stand. And at the end of the day, I was very tired and I had a lot of pain in my feet and even today, I have problems with my legs. When we finished our production, we were forced to stay all night and if we went out before morning, there was no transportation and so we had to wait until there was public transportation, so we could go home. So we were working 26 consecutive hours without a break.

And in those work days there was sexual harassment of women. It never happened to me but it did happen to my coworkers and some of them would tell me sometimes that they would get called into the office and they would be told that if they stayed there with the men in the office, they would no longer have to work at night. And all these hours were unpaid. We were paid as if it had been a normal work day.

Overtime was also not paid. Salaries were at the minimum wage level even if we stayed day and night to work, it was always the same. We never got dinner and we never got a break. And it was very tiring work because it was all day long, all night and part of the morning of the next day. They would not allow us to go to the bathroom. If we wanted to drink water, we would get timed. We had a specific amount of time and if we went over, they would yell at us and we would have to stay later, even if we had finished all our work for that day. There was no consideration, even for pregnant women.

Because of all this abuse, there were accidents. On one occasion a coworker had a miscarriage because of excessive work. I was with her when she started feeling sick and the supervisors did not believe her. They told her that she could not leave yet because there was a lot of work to do. And then they saw that she started bleeding and that’s when they took her to a doctor. I don’t know where but when she came back she was no longer pregnant. It was a very ugly thing, very difficult because she could never say anything for fear of losing her job, especially because she was a single mother and she had a girl to support.

We had no protection, no dust masks, no ear plugs but we were forced to go to work because we have no other alternatives and if there are any, there are a lot of requirements that most of us cannot comply with. I realized that my worker’s rights were being violated when I was forced to start working nights without payment, even holidays, not respecting that these were not business days and that was for everyone. And that is why on June 10th, 2003, we decided to stop working, all the workers. We had been told that there would be no profit sharing as in previous years and this happened since the company was registered as Tarrant Mexico. This was starting in 2000.

When Tarrant came in, it made a commitment to respect seniority and profit sharing and that was something it did not fulfill. During the strike the company began to take reprisals against the workers who had stopped working. We were approximately 80 percent of the workers, so they said that they would not pay us for those works -- for those work days or profit sharing even if we spent entire weeks struggling for our human rights and workers’ rights, and we agreed then to form a coalition that would represent all the workers. This was six coworkers who agreed this and on July 8th, they went to the local Conciliation Board of Tehuacan and the Coalition and two representatives of the company met. These were {  } and {  }. She was the general administrator, general manager of the company.

An agreement was signed based on a list of our demands and the company made the commitment to satisfy all our demands, but the next day the company continued with the same attitude, violating our rights and it made us very angry to realize that the very local board was favoring the company and not us as workers. And this is why we decided to form an assembly and organize our union, so that we could protect ourselves as workers because we saw that we could not trust the authorities.

We saw that already our signed agreement had not been respected, so we organized our union on July 12th, 2003 and more than 400 workers out of 1,100 were there and they agreed that the members of the committee would be elected and most of the workers brought with them a copy of their ID from the company and their pink sheet from the IMSS, the Social Security Institute. They left us all their information, their full name, their fingerprints and their signature and the people who were not able to attend the assembly would find us later and give us their documents and their signature so they could be a part of the union, too. And then for this reason, the company starting firing the first members. The first six coworkers who had also become part of the committee. We were a total of more than 700 workers in the union and that’s why when we saw that the leaders were being fired, we tried to have another strike and we were asking for an explanation of why t these people had been fired, but instead of explaining it to us, they began to threaten us trying to get us to go back to our work area.

Otherwise they said they would fire all of us so we decided to return to our work, but the following day a report came out in the newspaper saying that Tarrant was going to fire more than 4,500 workers from the plants of Ajalpan and Tehuacan and that’s why on August 4th we decided to march from the company to the Municipal Palace of Ajalpan and of Tehuacan and to the local conciliation board. It was a distance of over 20 kilometers under hot sunlight and the warmest season in the region and this is how the company knew who the people were who were participating and we -- and they started firing the people, mainly the people from the committee.

It was over 50 people a day who were being fired. Then on August 7th we filed our papers for the union with the Board and after that we tried many ways to put pressure on the local board of the State of Puebla so that we could obtain the registration since we already had experience with the Board of Tehuacan that did not support the workers, we did not want to go through this again. And that is why we went to see the Governor, {  }. We demonstrated in front of Casa Aguero (ph) and we also talked to {  }, Secretary General of the local board.

We also went to demonstrate at the office -- the Tarrant office is in Mexico City and we also contacted the companies that had the brand names produced in our company. We had help from the CAT and also legal support from them so that we could file our registration and to start making our demands for reinstatement because by that time many had already been fired. I was one of the last members of the committee to be fired. I had been selected as the treasurer for the union by my colleagues.

On October 6th, we went to the local board and {  } told us that our registration had been rejected. He gave us some explanations which, when we were talking later to the lawyers we found out were reasons that the board had given but they were not valid because the federal law, labor law does not say that it has to be that way. The board said that we were missing a copy of the papers but they had not said anything about that. And the federal labor legislation says that they have to let us know if there’s anything missing before they issue their resolution.

So we all felt very discouraged because we had already been fired and the company did not want to reinstate us. That is why we thought that if we were able to succeed with this union then we could fight for our reinstatement and for me it’s very important to have a job because I pay the expenses for my younger sisters. I pay for their schooling because I don’t want them to have to stop going to school because of lack of money.

It’s for girls that I support and we need everything because we are orphans. I have to protect them and for those reasons we were fighting for our rights. And that is when the company starting putting more pressure on us to try to get us to leave and I was pressured several times. And when the company closed, {  } said to me and to my coworker {  }, that we should sign and be liquidated because we were their only headache before they could close the company.

Also on another occasion, I received a call from a lawyer from the company and she said she had my documents ready and that I should sign them. Now that the company is closed, it’s more difficult for us to deal with this situation. That is why we are asking that this type of injustice not be allowed any longer because companies come here and it is good that they give us jobs, but they try to profit at our expense. They try to take advantage of our needs because we have no other choice and then when we try to defend ourselves through the law, the government closes the doors on us because the government has given many advantages to the companies and then they say in their reports that there are jobs in the country.

I think that is useless to us. We did not get the registration for our union because it did not suit the companies for us to have an independent union in Tehuacan. It’s just not convenient for them. And the government wants companies to keep coming in and it will do anything to get them to come in, even violating people’s labor rights. In Tehuacan the water is very polluted because they wash the denim pants there. The Maquiladoras are our source of employment. That’s what feed us, but it is also killing us because it’s making us sick.

We’re running out of water and what little water we have left is polluted. So I ask that these injustices be resolved, that the government and the companies respect the right of free association and unions. I want them to stop breaking Mexican law. I want my right to work to be given back to me. All we want is to work but we also want to be treated in a dignified manner as we deserve as workers.

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, thank you. We have several questions. Be patient with us. First off, let me ask you about the existing union that there was. When did you find out that there was another union at your plant and once you found that out, did you as leaders in forming your own union, have discussions or conversations with them about taking any of your issues to management or to the labor authorities?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ: (Through Interpreter) When we asked for the union to be registered to the Conciliation Board, {  } told us that we already had a union that belonged to FROC-CROC but we never -- we have never heard of that union at the facilities. The quota was not taken from our salaries. Mr. {  } met with us in Puebla and they showed us a piece of paper and said, “You have a bargaining agreement”, but he didn’t let us read it.

That was the day that according to them, we belonged to a union called Syndicata Jovinal (ph) of the garment industry but we denied that because we had never heard of it before. Then another union sort of appeared, CTM, but this union never defended us. We don’t even know who the general secretary is.

SECRETARY KARESH: So in all the time that you were there and supposedly represented by this union, you never had dues taken out of your paychecks, never paid any dues to this union.

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Actually we had no union at least I had been working there for four years and we were never told that we had a union. The dues were never deducted or anything, so when we decided to make up our own union or we requested our independent union, all these unions started appearing. But we had never heard of them before. We didn’t even know that there was a union in that company.

SECRETARY KARESH: You mentioned a July 8th, 2003 agreement that had been signed between some of the workers and management and that also the junta officials had signed that or were aware of that document. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, what that process was, who were the workers that spoke to management and were involved in that and whether either of you were involved in that? And then you indicated that the next day really after that agreement, management started violating your rights again. I wonder if you could tell us exactly what you mean by that.

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Well, yes, the coalition was made up by six members. We were -- we chose them, the workers chose them so that they could represent us negotiate with the company some clauses to fulfill our requests. That day July 8th, we went to the Conciliation Board in Tehuacan. Ms. {  } was there and the representative of the company, {  } was there, too, but unfortunately, the clauses of our requests nothing was complied with. They violated all our petitions.

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes, that is true because when we went to the local board to sign that petition, the next day things remained the same because at least in my case, I was made to stay longer. We wanted to leave after the shift because the agreement had been signed because our rights had to be respected and the answer I got was, “I don’t care what that paper has. How do you believe a paper that is useless, not only for you but for my company”. That’s the answer that I got and that was the day after that was signed. I mean, our rights were violated, being violated the next day.

SECRETARY KARESH: What was the involvement of the junta officials? This appears to be a document that was worked out between this group of workers and management at the facility. How did the junta get involved and what did they do? I mean, were they mediators, you know, conciliators? How did they get involved in this document?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Well, Conciliation and Arbitration is in Tehuacan, but actually, they gave away all their responsibilities. They didn’t do anything for us. They did not punish the company for the violation and unfortunately, the authorities work with the companies. Even this guy in the Arbitration Board in Tehuacan, he used to go with the company to talk to the accountant and, you know, maybe they reach an agreement between the two of them but they didn’t respect our requests.

SECRETARY KARESH: Subsequent to this document being signed and the junta officials being aware of it, did the group of workers at any time go back to the junta and tell them, you know, “You were involved with this, you were aware of this but management is not living up to what it committed to do in the document?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Well, when we went from the company to Tehuacan, we asked the local board to know how they had supported us because they had reached an agreement with the workers and they did not put pressure on the company at all. The company did whatever they wanted to because we told them that they had sided with the company and not with the workers, and we told them that.

SECRETARY KARESH: It’s our understanding that at some point in this process your union sent letters to the Governor of Puebla and other governmental officials. Did you ever receive any reply to any of those letters that you’re aware of?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Well, we sent letters and we personally went to talk to the Governor. We, as representative of the committee on September 15th, we met with the Governor in Puebla and he promised that he was going to support our request for a union. We met with the President of the Board, {  } and they promised that they would support our request, but unfortunately October 6th we received the denial flat because they said that the union could not be formed because we had no experience in running a union.

But we went there to talk to the Governor but he didn’t give us any support.

SECRETARY KARESH: Did you receive any response from letters that were sent to the Mexican Labor Secretary, {  }? You’re both shaking your head no.

Did you or other officials or members in your union have any discussions with any local offices of the -- I think in English we call it the Attorney General’s office but in Mexico, {  } (ph)? Was there any local office that you may have spoken to that -- I understand in Mexico these offices are supposed to be established to assist workers in the defense of their labor rights.

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) I didn’t really understand what you meant with your question. Could you repeat it, please, or just make it more clear?

SECRETARY KARESH: Sure, my understanding in Mexico there are these offices called {  }, that there are both federal offices and local offices and that they are established to provide legal advice and assist workers in legal defense of their rights. What I’m wondering is whether you’re aware of any offices locally within the area where you worked or lived and whether you were ever able to meet or speak to any of those legal officials.

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) No. The only person that gave us support in Tehuacan is the CAT, the Center for Support of the Workers. Those are the only ones that approach us and has given us any sort of support. Nobody from the Becoro de Ria, we have no idea who they are and I don’t even know what they do.

SECRETARY KARESH: The Federal acronym is PROFEDT, Becoro de Ria Federal de la Defense del Travajo (ph). That’s the federal office. I don’t know if that is helpful. No? Okay, well, we can raise the same question with other panels. I see some people nodding their heads that they’re familiar with the office, so we can talk more about that later.

You raised several issues regarding overtime pay, force overtime, failure to pay profit sharing, safety and health issues, concerns about safety and health in the factory. Did the workers or did your union, your organization you attempted to make into a union, did you file any complaints with labor officials and if so, what were the response to those complaints?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Well, these complaints were submitted and the answer is that we had no support from anybody.

SECRETARY KARESH: Were there hearings on these cases or did you have the opportunity to go before the labor board and present your case and indicate, “We were not paid appropriate wages”, or “There are safety and health conditions that, you know, we’ve reported to the government and no action has taken place”?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Well, we requested that but we never got any sort of support from the official representative or from anybody.

SECRETARY KARESH: When you first were hired to work at the facility, did you have a written work contract? Was there any kind of written contract you had to sign or anything that you were given that explained what your pay was and what the work rules were and what the terms for your employment were?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes. We had a contract where it said how many hours we were supposed to work every day and what benefits we were given and that company was giving us work for an indefinite term. We didn’t have a due date to finish our work.

SECRETARY KARESH: The same situation for you, Mr. Garcia?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Yes, yeah, the contract said that we used -- should work nine hours a day, Monday through Friday, but it was never really respected because some times we worked 11, 12 hours and sometimes more and it did not agree with the agreement that we signed the day that we were hired.

SECRETARY KARESH: At the time of your dismissal, could you talk a little bit about that process, what the employer said to you, what reasons he gave you for the dismissal and what severance was offered, and what type of document it was that you had to sign in order to receive your severance payments?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Well, yes. I was called. They shouted at us and since I didn’t go, well, we argued with them and they called the policemen and they threw me out because we have -- we went to the office and I talked to the accountant and the human resources rep. They gave me a piece of paper that said I gave up my job willingly and they told me, “We don’t have any more work. This company is going to go bankrupt and therefore, I was going to be fired”, but that was a lie because we knew that we were producing a lot and they could not go bankrupt with that.

SECRETARY KARESH: You refused to sign that document at that time?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) No, because they offered me 50 percent what the law says, but I didn’t sign anything and I was thrown out.

SECRETARY KARESH: Did you ever take a severance, sign a document and take severance or did you file a complaint with the local labor board?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Yes, we submitted the request to the Conciliation Board and we asked to be reinstated, that was the case. We asked the company to reinstate me, but they never rehired me.

SECRETARY KARESH: And what’s the current status of that complaint before the Labor Board? Did the Labor Board ever have a hearing on that or make a ruling on your allegation that you were, you know, improperly dismissed?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) Well, our lawyer, Alejandra Ancheita, and she submitted the documents and maybe she’s more qualified to tell you, you know, where the case is because I really don’t know.

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, well, we’ll ask her later today. Ms. Ramirez, would you have a similar situation?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes, yeah, it was just like that when I was fired, they had a policeman carry me to the office and the officer told me, “We don’t have any work for you and therefore, you had to leave right away”, because I couldn’t even go back to pick up my sweater or anything, my purse and all effects. The policeman had to go there, pick up my things and they said, “You cannot step in this company any more. You’re going to have to leave right now”, without any sort of explanation.

I said, “Well, explain to me why you are firing me, what did I do, or why I’m not performing up to par”, and they said, “Well, they are orders that we receive from higher up”, whatever higher up means, you know, and I had to leave right away.

SECRETARY KARESH: With regard to some of the issues you raised on occupational safety and health, safety and health conditions in the facility, did either of you ever see government inspectors in the facility or get any information about that they had been there or -- and what they had found? Were they issued any reports on safety and health?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Well, the inspection was regarding the brand. For example, Levi, sometimes would send the reps to see how the workers were treated, but they called beforehand to the company, so because if they knew that they were coming, we -- they would put water, they would put soap and toilet paper in the bathroom. They would sweep, they would clean up and they would threaten us. We have to say exactly what was not happening there because if we didn’t lie, they would fire us.

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, did you ever see any Mexican Government or officials come into the facility to do any kind of inspections?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) No, no, we never saw anybody because they never knew what the conditions were there. They only way for them to know something is if we approached them and told them. Even though we asked, they never did anything.

SECRETARY KARESH: It’s our understanding that facilities in Mexico are required to have safety and health committees that include workers on them. Were you ever aware of the existence of such a committee in your facility?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) No, we don’t know of any committee or anything that was ever conducting any inspections in that facility. Nothing was ever done in that regard. Not even the government would go and do hygiene or safety inspections there. We never saw any representatives of anything like that for cleanliness or anything. We really don’t know of anything like that for these cases.

SECRETARY KARESH: There’s an allegation that there was an instance where workers were locked in the facility. I don’t know if this was at Tarrant or Matamoros Garment but if it was at Tarrant, are you aware of that situation and if so, can you tell us what occurred?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) No, when they didn’t want to let us out, what they did was just have the police officers there and they wouldn’t -- at the door and they wouldn’t let us out or the guards who were there, they simply wouldn’t let us out and they were actually guards from the company.

SECRETARY KARESH: Why was it that they wouldn’t let you out. I mean, was this because there was work to be done or because there was some other situation going on that they didn’t want the workers involved in?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) We always had the experience where they would force us to stay longer because there was always too much work to be done in that company and they would fill their production quotas but they would go over just so they could have more profits for themselves, I guess, because we never saw any overtime pay.

SECRETARY KARESH: This isn’t a single instance. You’re saying this is a regular occurrence and that there would be guards who were employees of the company who would prevent you from leaving. Is that correct?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes, that’s correct. The supervisor said that we had to stay and the guard would not let us out. He would close the door.

SECRETARY KARESH: Were there ever situations where there were officials of the government, be they police officers or some other type of guards that were government officials that prevented employees from leaving the facility?

MR. GARCIA SANCHEZ:(Through Interpreter) No. It was just the company. I don’t think the government was even aware of what was going on there or they were pretending not to realize what was going on there.

SECRETARY KARESH: You mentioned gloves and masks and other kind of protective equipment. Were you issued that kind of equipment and were you given any instruction as to whether you needed to wear it or whether it was optional?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) The dust mask we got was really not the right kind to work in those conditions. It was very light protection that was not really useful for the type of work we were doing, the type of things we were producing. We couldn’t even use it because all it did was make us sweat and wasn’t even helping at all and we never got gloves, at least we didn’t. I was always working just with my bare hands that they were always dyed blue because of this chemical that’s in the denim and we didn’t even have soap to wash our hands, and when we ate, we were actually eating this dye because our hands were completely dyed blue.

SECRETARY KARESH: There’s been allegations included in the Submission about underage workers. Were you aware of the hiring of workers who were underage and if so, to what extent?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes, there were minors, 15 years old, and of course, they knew they were underage because every time there was going to be an inspection, they had to hide these workers.

SECRETARY KARESH: Were workers required to provide a birth certificate or some other means of showing their age at the time of hiring?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) Yes, those birth certificates were fake. They would just increase their age on the document.

SECRETARY KARESH: You say that management was aware that some of the workers were underage because they would hide them. Who were they hiding them from? I mean, what kinds of visits or inspections are we talking about?

MS. RAMIREZ TORRES: (Through Interpreter) When the people from the brand name companies like Levi’s for example, they’re very strict in their request that they not hire minors, so when these people came to visit, they would have to send these workers somewhere else where they would not be seen.

SECRETARY KARESH: Okay, thank you very much. We’ll move to Panel 3.

Mr. Nova, please.

MR. NOVA: I’ll start again. Thanks very much for the opportunity to provide testimony on this important matter concerning implementation of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. I’m the Executive Director of an organization called the Worker Rights Consortium and I want to give you one quick moment of background as an explanation of why we have information to offer you with respect to this complaint.

The Worker Rights Consortium is a labor rights monitoring organization created by colleges and universities and representing 121 colleges and universities who license their names and logos to apparel companies who then produce and sell clothing with the colleges’ and universities’ names. All of these educational institutions have adopted codes of conduct that are designed to insure that the rights of workers are respected in any factory around the world engaged in the production of this university clothing.

Our organization exists for the purpose of assessing conditions in these factories and providing information to the colleges and universities and the public about those conditions so that colleges and universities can take whatever action is necessary to bring about full and faithful enforcement of their codes. In this particular case, the case of the factory Tarrant Ajalpan our organization received a complaint alleging a range of violations in the factory and as a result of that complaint, we conducted an intensive investigation in August of 2003 and produced a report the following month with respect to our conclusions concerning those issues having to do with freedom of association and allegations of illegal dismissals at the factor.

And we have also conducted in response to other complaints, three other investigations of apparel factories in Mexico and I’m going to comment to a lesser degree on those in particular the case of a factory that at the time we conducted our investigation was known as Kukdong and is now knows as MexMode.

The case of Tarrant Ajalpan is not only of course, the subject of the complaint but also an excellent starting point for gaining a sense of the problems with enforcement of federal labor law in Mexico because the case illustrates a number of the most significant ways in which Mexican labor is being flouted systematically today. While Tarrant Ajalpan has violated federal labor law in Mexico in a brazen fashion, the reality is that the actions the company has taken to deny workers’ rights to associate freely and the inadequate response on the part of Mexican authorities to these violations unfortunately reflect a widespread pattern in Mexican labor relations in the apparel industry.

I want to begin with a bit of background on Tarrant Ajalpan and I’ll try not to cover ground that’s already been covered. The complaint the WRC received made a number of allegations and our investigation concentrated -- the investigation of August 2003, on two related allegations; that the factory had taken actions that prevented workers from fully exercising their legally protected associational rights and that workers had been illegally dismissed from the factory for exercising their associational rights.

We also looked at several issues having to do with conditions inside the factory but I want to mostly focus on those two related issues. The WRC, in its investigation in 2003, interviewed 24 workers at Tarrant Ajalpan, the staff of the Labor Board in Tehuacan Puebla and a representative of Tarrant Ajalpan. And we focused first on the case of eight workers who were fired from the factory on the 16th of July after having -- as you’ve just heard, after representing workers at the factory in the negotiation of an agreement in the presence of the Tehuacan Labor Board with the management of Tarrant Ajalpan. Eight days after the conclusion of the agreement, the workers were dismissed and we looked at two questions; why were the workers dismissed and how were they dismissed?

Because it’s very important to bear in mind that in addition to protecting workers’ associational rights, the federal labor law in Mexico provides strong protections for workers from arbitrary dismissals of all kinds and in that sense, on paper, it’s fair to say that Mexican labor law is much stronger than U.S. labor law.

And I want to quote briefly from Article 48 of the Federal Labor Law which sets forth one of the two basic reasons for which a worker can be legally fired, for which the employment contract with an individual worker can be legally terminated in Mexico and that is for cause. And this article sets forth examples of the legitimate causes for which a worker can be dismissed, various kinds of misbehavior, absenteeism, et cetera and the article concludes by saying this: “The employer must inform the worker in writing of the date and cause or causes of the termination. This document must be brought to the attention of the worker and if he refuses to accept it, the employer within five days following the termination must bring it to the attention of the respective board.”

In other words, whenever a worker is dismissed for cause in a factory in Mexico, the employer, prior to the act of dismissal, must provide the worker with a written explanation of the cause. In the case of the eight workers fired on July 16th from Tarrant Ajalpan, there was no provision of written explanation of the reasons behind the termination and thus, we concluded on that basis alone these were illegal dismissals.

There was also very strong evidence that the dismissal of these eight workers was motivated by anti-union animus on the part of the factory, the most obvious point being that these were the eight workers who had represented other workers in protesting labor conditions and negotiating the agreement of July 8th. And it’s also important to note that in addition to providing protection for union rights, Mexican law also gives workers the right to form what the law calls coalitions, which is an informal organization of workers represented by leaders to advocate on behalf of workers’ interests and it’s quite clear that the eight leaders at Tarrant Ajalpan were, in fact, representing a coalition and thus, all of their activities, including the negotiation of the agreement of July 8th were protected activities under Mexican law.

So we concluded both that the workers were fired for an illegal reason which is to say the anti-union animus of Tarrant Ajalpan management, but also that the process through which they were fired was illegal. We then looked at roughly 150 terminations that took place in the month of August, a substantial portion of the Tarrant Ajalpan workforce, and based on extensive interviews with workers, based on our discussion with factory management, we reached the same two conclusions, vis-a-vis, those terminations as we did with respect to the initial eight terminations, which is that these workers were fired because they supported the union and one of the interesting pieces of evidence in support of that were -- was mutually corroborated testimony from a number or workers who were still working at Tarrant Ajalpan at that point in time that they had heard explicit statements from managers to the effect that the firings that were then underway were the fault of the union, were exactly what workers can expect to get when they support a union and similar comments.

We also concluded that again, the factory had failed to follow the requisite legal procedures for dismissing an employee and I want to focus on that point for one moment more. As the workers who testified on the previous panel noted, when they were called in to be dismissed, they were told -- they were not given a written explanation for why they were being fired; thus, the factory was violating the law. They were simply presented with a voluntary resignation agreement. And they were told, in effect, you can either sign this agreement and we will give you some money, or you cannot sign the agreement and you’re fired anyway and you will get nothing. And this is a common method used by employers in Mexico. It’s taking place in all four of the factories that we’ve investigated in depth for getting rid of workers who are engaged in independent union activities.

Because Mexican law does protect workers from being fired arbitrarily and because there are occasions when through great effort and pressure, the local labor boards will take action with respect to a particular illegal dismissal, and because increasingly factories in Mexico are subject to inspections by labor rights monitors employed by the buyers in U.S. and Europe who are the customers of these factories, the managers like to have in their files an explanation for what happened, that at least on its surface seems to be appropriate. And that is why factory managers like to have in their file when a worker is dismissed, a voluntary resignation agreement.

At one factory investigated, workers were actually asked to sign a voluntary resignation agreement on the day they were hired in the event that the factory should ever need to make use of this. In the case of Tarrant Ajalpan, the workers were asked to sign this voluntary resignation agreement at the time of their dismissal.

Now, of course, since the workers were being fired and being told that if they refuse to sign the voluntary agreement, they would get nothing and be fired anyway, the decision of some workers at Tarrant Ajalpan to sign the agreement so that they would, knowing that they would be fired anyway, at least leave with some money, is a coerced decision and it is the kind of coerced decision coerced agreement to resign and relinquish rights that is the primary tactic employed by managers who wish to dismiss workers engaged in independent unionism.

And we have yet to see in our four in-depth investigations a single instance of a local labor board despite the lodging of numerous complaints, a single instance of a local labor board taking action to achieve the reinstatement of a worker fired through this process. And in discussions with representatives of the local labor boards, there is also an unwillingness to acknowledge that there is anything inherently troubling about the employment of coercion to compel workers to sign voluntary resignation agreements. So it is not merely that the local labor boards do not take action to protect workers’ associational rights with respect, for example, to the granting of registros to independent unions, it is the fact that the local labor boards do not, in accordance with Mexican law, protect workers who are illegally terminated because they have sought registros because they had taken other actions in support of independent unionism.

In the case of Tarrant, the local labor board, as you’ve heard, did not, in fact, take action to correct the violations committed by the factory and of particular note, in dismissing a number of the complaints that some workers brought about these illegal dismissals, the labor board in Tehuacan cited the fact that some of these workers had accepted severance and resigned as creating a circumstance in which the workers no longer had standing to complain that they had relinquished their rights. And so you see the beauty of the method.

Managers coerce workers into signing voluntary resignation agreements. The local labor boards can then use the presence of these coerced agreements to justify a refusal to take appropriate action to bring about reinstatement and unfortunately this is a common pattern of collusion between factory managers and representatives of local labor boards.

SECRETARY KARESH: Let me interrupt you if you don’t mind.

MR. NOVA: Sure, please.

SECRETARY KARESH: Are workers given an opportunity before the board members or before the judges in court to assert that, in fact, they were coerced?

MR. NOVA: Workers can file a complaint after being terminated. But if the worker has already signed a voluntary resignation agreement, while the worker can make that representation to the labor board, I’ve never heard of a case in which the labor board responded by acknowledging the coerced nature of the resignation and acting in an appropriate fashion as a result. So the worker can lodge a complaint but the likelihood of success, I think it’s fair to say is minimal and of course, it’s also important to understand that in the moment when a worker has been brought into the human resources office and yelled at and threatened and told, “You’re out of here”, the worker is unlikely to either possess the knowledge or the moments for reflection that will be necessary to make a studied legal determination as to what the legal consequences might be or might not be of signing the document and, of course, this is why it works. Workers are being told, “You’re fired, you’re fired, you’re fired today, you’re going to have no income as of today. You can take several hundred dollars and at least have some money to support your family or you can refuse to sign this document and you’ll get nothing”. And for obvious reasons many workers sign under the circumstances and then those documents are used as a legal tool by the factory and by their contemporaries at the local labor boards to justify a failure to take action to reinstate workers.

SECRETARY KARESH: And in the case of Tarrant and Matamoros Garment, we know some of the workers have filed complaints. Have they -- has this idea of coercion in severance agreements been any part of any of those complaints?

MR. NOVA: I actually have to say just two points really quickly. In the case of Tarrant, I believe most of the complaints that were brought, were brought on behalf of workers who did no, in fact, resign but our investigation which focused on the events of July, August and September of 2003, did not include a focus on the subsequent legal process after that point in time. So unfortunately, I’m not in a position to offer you much useful information in response to that particular set of questions.

So let me not take too much more of your time but talk briefly about the case of Kukdong, which the Worker Rights Consortium investigated in-dept in the early part of 2001 after mass firings resulting from an effort by workers to protest conditions and assert their associational rights and in so doing to try to find some way to overcome the efforts of an existing union which in no way represented the workers’ rights or interests to prevent workers from taking any action that -- either that union or management viewed as problematic or difficult or troublesome.

And I want to talk about in the context of Kukdong, the process through with registros are granted and the process through which unions in Mexico come to legally represent workers at a factory and come to be in a position to negotiate a contract. In the case of Kukdong, we were trying to figure out it had gotten to a point in 2001 where workers were so angry and frustrated with the legally constituted union in the factory that they organized a massive strike and protest of that union’s refusal to represent them and in protest of certain conditions in the factory that that union was tolerating and I think it is unfortunately richly symbolic of the situation in Mexico that when that strike was broken up outside the factory by local police, and state police, that according to credible worker testimony, the person leading the charge for the police who beat many of the workers, 17 of whom needed medical treatment, the person leading the charge was the head of the state union, the FROC-CROC that, in fact, in theory represented workers at the factory.

So it was the workers’ own legally constituted union, the leader of this legally constituted union, that led the violent assault upon them and their expulsion from the factory grounds. So we looked in-depth at how the FROC-CROC came to represent the workers at Kukdong. And we conducted extensive interviews of the local labor board in Quaplia, the leadership of the FROC-CROC and the management of the factory to discuss the process through which the CROC came to hold the title that is to say came to have the right to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement on behalf of the workers at Kukdong.

What was very interesting was that those three parties gave us three entirely different and mutually contradictory stories as to how the FROC-CROC came to be in this position. The junta locale (ph) claimed that it happened because the FROC-CROC has been able to present factory management with credible evidence that they in fact, represented a substantial number of workers at the factory and on the basis of that evidence, the factory would be able to negotiate a contract with them.

The FROC-CROC leadership claimed that, in fact, management had refused to negotiate a contract with them and they had, therefore, filed a strike notice which under Mexican law, unions may do if management refuses to negotiate a contract. The management of the factory said no, there had not been a strike notice and there had never been evidence presented that the CROC represented a substantial portion of the workers, that the factory had simply chosen to negotiate with the CROC because they were a far-known company with limited experience in Mexico and they were told that that was what you do when you open a factory. We received testimony from a large number of workers at Kukdong that the vast majority of the workers did not even know that they had a union until about six months into their term of employment and we were unable to find an individual worker who was not a union delegate who stated in confidential testimony that they did, in fact, support FROC-CROC as their representative.

It became quite clear that not only had the legal procedures of the establishment been violated in the case of the FROC-CROC in Kukdong but that to the day of the events of the strike, that the FROC-CROC had made no successful attempt to actually win the support of any of the workers inside the factory. Instead the FROC-CROC had signed a collective bargaining agreement which contained no benefits, privileges or rights beyond those mandated by Mexican federal labor law, which is a typical contract in a Mexican factory or workers represented by the FROC-CROC or the CTM or one of the other corporatist unions.

Just two more quick points; the workers at Kukdong had never seen their contract and this is a phenomenon that we’ve witnessed at several factories, where workers may work for a period of years under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement, which management commonly cites as a justification for certain disciplinary actions, certain actions with respect to paying benefits without ever having actually laid eyes on the document and workers will go to their union leadership who will refuse to supply it. Workers will then go to the local labor board who will say, “Well, we can’t give it to you because that’s the job of your union leadership”. Nor will management assist workers in finding the contract.

In the case of one factory we investigated in the state of Qualpila, the name which I don’t want to mention because we haven’t published a report yet, but we will supply that information to you later, we were able to obtain a copy of the contract after a long discussion with the local labor board, and therefore, we were able to provide the workers, for the first time after having worked under the contract for nearly five years, with a copy of the document that defined all of the rules under which they were working and I think the inability of workers even to see the contract under which they were working says a great deal about the actual nature of representation that is done by unions like the FROC-CROC and the CTM.

The process of registros, you’ve heard testimony about. I don’t want to cover that same ground again except to say that we have seen in multiple cases, in addition to Tarrant, exactly the process that occurred at Tarrant where workers will file clearly legitimate petition in what is supposed to be a pro forma process that will be denied on the basis of pretexts on the last possible day under the law on which the junta locale can respond.

And one point I want to note is there are specific provisions of Mexican federal labor law that require the local labor boards when a petition of any kind is submitted, to assist the petitioning party with a correction of any technical problems in the petition. So, in fact, in all of these cases, most prominently in Tarrant by refusing to correct the technical problems that become the junta locale’s pretext for denying the registros, the junta locale is, in fact, breaking the law. And I want to mention only a couple of issues not related to freedom of association.

We did a document in the case of Tarrant illegal forced overtime beyond the three hours per day and nine hours per week that are allowed under Mexican law and we have not investigated a factory in Mexico where there was not to some degree illegal forced overtime. We also have seen, although we did not look at this at Tarrant, significant violations of minimum wage law in the apparel industry. Usually in that Mexican minimum wage law sets not just a general minimum wage, but higher minimums for various professions. And commonly we have seen workers who should be earning the higher minimum that the law provides to people who work on sewing lines in an apparel factory that many of these workers are not, in fact, receiving the higher minimum, either because the factory isn’t paying it to anyone or because the factory is arbitrarily classifying some sewing machine operators into other job classifications so as to avoid paying the wage.

And finally, we have -- you talked briefly before about the issue of health and safety committees. In the factories we have investigated in-depth and also in others that we’ve looked at less in -depth, we have yet to see an actual functioning health and safety committee which is doing the work that a health and safety committee is supposed to do. All we’ve seen is either nothing in place or health and safety committees that are obviously going through the motions and not doing any of the real work that legally their obligated to do. So I will conclude there and answer any questions you may have.

SECRETARY KARESH: Thank you, Mr. Nova. What does the Mexican labor law say about a worker’s right to a copy of the collective bargaining agreement?

MR. NOVA: Well, there isn’t any specific stipulation to this effect but it is assumed that as members of a legally constituted union that is negotiating a collective bargaining agreement on behalf of workers, that workers would have a right to know whether the actions the union is taking on their behalf area actually representing their interest. And Mexican -- and I would cite with respect to this, the very definition of a union under Mexican law and I may or may not have this but if I don’t, I’ll do my best to paraphrase for you -- I think I don’t but the law very explicitly says that a union is an entity that exists for the purpose of advancing the interests of workers. So any action that is taken by a union and certainly any systematic action, and that is countenanced and tolerated by local government officials, is an illegal act and certainly the act of denying workers the right to see their own collective bargaining agreement and particularly one that on its face does not appear to be an agreement that serves the workers’ interests would seem to me to be quite clearly a violation of the spirit at least of that article.

SECRETARY KARESH: What is you experience in Mexico with workers ever voting on a collective bargaining agreement, approving a collective bargaining agreement?

MR. NOVA: I’m not aware of the process occurring, not at any of the factories that we’ve seen. We are familiar with some elections that have been held, very few, but some where one union is challenging the other’s right to be the bargaining representative, but we aren’t aware of actual democratic ratification of labor agreements. In the case of the factory in Quapila, we were able to get very detailed testimony about the process of union formation because unlike the case of Kukdong, the union did not form until after the factory had been open and operating for a number of years and what was particularly important in our view about that testimony was that it credibly described a process in which factory management and the representatives of the union in this case the CTM, were working in tandem and in fact, it was the factory that announced to workers they should meet their new union president, who they had never laid eyes on before.

And so with collective bargaining agreements but more generally with respect to the simple fact of union representation, it is hard to find examples of democratic procedures. The cases where we’ve seen democratic procedures have been in Kukdong and in Tarrant and in other factories where there’s been an actual attempt to organize an independent union and as you’ve heard, those have generally been met with illegal refusal to acknowledge the rights of those independent unions in the cases where they have come forward.

And it’s interesting to think about the contrast between what happened to the workers at Tarrant where 700 workers had clearly expressed their belief that the SUITTAR union represented their interests and that they wanted to be represented by this union, the treatment that they received and the response that they got to their legal filings from the junta locale and the response that the CTM union that this factory in Northern Mexico that the FROC-CROC at Kukdong had received when they had failed to establish in any way that they represented workers’ interests and the workers wanted to be represented by them but had no trouble whatsoever negotiating legal ins and outs of becoming the collective bargaining representative and, in fact, were receiving the protection of the local labor boards in both cases.

SECRETARY KARESH: How many workers were there total?

MR. NOVA: About 1,000.

SECRETARY KARESH: In your experience, you indicated that you had come across many situations where unions existed but the workers were not really aware of it or at the very least, not many of the workers were aware of it. In those instances, did workers have dues being deducted?

MR. NOVA: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Generally, yes, because that, of course, is how these unions generate income. In some cases we’ve seen not only dues being deducted by unions that aren’t acting on workers’ behalf but other funds being taken out. A common one is a deduction for funeral expenses that is supposed to create a fund for to pay for funerals of the family members of workers, except that the funds are never available when a worker actually seeks to pay for a funeral and we assume that those funds end up in the same coffers as the union dues.

In the case of Tarrant, there were not dues being collected and there may, in fact, have been a union. I mean, one of the interesting things about the Tarrant case is it remains a mystery to this day whether or not, in fact, there ever was a legally constituted union at Tarrant prior to the factory’s closure and as I think you’ve heard, in talking to the different labor boards that had jurisdiction, specifically the Tehuacan Labor Board and the Puebla Labor Board, people got two different stories as to whether in fact there had or hadn’t been a union. So we -- in general, we’ve seen cases where dues are, in fact, being deducted but in the Tarrant case and in one other, where there was, in fact, a union, there was not dues deductions happening.

SECRETARY KARESH: And what would happen if a worker went in to management and said, “Stop deducting my dues. I don’t want to pay dues to this union”?

MR. NOVA: Well, in the case of Kukdong, workers who attempted to rescind their union membership and not pay dues were approached by the FROC-CROC and told that if they did not, if they did not retain their membership, they would be fired. And Mexican law, the statutory law, allows a factory and a union in a contract to agree that once the contract is signed, the factory will not hire any worker who is not willing to become a member of the union.

There was a ruling, I think now it is thre years ago to the effect that that actually is a violation of the Mexican Constitution and it’s not clear yet how all of that will play out but the law does stipulate that even in a factory in which such an agreement exists, it cannot be used in a prejudicial way against workers who are already employed.

If, for example, the contract is signed when workers are already employed and some choose not to join, they are not supposed to be subjected to any disciplinary action.

SECRETARY KARESH: This case you’re mentioning, is this a Mexican Supreme Court case?

MR. NOVA: I believe so and I have to apologize because my recollection is vague. We do have information on it and certainly can submit it to you. It was a ruling that happened in the time frame of the Kukdong case, I believe mid or late 2001 that basically said that it isn’t -- and I believe it was a Supreme Court case, that by denying employment to workers who weren’t willing to join a particular union, the statutory law was a violation. I’m sure there are other witnesses who are far more knowledgeable than I who can give you a confident and correct answer.

SECRETARY KARESH: You mentioned a variety of issues that you’ve seen at various plants. What is the response of the government officials when you meet with them and raise these concerns?

MR. NOVA: In our experience there have been two types of responses, neither of which suggests any willingness or commitment to actually take appropriate legal action. In the Kukdong case, we received a response that I would describe as a filibuster. We are -- our team of investigators met at great length with junta locale to discuss what was taking place at Kukdong and the various violations that we believed had been committed with respect to workers’s associational rights. And in a meeting that must have lasted two hours, I’m not sure that we were able to ask more than seven or eight questions because to each specific factual question, we received a response in the form of a lecture about Mexican law and Mexican history. So that type of response, I guess I would characterize as non-responsive.

In other cases and in the case of our conversation with the Labor Boards in Puebla and Tehuacan, vis-a-vis, the Tarrant case, the response we got was an acknowledgment that the factory may have acted illegally. For example, one of our staff people spoke of the junta locale in Puebla and was told that in fact, the factory had not -- I need to backtrack for just one sec. The larger group of dismissals that happened, the group that we measured at 150 in August, was justified by the factory on the grounds of an economic downturn. That there was less business, therefore, less production, therefore a need for fewer workers. It’s interesting to note that in Mexico the law does not allow employment contracts to be terminated for that reason. An economic downturn of that nature is a legal justification for suspending a contract, but not for terminating a contract.

And if --

SECRETARY KARESH: What’s the distinction between suspending a contract and terminating a contract?

MR. NOVA: If a worker’s contract is only suspended, the worker remains in legal -- in the legal sense, an employee of the company. And, in fact, the worker has the legal right if after time passes and the workers believes -- has reason to believe that the economic problems have abated, and that there’s more production in the factory but the worker has not been called back, the worker can take legal action to enforce the law and require the factory to reinstate the worker.

Termination means that the employment relationship is over, and once that’s concluded and any necessary severance is paid, the worker ceases to have any legal rights as an employee and that is allowed in Mexico only in cases of extreme financial distress or an act of God, some sort of natural disaster that shuts the factory down, makes it literally impossible for the factory to issue another paycheck, you know, or operate a production line.

SECRETARY KARESH: Are you familiar with the process -- I assume the employer has to file some sort of document with the Labor Department.

MR. NOVA: Right.

SECRETARY KARESH: Is there a hearing?

MR. NOVA: Right, and this is --

SECRETARY KARESH: Are the worker or the union allowed to come to a hearing and present a different argument?

MR. NOVA: Right. And this is what gets back to your original question. In a case where an employer is providing an economic justification for multiple layoffs, they are supposed to provide the labor board that has jurisdiction with a filing to the effect that this is happening and an explanation of the reasons, and the labor board in the case of Tarrant acknowledged to us that there had been no such filing made and that if the conditions -- if the facts we were describing were in fact, true that these would be violations of law but no action was ever taken and that’s the other kind of response we’ve received in these cases, is an acknowledgment by an official, a staff member of a local labor board that, yes, the fact pattern we’re describing would constitute legal violations but this is never, in our experience led to any action by the board to correct those violations.

SECRETARY KARESH: Are you familiar with any specific cases where workers specifically would have filed a complaint and said, “This discipline was improper, that the employer did not file the appropriate papers, the local board never made a ruling allowing them to dismiss workers or to close their facilities?

MR. NOVA: In the cases we’ve been involved in, no. I know that there have been cases where workers did file a complaint and were successful. And I should stress that it is not the case that the kind non-compliance I’m describing is universal. It is, I believe, accurate to say that with respect to the areas of what we’re discussing, there is a systematic disregard of labor law in Mexico by employers and the government but that does not mean that it is a universal disregard and there no doubt are instances where the law is upheld with respect to a particular worker’s dismissal. I think the area where you’ll find almost universal disregard is when independent unions seek registros and the case of Kukdong, of course, is in many ways one of the exceptions that proves the rule, because the registros in that case was only granted after enormous pressure on the government of Puebla, the state government of Puebla, not only from Kukdong management itself after a certain point in time, which for its own reasons no longer wanted the CROC to represent workers, but also from well-know apparel companies who are Kukdong’s key buyers and whose business is very important to that part of Mexico.

So it probably is true, with that sort of pressure that one can imagine achieving the kind of success that was ultimately achieved at Kukdong, but absent such extraordinary circumstances, there seems to be at least near universal disregard for the law with respect to the obligation of the local labor boards to grant a registros to a duly constitute independent labor union.

SECRETARY KARESH: Were the junta officials who were involved with granting the registration ultimately at Kukdong, are these the same officials the same board members that were involved in Tarrant and Matamoros?

MR. NOVA: There are -- there is a labor board in Puebla and then there are more localized labor boards in Bohatlisco which is the town near Puebla in which the Kukdong factory is located and in Tehuacan, which is the town quite close to where the Tarrant Ajalpan factory is located and I have to admit that I find somewhat confusing the question of how the different labor boards share jurisdiction.

In some instances it appears as if it’s possible to approach either labor board, for example, with a complaint, although it’s clear that the Puebla Labor Board is a more senior body, and in the Kukdong case and the Tarrant case, the Puebla Labor Board had substantial involvement and we did talk to the labor board in Puebla about both cases. And the filibuster experience I described to you is with the labor board in Puebla.

SECRETARY KARESH: Did your organization when you were doing the review, actually see the union registration petitions and --

MR. NOVA: Yes, in the case of Tarrant, yes. In the case of Kukdong, yes. And I would only say that with respect to the Tarrant petition, although we haven’t seen that many, it’s quite extraordinary from what we understand about the situation more generally in Mexico, to have so many workers’ names on a petition. Usually because there’s so much fear of retaliation, workers will submit a petition with the bare 20 names that are required or a handful more, sometimes a handful more because they know that the junta locale, the local labor board will look for a pretext to reject the petition and they want to make sure if one name gets struck out, that that won’t push the total below 20, so it might be 22 or 23, but to have hundreds of names on a petition is unusual and I think reflective of the degree of support and enthusiasm for the independent union at Tarrant Ajalpan.

SECRETARY KARESH: In the case of Tarrant, did you ever have any conversations with the union that the workers were told already existed?

MR. NOVA: No, and in the time frame in which we were actively investigating the case in August and September of 2003 the issue was never resolved as to whether there was or wasn’t an independent union. We received, and I understand the workers also received, different answers to this question from the Tehuacan Labor Board and the Puebla Labor Board.

In our staff person’s conversation with the Puebla Labor Board the answer was that they didn’t know whether or not that was the case and that while there would have to be some record of it, they were not in a position to access the files that the question could be answered definitively. The information, as I think the workers’ testimony indicated, largely came from public pronouncements by union officials to the effect that they already represented the workers at this factory.

SECRETARY KARESH: With regard to board membership there’s allegations