Allies Across the Border - Softcover

Hathaway, Dale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0896086321 ISBN 13: 9780896086326

Publisher: South End Press, 2000

Synopsis

North American workers find their jobs more pressured and precarious but turn on the television and find pundits praising the glories of the global economy. Their counterparts south of the Rio Grande find themselves forced into the arms of global corporations that barely pay them their daily bread for work in dangerous plants that refuse to observe minimal safety or environmental standards. No wonder inequality is increasing in both countries. Although North Americans are told that Mexicans are stealing their jobs, workers can find "allies across the border."

Like the U.S. labor organizers in the early part of the 20th century who created the C.I.O. in response to A.F.L. corruption, Mexico's F.A.T. (Frente Autentico del Trabajo or Authentic Workers' Front) is building a historic movement to create an alternative to Mexico's notoriously co-opted labor unions and collusion with government international capital. Allies Across the Border, the first book on F.A.T., analyzes this important group in the context of the globalization of capital and the necessary globalization of labor struggle. Dale Hathaway shows how F.A.T.'s dedication to worker education and self-management, union independence, and community development are key, not only in Mexico, but worldwide.

Allies Across the Border includes detailed descriptions of F.A.T.'s growth from its liberation theology origins, through the Worker's Uprising and student movements of the late 60s, Mexico's debt crisis of the 70s and 80s, and F.A.T.'s work with women's groups, peasants, and consumer co-ops in the 90s. Hathaway's Allies Across the Border shows how F.A.T.'s dedication to worker's dignity offers lessons for North American workers who are fighting to keep corporations from pushing for greater exploitation of workers and environment in their home countries and worldwide.

Dale Hathaway is Associate Professor of Political Science at Butler University in Indianapolis.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

"What's good for a Ford worker in Detroit must also be good for a worker in South Africa. And it must be good for a Ford worker in Hermosillo, Mexico," says one of the many voices Butler University political scientist Hathaway (Can Workers Have a Voice?) marshals in this groundbreaking study. Since the mid-1970s, Hathaway begins, corporations have been less tied to particular nations, shifting production to take advantage of cheaper labor and lax regulations in the developing world, a phenomenon commonly called globalism. Plants in Mexico controlled by familiar corporations, Hathaway shows, can harbor conditions ranging from unsafe to toxic and deadly, as real wages there have fallen. After chapters on the development of the Authentic Labor Front, which arose in 1960 and goes by the Spanish acronym FAT, the last third of the book shows how the union has recently sought out labor movements from North America, pushing in innovative and effective ways for mutually beneficial policies. Throughout, Hathaway places the union in a global context, carefully tracing the many strands of international commerce and law that converge in FAT's membership's factories. This book stands firm against the corporate hagiographies currently clogging the shelves; its clear, careful tracking of actual plant conditions and labor practices, rendered evenlyAif sympathetically to workers' plightAshould convince even hardened union skeptics to consider the other side's claims. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: South End Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0896086321
• ISBN 13: 9780896086326
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288