Kukdong: A Case of
Effective Labor Standards Enforcement
Jeremy Blasi, Center for
Labor Research and Education
On December 5th,
the Center for Labor Research and Education and the Center
for Latin American Studies welcomed key leaders and advocates
from one of the most significant labor rights breakthroughs
in recent Mexican history. With the help of American student
activists and labor rights monitors, workers from the Kukdong
apparel factory (now called "Mexmode") in Atlixco,
Mexico recently succeeded in creating one of the first independent
unions for garment workers in all of Mexico.
At the panel, titled "From
Sweatshop Labor to Worker Power," Marcela Muñoz
Tepepa, a Kukdong worker and leader of the independent union,
reflected on the origins and implications of the victory.
She was joined by Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker
Rights Consortium, a newly formed labor rights enforcement
agency that was instrumental in the reform effort, as well
as Catalina Guzman Albafull, a senior researcher at the Autonomous
University of Puebla, and Jon Rodney, a student anti-sweatshop
activist at UC Berkeley.
In January 2001, Muñoz
recounted, the conditions at Kukdong were dismal. The factory's
rancid cafeteria food, corrupt company-allied union, and
firing of five workers for demanding better treatment, inspired
approximately 800 workers, mostly women in their teens and
early 20s, to go on wildcat strike. At midday they left their
stations, and, for the next three days, camped in the factory's
front patio. Late on the third night, a battalion of riot
police, led by the existing union's secretary general, marched
into the area wielding clubs and guns. By sunrise, 17 workers
needed medical attention; several were struck unconscious.
This is, of course, not
an uncommon story in Mexico. In fact, Muñoz recalled,
many of Kukdong's workers were joined in protest by parents
and relatives who themselves had gone on strike and been
attacked just months before in the neighboring city of Matamoros.
And it is not unusual for government backed "unions" to
sign sweetheart protection contracts with employers to ensure
for the union a constant influx of dues while obstructing
genuine organizing. The vast majority of the country's unionized
workers suffer from this kind of representation.
What was unusual about
Kukdong, Muñoz and others stressed, was the tremendous
amount of international attention the strike generated. News
of the uprising and violent dispersal, as well as the fact
that Kukdong was a major producer for Nike and dozens of
universities, spread quickly through the internet to student
anti-sweatshop activists in the U.S. Spying another bout
with the mammoth apparel firm, student activists, including
Rodney, organized support rallies at Nike stores across the
country. Meanwhile, a wave of factory monitoring organizations
descended on Atlixco to conduct investigations. Within weeks
the story had made it to the pages of the New York Times.
By late February the factory had reinstated the majority
of the fired workers, including several of the leaders terminated
for complaining--a virtually unprecedented scenario in Mexican
maquiladoras. Then, by mid September, the workers of Kukdong
successfully transformed their factory into one of the only
workplaces in the Mexican garment industry with a democratic,
independent union chosen by the workers themselves. They
have since won improvements in almost every aspect of factory
life.
The surprising turn of
events, the speakers emphasized, might not have been possible
just several years ago. In the past three years, students
at nearly 200 universities have launched "sweat free
campus" campaigns, demanding that their administrations
adopt anti-sweatshop policies for their schools' licensed
products. Many of these policies included a provision requiring
that licensees publicly disclose the names and locations
of the contractors they hire to make their products. Before
the policies were enacted, Rodney said, it was virtually
impossible for a concerned citizen or researcher to identify
the factory where a particular garment was made--such information
was concealed by companies as a trade secret. But last spring,
after refusing for years, companies began to post lists of
factory addresses on the internet. Kukdong was on a list
disclosed by Nike. A local advocate wielding this information
relayed the story to the student activist community in the
U.S. and the campaign took off from there. Without student
support and the university policies, Kukdong might have faded,
like so many other worker uprisings, into obscurity.
Muñoz described
the workers' surprise when they learned of the students' interest. "During
the work stoppage," she recalled, "we began to
receive emails from American university students, encouraging
us to continue with our struggle. At first we said to ourselves, 'Who
are these students and why do they want to support us?' That's
when we began to learn about the student movement."
Another crucial development
in recent years was the emergence of a crop of agencies designed
to inspect garment factories for anti-sweatshop policies.
Several of these
organizations, the Worker
Rights Consortium, Verite, and the International Labor Rights
Fund, traveled to Atlixco shortly after the strike to investigate
alleged abuses. Their findings, circulated widely among university
and apparel industry personnel and the media, verified the
workers' claims of rancid food, child labor, and physical
abuse and helped move Nike and other licensees to intervene.
Nova commented, "I
think a lot of us who have been involved in this effort around
codes of conduct and working conditions for university clothing
have been wondering whether, in fact, at the end of the day,
colleges and universities can make a concrete difference
in helping real workers in the real world achieve significant
improvements in the level of respect for workers' rights.
And I think that what Kukdong tells us is the answer to that
question is yes."
Of course, this sort
international support can easily fall into paternalism or
irrelevance without a strong base of support inside the factory.
In the case of Kukdong, Muñoz stressed, the workers
themselves spearheaded the reform effort. And they have insisted
ardently that their newly formed union's decision-making
structures be democratic and free from outside influence. "We
knew we needed an independent union to protect our rights
because we were conscious that an outside person, who did
not know what we experience, could not always represent and
defend us," she said.
Beyond an historic victory
in one of Mexico's 3,400 foreign-owned assembly plants, the
Kukdong struggle may represent the first successful implementation
of a new model for achieving basic labor rights on an international
scale. In the new era of globalization, the need for such
universally observed rights has never been greater. But global
governance institutions, like the United Nations and World
Trade Organization, have either lacked sufficient enforcement
mechanisms or declined to include labor standards at all.
In the absence of such formal agreements, first world activists
have chosen to bypass government and international organizations
and call directly upon transnational corporations to adopt
socially responsible business practices. Corporate and university
anti-sweatshop policies are one result of these campaigns.
But until now, consumer-based
anti-sweatshop projects have generally not been connected
to the workers themselves. Thus, their policies have not
been available to workers as tools to change the power relations
among which they work and live. The Kukdong struggle represents
a crucial transcending of scales between third and first
world activists. The case suggests that, in repressive settings,
when workers alone do not have the power to enforce their
rights, an alliance with consumer activists and labor rights
monitors may be strong enough to break through the wall that
has blocked democratic unionism and labor reform in Mexico
and elsewhere.
Muñoz concluded
her presentation, "We have come to believe from our
experience working with American students that if we bring
together international solidarity and labor struggles, we
can triumph, not only in Mexico but in the whole world. So
let us move forward."
