Calderón and the Trans-Pacific Agreement

 

President Felipe Calderón, together with his wife, Margarita Zavala, and his children, during the ‘A Democratic, Accountable Government’ event yesterday in the National Auditorium. Photograph: Cristina Rodríguez

Next Monday 2 April, president Barack Obama of the United States, president Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, will participate in a North American summit in Washington, DC. It is expected that at this meeting they will analyse issues such as the role the three nations will play at the summit in Cartagena, Colombia, which takes place at the end of April, Mexico’s conduct as host and member of the G20, which will meet in June in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, and the Mexican government’s application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which is not yet finalised.

Negotiations concerning this Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement are underway at a critical time for the global economy, which in many areas has faced catastrophe due to the lack of control, recklessness and irresponsibility of financial markets. Global unemployment is currently calculated at between 250 and 300 million people and in Mexico almost 6 million people are unemployed, a figure that does not include the 14 million in unstable informal employment. Most governments and international financial institutions are pressuring for debts to be shouldered by workers, and of course anti-union currents are going so far as attempting to wipe out the unions, especially the most democratic ones, so that no organisations are left to protect and defend workers’ and human rights, and thus passing the responsibility for and consequences of the crisis and their abuses onto the working class. This is a myopic, clumsy and incredibly short-term vision.

International federations such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF), and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), among others, have signalled in writing and across a range of forums that the Mexican government should not be allowed to join the TPP until it changes its economic and social policies to ones that truly promote economic growth, employment, the correct application of justice and respect for the unions’ autonomy and freedom.

The members and leaders of these strategic and powerful federations are conscious of the importance of global commerce. They also know that free trade agreements have not improved the wellbeing of the world’s workers, nor have they contributed to decreasing inequality between and inside different countries. Commerce should be fair and based on the principle of equity in order to increase living standards, quality employment, social protection and security, at the same time as defending workers’ rights, avoiding contamination, and respecting human rights, dignity and democracy.

Felipe Calderón’s administration has been seriously questioned by these and other organisations, but this questioning has become more forceful in the face of the administration’s recent application to join the TPP, the lack of coherence in the objectives it announces and the specific negative results that can be observed in terms of the application of justice, inequality, corruption, and repression of workers and democratic unions.

In the eyes of the global federations, it is clear that the Mexican government, as a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has not respected the parallel labour cooperation agreement, has failed in the protection of workers’ basic rights and has been highly inefficient and insensitive in relation to their concerns about excessively low salaries, employment insecurity and the growth of employer protection contracts and ghost unions, some of which are linked to organised crime and others of which have ties with or are part of ‘official or charro’ corporatist unions. These are generally fraudsters working with government consent and at the service of employers to ensure that wages and working conditions are minimal, in a truly scandalous and shamefully barefaced system of corruption and complicity. For all these reasons the global organisations oppose the Mexican government joining the TPP.

What is more, Calderón’s labour policy has led to greater repression and violence through the use of physical intimidation and terrorism against the activists and leaders of democratic and independent union organisations. His government has abused its power by employing methods such as official recognition or ‘taking note’ against democratic union leadership, with a discriminatory strategy of controlling unions that do not serve their interests. In the desperation of his anti-union policy at the end of his six-year Presidential term of office, with clear Fascist overtones, Felipe Calderón has gone as far as pressuring and forcing representatives and senators to approve his labour reform project, which deepens exploitation, inequality and insecurity in Mexico.

The esteemed columnist and labour lawyer Arturo Alcalde Justiniani is entirely right in asking: when will the government will stop siding with the corrupt leaders it protects as if they were a necessary evil? When will it end the war against the mining union and stop putting all the power of the State behind Grupo Minero México? This is the reality of governmental policy towards Mexican workers. In short, Calderón would rather look after investors than his own citizens.