Video: Mexican Labor Conditions, including the Cuautitlanán Ford Plant

The above video is a "pre-NAFTA documentary film about labor conditions in Mexico. It contains footage of the struggle at Cuautitlanán Ford and U.S. support from them (UAW 879 and 249). It was  Just posted to Youtube this month. A big role played by a young UAW leader...Ted La Valley"

We received a link to it today from Rob McKenzie the former president of UAW Local 879 who was a major part of that solidarity effort and has since written a book recently published titled: El Golpe: U.S. Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico

McKenzie spent many years investigating the events at the Mexican Ford plant and his findings are important reading for all workers, socialists and activists if we are to build any serious links with workers internationally.  We encourage readers to buy the book. It can be purchased at Pluto Press, Barnes and Noble and other outlets. Here's an excerpt from the Jacobin review.  

Since Ford first built its Cuautitlán plant in the 1960s, the workers there had labored under a CTM protection contract. But riding the wave of popular outrage in the late eighties, they organized a rank-and-file reform movement, particularly to challenge a 1987 agreement between company and union officials to implement a more exploitative “lean production” model at the plant. Despite multiple attempts by Ford and the CTM to intimidate the union dissidents in Cuautitlán, their movement only grew, resulting in a series of wildcat work stoppages and slowdowns.

Things came to a head in January 1990. The Ford Cuautitlán workers were in the midst of a public campaign protesting the company’s failure to pay a promised year-end bonus the month before, a betrayal that appeared to have been approved by CTM leaders. In the early morning hours of January 8, around three hundred hoodlums armed with clubs and guns — and mysteriously outfitted in Ford uniforms — were bused to the Cuautitlán assembly plant during a shift change, allowed in by company security guards.

A confrontation broke out when the workers arrived to start their shift. The thugs opened fire, and nine workers were shot. One of them died from his wounds a few days later.