Appendix F

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
BUREAU OF INTERNATIONAL LABOR AFFAIRS
PUBLIC FORUM
Tuesday, February 27, 1996
9:30 a.m.
Moderator: Joaquin F. Otero

Deputy Under Secretary of Labor
for International Labor Affairs
U.S. Department of Labor

 - - -

 Ana Hotel

50 Third Street
San Francisco, California

AGENDA

PAGE

Opening Remarks

Joaquin F. Otero 6

Deputy Under Secretary of Labor

for International Labor Affairs

U.S. Department of Labor

Luis Miguel Diaz 12

General Coordinator for International Affairs

Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, Mexico

Warren Edmondson 17

Director General, Federal Mediation

and Conciliation Service

Human Resources Development, Canada

Oral Presentations

Francisco Hernandez Juarez 26

President

Telephone Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico

Morton Bahr 31

President

Communications Workers of America (CWA), AFL-CIO

Robert L. Corrada 40

Assistant Professor of Law

University of Denver (speaking on behalf of Sprint)

Dora Vogel 50

Former employee of La Conexion Familiar (Sprint)

Federico Anaya 56

President, Law Firm of Anaya Valdepena

Management Attorneys and Consultants

Counsel to Confederation of Chambers of

commerce and Industry of Mexico

Maria Blanco 62

Associate Director

Women's Employment Rights Clinic

Golden Gate University, School of law

PAGE

Former employee of La Conexion Familiar (Sprint)

Sergio Tapia 76

Consultants Associates (Management Consultant)

Monterrey, Mexico

John Zucker 84

Legislative aide to the Honorable Tom Lantos

U.S. House of Representatives

Fernanda Recio 91

Former employee of La Conexion Familiar (Sprint)

Veronika Altmeyer 96

Managing Executive, Telecommunications

Deutsche Postgewerkschaft (German Post and

Telephone Workers)

Jose Luis Mendoza 104

Legal Counsel

Telephone Workers Union

of the Republic of Mexico

Lawrence Bertuzzi 110

Partner, Miller & Thompson

Philip C. Bowyer 123

General Secretary

Postal, Telephone and Telegraph International

Marie Malliett 134

President, Local 9410

Communications Workers of America

Frank Martin del Campo 141

President, San Francisco Chapter

Labor Council for Latin American Advancement

Dick Martin 146

Secretary-Treasurer

Canadian Labor Congress

Janice Wood 154

Vice President, District 9

Communications Workers of America, CWA, AFL-CIO

PAGE

Kate Brofenbrenner 161

Director of Labor Education Research

New York School of Industrial Labor Relations

Cornell University

Closing

PROCEEDINGS

9:40 a.m.

MR. ZEE: Before we have the formal start of today's program, I would like to make some comments on some procedural details which I hope will make the meeting go by a little more smoothly.

First, you will notice that there is interpretation equipment at all the tables. Channel 4 is English and Channel 3 is Spanish. Of course, if you don't understand English, you don't know that Channel 3 is Spanish, but Channel 4 is English, Channel 3 is Spanish.

There are a variety of materials at the table in the back as you come in. I think most people have taken those materials. They are for you and please feel free to take as many as you want.

If you need something, I will be around throughout the course of the meeting. Please let me know and I will help get those materials for you.

There is a section on the side here reserved for the media and I ask only that the reporters not do any interviews in this room during the course of the meeting. There will be plenty of opportunity during the break at lunchtime. And also if you have an interview scheduled with somebody during the course of this meeting, please just do it outside the room. And there's also a mult box set up if any reporters require the mult box and that's at the back of the room also.

All the speakers, by the way, will come up to this podium, there will be no speakers or questions or comments from the floor, so we do ask that the speakers sit at these first two tables up here to minimize the time traveling back and forth and to help us expedite today's program.

I believe that's all I have. If you have any questions, as I said, I will be around. And with that, I am going to turn the meeting over to Deputy Under Secretary for International Affairs Jack Otero and he will chair today's program.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Bob.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

Muy buenos dias, senoras y senores. Bienvenidos a todos.

My task today is to chair this public forum on behalf of Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. I would like first of all to identify those at the head table with me for your benefit.

First, to my extreme right is Mr. Warren Edmondson, who represents the Human Resources Department in Canada and he is the leader of the tripartite Canadian delegation which involves government, unions and management representatives.

To his left is the representative of the Mexican Government, Dr. Luis Miguel Dias, from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare of Mexico. He, too, is leading a tripartite delegation composed of union, management and government.

To my immediate right is Mrs. Irasema Garza, who is the Secretary of the United States National Administrative Office, which is the first line agency set up at each government's level for the purpose of implementing the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation.

And to my left is Mr. Bart Widom, who is from the Solicitor's Office of the Department of Labor. He is my legal advisor and both he and Mrs. Garza will be assisting me should there be any question for technical or legal questions which I may be not able to answer on my own.

I would like to thank all of you today for being here promptly and at the outset I should also say that I am delighted to see such a large number of people present as well as to see so many faces in the audience which are familiar to me.

We also have headsets for simultaneous interpretation. I ask each and every one of you to please not inadvertently take them out of the room, leave them in your place when you go out to lunch and when the meeting is concluded today because they do not belong to the Department of Labor, they have been rented for the purpose of this meeting.

The public forum that we are conducting today is being conducted pursuant to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation which is in the vernacular known as the labor side agreement to the NAFTA trade agreement.

As you know, the NAFTA agreement itself is supplemented by an agreement on the protection for the environment and an agreement on the protection of workers' rights. But this forum is specifically conducted today as a result of a ministerial consultations implementation agreement on Case 95-01. This agreement was reached by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Mexican Secretary of Labor Javier Bonilla on December 15, 1995. And I would like to say in passing that the agreement was endorsed and signed by the government of Canada through the Labor Minister, Luzian Robilliar.

This public forum presents an opportunity for public debate on the freedom of association and the right to organize, principles on which the three NAFTA signatory countries place the highest of importance.

Ministerial consultations were held on Submission 95-01 under Article 22 of the Labor Supplemental Agreement following the Mexican National Administrative Office issuance of a public report on May 31, 1995. Submission 95-01 was filed with the Mexican NAO on February 9, 1995 by the Telephone Workers Union of Mexico. The submission alleged that the Sprint Corporation closed its facility known as La Conexion Familiar, a Spanish-language telemarketing subsidiary in San Francisco, in July of 1994 just one week prior to a scheduled union representation election, thereby dismissing over 200 employees and denying them the right to freedom of association and the right to organize.

Mexico's public report on this submission requested ministerial consultations to address the effect of sudden closure of a workplace on the workers' freedom of association and the right to organize in the United States of America.

The agreement negotiated by the United States and Mexico during these ministerial consultations recognizes the importance of this issue and provides several action items, one of which is, and I quote, "that within 120 days of the agreement the United States Department of Labor will organize and conduct a public forum in San Francisco, California to allow interested parties an opportunity convey to the public their concerns on the effect of the sudden closure of a plant on the principle of the freedom of association and the right of workers to organize."

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we are all here today. Notice of today's forum was published in the Federal Register on January 25, 1996. In that notice, advance registration procedures for all presentations were outlined with the intent of ensuring an orderly process and allowing sufficient opportunity for all interested parties to participate within the time allowed each speaker.

This is a one-day event, scheduled to end today no later than six p.m. We will have a break for lunch at approximately 12:30 and we will return to work at two p.m.

The published guidelines allow me as chairman of this event today to allow each speaker no more than 10 minutes and I ask each speaker to be mindful of this requirement so as not to encroach on someone else's right to speak.

Only those people who have registered in advance with our office will be permitted to speak today. We have compiled a list with the names of persons who wish to speak and who registered timely with the United States Department of Labor. That list containing the names of persons speaking today is available at the table located at the rear of this room.

If you have registered to speak, please locate your name on the list because to the extent possible I will try to follow the order in that list and will call your name accordingly.

I request again your cooperation and assistance in conducting an orderly proceeding so that all those who have registered can make an oral presentation and have the opportunity to do so without any encumbrances. To this end, I request that all oral presentations be limited to the issue before us today, Submission 95-01, and the general objective of the forum is to analyze the effect of the sudden plant closures in the United States have on workers' rights to organize and on the freedom of association.

After each presentation, I will have the discretion to question the presenters if appropriate or necessary. There will be no questions from the audience to the presenters. At any time during the forum I will have the leeway of calling a recess if I deem it appropriate.

In addition to the recording of today's proceedings, written statements which have been submitted to the United States National Administrative Office will be included in the public record of this forum. The complete record of these proceedings will be available to the public upon request.

I would like to thank all of you in advance for your cooperation in ensuring the orderly process of these proceedings and I would like also to announce to the presenters that it is their choice to address this audience either in English or in Spanish as we have simultaneous interpretation provided for this event.

Having said that, it is my pleasure at this point, first of all, to recognize the leader of the Mexican delegation and invite him to make a few remarks, Dr. Luis Miguel Diaz from Mexico.

DR. DIAZ: First of all, I would like to thank the Department of Labor for organizing this event and I would like to express my appreciation to the local authorities for having us here.

(THROUGH TRANSLATOR)

My presentation will be a short one and it will focus on three points. They are, number one, a new way of focusing on the worker; number two, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation as a venue for cooperation; and, third, I would like to highlight the situation of labor in the framework of labor relations between the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Regarding the first point, in recent years the subject of labor and labor conditions as opposed to the original approach taken has been focused in a more broad manner. Workers are approached as human beings and working conditions now take into account their economic situation, productivity of companies and the well being of nations. On the other hand, the worker is considered in the light of his environment and work environment. This theory focusing on the worker as an economic being and as a generator of wealth and environment is relatively new.

The topic is clearly identified as one of the typical topics in the globalization we are experiencing and has been dealt with by the ILO, the WTO, the Organization for Economic Development, OECD, and by the United States, Canada and Mexico within the Organization of American States. However, within this debate the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation seems to have taken the fore since it is an agreement which along with NAFTA and along with the environment cooperation agreement is an international agreement binding for the three countries.

The preamble of the NAFTA agreement says that one of its objectives is the well being of workers. The preamble of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation in several ways insists on this purpose. And, finally, article first of the cooperation agreement refers to the objective of raising the standard of living of workers within an international context, within a context of creation of jobs and the expansion of workers' rights.

Now I'll turn to the second point and with your permission I would like to highlight five specific aspects of the cooperation agreement which brings us here.

The first aspect is that the agreement is based on a tenet which is a respect for labor legislation in each of our three countries. Article 2 says that all mechanisms set forth are based on this principle by virtue of which in each country the corresponding labor authorities are the only ones acting in the matter. This agreement does not aim to and, as Article 42nd would say, this agreement cannot be interpreted as substituting authorities from one country to the other.

The second point has to do with one of the objectives of Article 1 which says that the countries undertake to find transparency in the implementation of labor laws. The three countries want to discuss all matters openly and we want all elements of society to participate in this debate and this is why at this forum we are showing that we are taking seriously this obligation.

The other point has to do with the establishment of national administrative offices. Dr. Otero referred to this. And this means that in order to comply with the agreement the three countries established three offices which aim to serve as points of contact among themselves or with local and state organizations in the three countries and then to establish contact with a labor secretariat created by three countries. It is an institution created by the three countries with equal composition from Canada, Mexico and the United States. It is based in Dallas, Texas.

The other point I wanted to highlight is that the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, breaking with an internationalist tradition, does not set forth new rights nor new obligations for the parties in a substantive way. The basic concern of the three countries was to seek ways to effectively implement our laws which result from our traditions, our idiosyncracies and our aspirations.

So the reason we are here, the specific reason we are here is to discuss the principle of freedom of association and organization which is contemplated in our national laws and which we have specified as common principles. This is not a new right. It is not a new right but we would like for this right to be more effective.

And, finally, on the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, I wanted to say and underscore that this is an international instrument and if we are to analyze it in keeping with international law, it is a perfect law. It is a perfect law because the document itself sets forth a series of requirements so that sanctions may be applied and penalties maybe applied. It is not merely a declaration of principles of good will, of political will, it is a legal instrument which is binding and so non-compliance can be corrected through penalties.

The last point I wanted to make was that the area of labor is something which the United States and Mexico have focused on and have reached an understanding to address problems. It is a way to detect possible irregularities and problems, to analyze them and to expose them to the public so that our authorities can be more effective.

A second point that I wanted to underscore is that the composition of this forum breaking with the traditional patter is not just a forum of government entities. No. We have tripartite delegations with us representing different sectors of our societies, so the representation of what we are, what we want to be, is very broad to the extent that we are represented here in a tripartite way, and I would even say four parties because we have invited sectors of our society which are not representative of governments or companies or workers, they represent society at large.

And, finally, I wanted to end by saying that through me the Secretary of Labor of Mexico, Secretary Bonilla, believes that this forum is a demonstration of the fact that there is communication to address problems, there is political will present and we are expecting concrete results.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Dr. Diaz.

I now would like to introduce Mr. Warren Edmondson, Director General of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services, Human Resources Development, Canada, representing the government of Canada.

MR. EDMONDSON: Thanks very much, Jack. And it's always a pleasure when traveling from Canada to visit our neighbors in the south not only to renew acquaintances but also to escape some of the colder climates that we become exposed to at this time of year.

As a partner to this North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, we're certainly pleased to be here to participate in this public forum dealing with a very important subject, the subject of freedom of association and rights of workers to organize. These issues, of course, and this process, the process for the resolution of complaints under the North American Agreement are of considerable importance to us in Canada, not only to the government of Canada and to the provincial governments but also to our trade unions and our employers, so we look forward to today's proceedings.

We certainly hope that our participation here in this forum will further contribute to improving the dialogue that exists between business, labor and government in our three countries and will further assist us in our efforts in achieving the objectives of the North American Agreement.

Accompanying me today from back east, northeast, are Mr. Dick Martin from the Canadian Labor Congress, which is the largest Canadian central labor organization in Canada, Dick is seated over here at the left, and Mr. Larry Bertuzzi, a practicing labor lawyer from Toronto who has had considerable experience in representing companies in many jurisdictions in Canada and also in the United States. Both of them are experienced labor relations practitioners and I understand that they have been scheduled to speak later on today on the subjects at hand and I look forward to hearing their views.

I can certainly assure you from my experience in dealing with them that neither one of them is shy and if they happen to agree or disagree with anything that I happen to say today that I'm sure they will do so and will certainly give you their perspective on the Canadian experience in dealing with labor law.

Those of you who are familiar with Canadian labor law know that the constitutional jurisdiction for labor law in our country is divided between the federal government and our provincial governments. Each jurisdiction has its own labor laws, protecting workers' health and safety, basic employment standards, equity laws and laws providing, of course, the right to organize unions and laws governing the process of collective bargaining.

Although there may be some differences, and some of them significant, between these respective laws in our country and also in the way in which they are administered, fundamentally they are all based on the U.S. Wagner Act model. And those of you, of course, in this room who are familiar with labor law will know the model well.

They all recognize in the statute, in the respective statutes, the fundamental right of workers to organize and become members of trade unions of their choice, whether they be local unions, national unions or international unions. This, of course, is consistent with the basic rights and freedoms of association found in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as in Convention 87 of the International Labor Organization which has been ratified by Canada.

Our Federal Minister of Labor, Mr. Galiano, who asked me to bring his greetings to this group, is the minister responsible for the Federal Canada Labor Code. Part 1 of that code is the part that establishes a framework for collective bargaining for federally regulated industries and these industries include industries such as airlines, telecommunications, railroads, longshoring, grain handling and many of the major infrastructure industries in Canada. Although I think about 10 percent of the workforce is governed by the federal labor law, the law, as I said, applies to a number of significant industries.

This part of the code was recently reviewed by an independent task force which submitted its report to the minister on January 31st of this year. The report contains a number of important recommendations and underscores once again the value of our system of collective bargaining as an effective instrument in Canada of both social and economic policy, which is a particularly important statement, I think, as we move into the 21st century.

To quote from the report of the task force chaired by a Mr. Andrew Simms who was the former chair of the Alberta, one of our provinces, labor boards, he states, "Canada must continue to facilitate means by which individuals can express themselves through democratic intermediary groups. Free collective bargaining is an important example."

He goes on to add, "It is not only the absence of rights and freedoms that can lead to the growth of disorder, but also and perhaps more importantly the sense of injustice that results from the inability to secure these rights and freedoms."

It's worth noting that during that process of the task force process that with the assistance of government key labor and management representatives in the industries affected by this legislation met jointly to discuss a number of the issues included in the terms of reference of the task force. The fact that they were able to reach consensus on a significant number of points I believe is an indication of their mutual respect, their ability to work together and as well an indication of their faith in the system of collective bargaining and their mutual interest in designing a system that works for them. That's not all to say that there is peace and harmony between labor and management in every situation in Canada, but I think it's an important indication of their ability to work together.

I should point out that the percentage of unionized workers in Canada remains relatively constant at approximately 37 percent of our workforce, despite the significant impact of changes in government policies such as deregulation, privatization, and the pressures of worldwide competition on Canadian companies and workers in recent years.

Wage increases in Canada remain relatively low at an average of about 1.4 percent while inflation is running at 2.1 in an environment of, again, relatively high unemployment within our country of 9.6 percent.

Discussions at collective bargaining tables like here in the United States have generally focused on the need for concessions, as many companies attempt to remain competitive or to increase profits.

Companies have attempted to reduce labor costs by seeking lower wages, seeking reorganized and more flexible workforces, and attempting to increase productivity by introducing new technology.

Governments also who are faced with large debts and deficits are finding it necessary to adopt some of the strategies of the private sector in their efforts to balance their budgets.

And yet the number of work stoppages in Canada, perhaps understandably, are at an all-time low. Last year, 982,000 person days were lost due to work stoppages, compared to 3.5 million days in 1990.

However, in this difficult environment, organized labor in Canada has managed to hold its own. As I said, it remains at about 35 percent, 37 percent.

Canada's laws, and in particular its labor laws, and the efficiency of its arm's length labor boards which are responsible for determination of bargaining unit structures, for the investigation of unfair labor practice complaints, for the certification of trade unions and their respective jurisdictions, I believe may be in a large part accountable for the ability of trade unions in Canada to organize and maintain their membership in this complex environment.

For example, when we examine the experience of labor boards in our three largest jurisdictions, the provinces of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, the statistics are revealing.

In Ontario, in 1993-'94, the numbers indicate that there were 11,066 applications for union certification filed with the Ontario Labor Relations Board, of which 829 were granted, 102 were dismissed and 204 were withdrawn. Most importantly, the median time taken by the board to grant certification was 22 calendar days. During that same period, there were only 110 applications for decertification, 53 of which were granted and 26 were dismissed.

In the province of Quebec for the year '94-'95, relatively similar numbers: 854 applications with 555 granted, 87 dismissed.

Again, similar in the province of British Columbia. In the province of British Columbia, the average time taken to grant an application is 27 days.

I will confess that our federal labor board, those of you who want to take the time to read the report of the task force, will note that it is not quite as efficient. I'm sure that will probably improve as a result of the recommendations that Mr. Simms has made.

While certainly Canada's system of industrial relations is far from perfect, and we've seen the pendulum swing in various provinces on various occasions, I think both labor and management would not find too much argument with the fact that in general our labor laws are being enforced. Not only are they being enforced, but I think they might also agree that they are being enforced fairly, effectively and efficiently.

In a highly competitive global marketplace where the rate of technological change is accelerating at a breathtaking pace, there is much speculation about the future of work. We find apparently competing interests between the quest for corporate survival and profitability on one hand and the pursuit of meaningful work and improved standards of living for workers and the protection of worker rights on the part of trade unions on the other.

These competing interests are not irreconcilable, but rather need to be balanced, not only through a fair and effectively administered legislative framework but also through changing attitudes, I believe, on the part of labor and management in our countries, through cooperation, through good faith, mutual trust, which unfortunately we can't legislate.

While many companies and unions in Canada take their traditional adversarial stances and appear to want to do battle at almost every occasion, there are currently many Canadian success stories in industries such as telecommunications, steel, manufacturing and others where organized labor and management are working together to find innovative and creative ways to advance their mutual interests.

They have recognized the competitive advantage and the benefit to both social partners to be gained by tapping the resources of a well trained, well motivated, empowered and represented workforce.

I believe that effective labor laws efficiently administered will allow us to move to the next dimension and perhaps change the traditional paradigm and enable labor and management as we move into the 21st century to work more effectively together to the mutual benefit of all three countries and workers in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

In closing, let me simply say that we are here to listen. We are here to learn. And I look forward to the day's proceedings and hearing the views of the various speakers.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Mr. Edmondson.

And now that we have completed the introductory statements by the three countries signatory to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, we will move on with the forum itself.

I would like to ask the presenters to please come to the podium to make their presentations. And, again, I ask all of the presenters to be mindful of the time allotted.

The first presenter this morning is Mr. Francisco Hernandez Juarez, President of the Telephone Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico.

Mr. Hernandez, please.

MR. HERNANDEZ: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) Thank you very much. Good morning.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Francisco Hernandez Juarez, as you have just heard, Secretary General of the Telephone Workers Union.

I would like to point out that the organization that I represent has approximately 50,000 affiliates throughout the country. Actually, we are represented in 31 of the 32 states that make up the Mexican Republic.

First of all, I would like to express my great appreciation to the representatives of the Labor Department of the United States and Canada, as far as the Labor Department goes, for having hosted this meeting.

Secondly, I would like to point out that I am here not only because of the fact that the Telephone Workers Union of Mexico is responsible for having initiated this whole procedure within the framework of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, I am also here and above all because in my entity as a unionist, I believe and I trust in solidarity of workers and as a worker and as a union leader in a globalized and complex work of intertwined economies that are interdependent, I wish to trust in the aquitative dialogue, in bargaining, in negotiation, in justice and laws and institutions as being the best instruments to improve the relationship between management and workers and to conciliate their problems.

I would also like to point out that the decision to initiate these procedures to its ultimate consequences was not a coincidence, nor the result of a personal decision. It was the unanimous decision of our national congress celebrated in January of '95 in which we affirmed the commitment that we have with the alliance that we have with the workers union of telecommunications from the United States and Canada in February of 1992, as well as our participation in the international trade unions for postal workers and communication workers.

In the case of La Conexion Familiar, it was a particular concern for us, not only the fact that certain laws were being violated in such an obvious manner, but that there was also a racist aggression and also that this was not by just a small fraction of a systematic aggression towards labor organization on behalf of Sprint with whom Telefonos de Mexico has a strategic alliance.

I would like to make as a complementary observation the following. Through a high executive of Telefonos de Mexico, it was tried to convince me not to speak this day, precisely because it would demerit the presence of Sprint in its alliance with Telefonos de Mexico.

I pointed it out to this executive that that would mean that Sprint meant to change its attitude in the situation of La Conexion Familiar but he told me that he could not assure that it would happen. Therefore, I answered that I could not therefore not attend this meeting.

Since this violation of the rules were published, we want justice to be carried out towards the people from La Conexion Familiar but also we want to send a clear message, not only to Sprint but to all telecommunications companies in the region, the continent, throughout the world, about what workers and trade unions are willing to do if they stand together to defend each other and to make progress as far as our rights go, in spite of the aggressions and offenses that have taken place against workers rights. These affect not only the workers but the companies themselves, even though this might not seem too evident for the general public.

We wish that this is a message of the defense of basic human rights because labor rights and trade union rights are part of human rights. We would also like to appeal to the transnational companies, to multi-nationalist companies, that they should keep open this dialogue with trade workers, with trade unions all over the world regardless of their nationality.

We wish that the multi-national companies should understand that progress is not necessarily something that is in conflict with the right of workers, with the assurance of their working place. If companies such as Sprint are willing to do everything in their power in order to prevent trade unions to exist, then trade unions would have no other option than to carry out whatever is necessary to accomplish the contrary. And if we had the same despotic attitude the company has shown, then we would also have to plan our fight in a confrontational way.

This absurd confrontational scenario is not desirable for anybody, but should it happen, it would be a responsibility of the companies. It would be their responsibility. We wish also that through this we can appeal to our governments that through modernization and regional global integration some policies and strategies would be developed that would promote a more balanced working environment, a fair working environment and therefore better for everybody involved.

We trust that this North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation be an instrument that is sufficient and enough to comply with all these expectations but we also trust in the fact that for the same reason it could be the basis for a more specific and more functional regulation that could defend workers' rights.

Through the IPCTT, we have defended a code of behavior for multi-national companies. Through this code, companies should recognize trade unions and their representatives, depending on the country they come from. In the same way, they cannot wander from one place to the other trying to avoid the recognition of trade unions, nor will they be able to interfere in the initiatives of the workers, such as happened in La Conexion Familiar.

I am convinced that the colleague Morton Bahr is also going to talk about this and in advance I would like to express that we coincide with his opinions and we are willing and determined to go on in our joint struggle.

To conclude, I would like to make one final remark. It is definitely the first time in which a Mexican trade union initiates a legal action to support labor struggle for the American workers. This is for us an incredible engagement and commitment that we undertake. We believe that the conditions to act in such a manner will be more favorable in the future because within the Mexican labor movement, there are important changes taking place and in which we communication workers are taking part of.

This redefines the traditional patterns of international labor organization, in order to be able to believe in justice and that this is not only an idea but a real possibility, that it is based on unity and solidarity amongst all workers.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Mr. Hernandez Juarez.

I now invite to the podium Mr. Morton Bahr, the president of the Communications Workers of America and a member of the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO.

MR. BAHR: Good morning.

MR. OTERO: Good morning.

MR. BAHR: I am Morton Bahr, the president of the Communications Workers of America. CWA represents about 600,000 workers, primarily in the telecommunications and information industries.

I want to commend the Secretaries of Labor of the United States, Mexico and Canada for their decision to hold this public forum on Sprint's sudden shutdown of La Conexion Familiar.

We were stunned when Sprint fired all of the workers within one week before they were scheduled to vote in a union election. This forum will help expose and we hope stop the use of sudden plant closing and other legal and illegal anti-union behavior which prevent workers from exercising their right to organize.

I also want to thank Deputy Under Secretary Jack Otero for presiding over this forum and giving the discharged Sprint workers the opportunity to finally be heard.

Finally, on behalf of the workers of LCF, I want to thank the Mexican Telephone Workers Union, STRM, and it's president, Francisco Hernandez Juarez, for taking up the cause of the LCF workers and filing a formal complaint under the provisions of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation.

I will submit for the record my complete written statement and attached exhibits. In this testimony I lay out in greater detail CWA's relationship with Sprint, Sprint's anti-union philosophy and an overview of the events which occurred at LCF. Today, given our limited time, I will focus on the importance of this forum and the recommendations we wish to present to the governments which have convened it.

The decision to hold this forum is a breakthrough for workers in Canada, Mexico and the United States who want to improve their working conditions and their standard of living by joining together to form a union. The forum has focused public attention on one of the worst cases of corporate abuse of workers rights and on the use by companies of a sudden plant or office closing to prevent their workers from organizing. Sprint's action epitomizes decades of increased attacks by corporations on workers rights.

This forum has focused attention also on the inability of U.S. labor laws to protect workers rights and the inability of the United States Government enforce its own laws.

The National Labor Relations Act is broken and our enforcement mechanisms are ineffective. We must act now to fix them. We hope this forum will contribute to efforts here and abroad to educate the public and our elected officials that meaningful reforms are needed if we want workers to organize and to bargain for a better life.

This public forum is important too because it demonstrates that the NAFTA labor side agreements provide another vehicle to hold Sprint and other companies who violate workers rights accountable for their actions.

As our country's integration into global economy deepens, we must look to trade agreements to establish an international code of conduct towards workers and their elected representatives. Foreign companies want access to the lucrative U.S. market and U.S. companies want to leverage their financial, technological and managerial to penetrate markets outside the U.S.

Companies on all sides want to increase opportunities for international trade and investment. Governments must balance these opportunities with the responsibilities of creating good jobs and respecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.

The Preamble and Annex 1 of the NAALC contain all the necessary objectives: the right to organize, the right to collective bargaining, the need to create employment opportunities, improve working conditions and raise living standards and the need to "protect, enhance and enforce basic workers' rights."

What is missing are effective remedies for violations of these objectives and prompt enforcement of these remedies. Under the current provisions of the NAFTA labor agreement, companies do not face any risks for blatantly violating the agreement. Yet there is nothing that companies understand better than risk. They manage for it every day of the year.

In the current political environment, where trade agreements are drawing more criticism, the governments of the U.S., Mexico and Canada are in a unique position to tell these companies in no uncertain terms that more trade agreements will never fly unless there are improved protections for workers, their jobs and their rights. The agreements must provide meaningful penalties for violation of these rights.

Today we are recommending that the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation be amended to include an international code of conduct for enterprises operating in the three countries which are parties to the NAFTA agreement.

CWA together other telephone unions affiliated with our international trade secretariat, PTTI, propose a code of conduct which in summary would require companies:

(1) To disclose to employees and their elected representatives company plans for investment, employment levels, technological change and movement of work.

(2) To meet annually with all their unions to discuss organizational rights, equal employment opportunities, safety and health, and education and training.

(3) To not interfere in worker organizational efforts where they conduct business.

(4) To recognize a union when the workers show the appropriate level of support.

(5) To not shift work from one nation to another to avoid a union.

The full text of the code of conduct is in my written statement.

In my written statement, we also make three recommendations to the government of the United States. I will summarize them here.

(1) We need meaningful penalties to deter companies from illegally interfering with their workers' right to organize. In the Sprint case, the violations were astounding yet the remedy was a mere notice to employees who have already been thrown out of work that the company will not do it again. This only added insult to injury.

(2) We advocate a change in the law which would deter companies from using the subterfuge of alleged business considerations to close a plant to avoid a union and prevent a first contract. Under current law, injunctive relief is heavily weighted toward the employer and has been awarded by the courts in only a few cases. We recommend that if a union has filed for an election or if an election has been won by a union but a first contract has not been reached, a company which is considering a shutdown for business reasons (a) must open its books to the employees and the union representatives and (b) must prove its business case to an independent arbitrator before it can shut a facility down.

(3) The Federal Government can refrain from doing business with major labor law violators. Defense contractors who have defrauded the taxpayer have had their right to bid on new contracts suspended. The U.S. Government should extend this practice to companies which have been found to have committed major violations of labor law.

Above all else, this forum is very important because it gives the Sprint workers their first real opportunity to tell the story of what happened at LCF. This is a story of a company, the Sprint corporation, the third largest long distance telephone company in the United States, that tells its managers that their main job is not to provide for quality telephone service, but to keep the union out at all costs. It's in their handbook.

It is a story of more than 200 workers, mostly Latino women, who had the courage and determination to withstand the threats, the coercion and the spying by management to stand up for their rights. They got within one week of accomplishing the unprecedented feat of forming a union at Sprint's long distance division.

This is also the story of how a company used every trick in the book to try to stop these workers and in so doing committed over 50 violations of law.

It is also the story of a management which suddenly realized they were about to lose their first union election and decided to shut the place down.

It is the story of a senior Sprint executive, the vice president of labor relations, who fabricated evidence submitted to a government agency to make it appear that the closure was done for business reasons.

It is the case of a company which not only shut down a facility, suddenly and brutally in one day, to prevent these workers from voting in the union election, but did it in a way which sent a chilling message to all of its other employees that unionization is off limits.

You will hear today from the Sprint workers themselves who will describe for you in vivid detail the poor working conditions at this company, the energy and spirit of their organizing efforts, the anti-union campaign launched by Sprint against their drive, and the residual long-term effects of the shutdown on their lives.

You'll hear from many others about the international repercussions, the outrage in the Latino community, the concern among elected officials that current law is incapable of protecting workers in the public interest and the extent to which Sprint's actions have been commonplace in the private sector.

The workers of LCF are still waiting for a remedy in the legal case which is outstanding against Sprint. More than two years will have passed when the National Labor Relations Board finally issues its order. And it will be years more before all appeals are exhausted. This situation is simply unacceptable.

That is why this public forum is so important, not only to the workers of LCF but to others who will face similar circumstances in the future. Sprint must be reminded again and again that CWA and all those who have stood up for the rights of these workers will never give up this fight until Sprint provides them with meaningful remedies, including compensation and job opportunities at other Sprint locations.

We know that in spite of the chilling effect of the LCF closing on other Sprint workers and the continued fear and intimidation by Sprint management Sprint workers will again stand up and seek to be recognized.

These workers in Sprint need to know that when that time comes the world will be watching and fair minded people will be ready to act against any attempt by Sprint to interfere with its workers' rights.

This forum gives the Sprint workers new hope that when that time comes the Federal Government and their elected representatives will have fixed our system of labor laws and be ready to enforce them.

The workers are not asking for handouts or entitlements. They are simply asking the government to level the playing field so they can stand up for their rights without the fear of reprisals from their employers. They should be able to organize into a union without the fear of losing their jobs.

We hope the testimony presented in this forum and the six-month study by the international labor secretariat will cause the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States to take the necessary measures to strengthen the NAFTA agreement to prevent the recurrence of the travesty suffered by the Sprint workers.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Mr. Bahr.

I would like to now invite the next presenter, Professor Roberto L. Corrada, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, who has registered to speak on behalf of Sprint Inc.

Professor Corrada, please.

PROFESSOR CORRADA: Good morning. My name is Roberto Corrada. I am an assistant professor of law at the University of Denver, College of Law, Denver Colorado. I have been teaching labor and employment law courses and courses in contract law and administrative law at the law school since 1990.

In December 1995, I was asked by Sprint Corporation to conduct an independent review of the regulatory activity undertaken and the two opinions that have been issued in a labor dispute involving La Conexion Familiar, LCF, a business entity that had been affiliated with Sprint. The questions posed to me were (1) whether the National Labor Relations Board's actions in this matter demonstrate enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act, NLRA, the United States labor law implicated by the dispute, and (2) whether the two opinions in this matter have applied the appropriate NLRA standard in deciding the dispute.

My conclusion based on a review of the decisions as well the enforcement activity undertaken by the NLRB in this matter is that United States labor laws involving the NLRA have been enforced and the proper standards applied.

In this testimony, I will first talk briefly about the origin and acceptability of the standard, the Right Line test applied by the district court judge deciding whether to issue a 10(j) injunction in the case and the administrative law judge deciding the merits of the case.

Next, I will assess the regulatory activity undertaken by the NLRB in this matter and finally I will discuss the two opinions, the district court opinion and the administrative law judge's opinion that have been issued in this case.

First, with respect to the standard applied, this matter implicates the NLRA, the United States labor law that governs relations between unions and management in the private sector.

MR. OTERO: Professor Corrada, they want you to slow down so that the translation can take place. Take your time.

PROFESSOR CORRADA: Excuse me. Maybe I had a little bit too much coffee this morning.

In particular, it involves a dispute under Section 8(a)(3) of the Act, which establishes at its core that it is an unfair labor practice for an employer to discriminate in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment, to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.

Administrative Law Judge Wacknov and District Court Judge Walker both applied the NLRB's Right Line standard in deciding the claims of the parties involving Section 8(a)(3) of the Act. The NLRB general counsel also argued for application of the Right Line standard in this case.

The standard was announced by the National Labor Relations Board some 16 years ago in its 1980 decision in Right Line and was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in its 1983 decision in NLRB v. Transportation Management Corporation as a reasonable interpretation of the requirements of Section 8(a)(3).

The Right Line standard may well represent the best approach to deciding who should prevail when legitimate but competing interests of labor and management must be reconciled under Section 8(a)(3). According to the Board, a dual motive case is presented under Section 8(a)(3) when there is evidence of employer reaction to union organizing activity but there is also believable competing evidence that an employer has acted pursuant to a legitimate business reason. This existence of both a good and a bad reason for the employer's action requires further inquiry into the role played by each motive.

In Right Line, the NLRB adopted a standard that was used by the United States Supreme Court in Mt. Healthy v. Doyle to decide a constitutional rights dispute between a school board and a teacher. The Supreme Court stated that a rule of causation which focuses solely on whether protected conduct played a part, substantial or otherwise, in a decision not to rehire could place an employee in a better position as a result of the exercise of constitutionally protected conduct than he would have occupied had he done nothing.

Most importantly, according to the court, the constitutional principle at stake is sufficiently vindicated if such an employee is place in no worse position than if he had not engaged in the conduct.

Following the Supreme Court's analysis in Mt. Healthy, the Right Line test announced by the NLRB places the initial burden on the Board's general counsel to make a prima facie showing sufficient to support the inference that protected conduct was a motivating factor in the employer's decision. Once this is established, the burden will shift to the employer to demonstrate that the same action would have taken place even in the absence of protected conduct.

The Right Line test is a well reasoned standard for governing dual motive cases, is consistent with the legislative history of the NLRA and fairly accommodates the legitimate competing interests of labor and of management under the Act.

The Right Line standard has been broadly accepted and indeed has become a fixture in United States labor and employment law. Since the Supreme Court's affirmance of the Right Line standard in 1983, it has been faithfully applied in scores of Section 8(a)(3) cases, yielding results in favor of both unions as well as employers.

The NLRB has applied the Right Line standard to partial closing cases similar to the LCF case on a number of cases. For example, the C.M. Breyer Corporation case in 1993, Cub Branch Mining in 1990, and the Redwood Empire case in 1989.

Moreover, the test has been used in cases involving employer action impinging constitutional rights, as in the Mt. Healthy case, and in non-employment cases involving dual motives where constitutional freedoms are implicated, as in the Arlington Heights case.

The test has also become an important standard in employment discrimination law in the United States. In 1989, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins in which it applied the Mt. Healthy Right Line test to dual motive cases brought under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which protects against discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.

Let me now turn to the application of the Right Line standard in the matter involving La Conexion Familiar, LCF. I will discuses first the NLRB's enforcement activity in the case, then the district court decision involving the 10(j) injunction and, finally, the administrative law judge's decision on the merits of the case.

In conducting my review of the NLRB's enforcement activity and the decisions by District Court Judge Walker and ALJ Wacknov, I have examined the written opinions as well as the briefs filed by both parties. This opinion is limited to a review of the written materials in this matter. I have not personally reviewed the documents filed with the ALJ or the district court and have relied on the characterizations made of them in the written ALJ and district court decisions and in the briefs filed by the parties. In addition, there can be no effective review of ALJ credibility determinations by persons like myself who have not personally listened to witness testimony.

Given all of that, with respect to the NLRB's enforcement activity, it is my considered opinion that the level of enforcement activity undertaken by the Board in this matter has been extraordinary. It is not common, for example, for the NLRB to seek a Section 10(j) injunction in a labor dispute. General Counsel Fred Feinstein stated in October of 1995 that, "The Board is filing more 10(j) cases although they still represent only about 3 percent of the total number of unfair labor practice complaints issued."

In addition to the NLRB 10(j) filing, the NLRB's general counsel's office has proceeded aggressively to enforce the NLRA in this matter. The NLRB general counsel's brief in this case filed with the ALJ is in excess of 250 pages in length, detailing a large amount of evidence and testimony. The brief is impressive with respect to the way it has organized the evidence and with respect to the way that it argues that the evidence should be assessed under the Right Line standard.

When the brief is considered alongside the NLRB's decision to seek a 10(j) injunction in the case it is more than fair to conclude that the Board's efforts in LCF have been above average in quality and extensive in scope.

As I mentioned before, the NLRB regional director, as part of its enforcement of the NLRA in this case, filed a petition in federal district court for the issuance of a 10(j) injunction. In the 9th Circuit, district courts must weigh the likelihood of success on the merits against the possibility of irreparable injury, mindful both of public interest and a federal court deference to NLRB decisions.

In assessing whether the Board was likely to prevail or merely had a fair chance of success on the merits, the district court properly chose to apply the Right Line test. The district court first analyzed the Board's evidence to determine whether a prima facie case had been presented. Based on the hearsay nature of the Board's evidence as well as the position of the persons making the allegations against respondent and the context in which alleged threatening statements were made, the district court characterized the Board's chances at a prima facie case as fair at best.

The district court nevertheless and in line with the Right Line requirements shifted its focus to analyze the quality of the respondent's evidence supporting its action as motivated by legitimate business reasons. Ultimately the district court was persuaded by the extent of the evidence presented by the employer that showed substantial losses by LCF. Rather than a projected profit of 7.9 million, LCF's actual earnings in January and February of '94 projected a year-end loss of 3.9 million.

In addition, between January and March 1994, the evidence showed that LCF lost 10,000 customers and that the churn rate, which is the percentage loss of customer base, was greater than 20 percent higher than projected.

The district court went on to weigh the hardships of an injunction on the parties and found that since the facility had already been closed for a time, the hardship of reopening would fall squarely on Sprint without much gain to the workers involved, many of whom were by that time unreachable or had already secured new employment. Thus, having failed to meet the burdens for a 10(j) injunction, the district court refused to grant preliminary relief.

Although the circumstances are certainly unfortunate, in my opinion it is hard to find fault with the district court's opinion. The court followed the standards for 10(j) injunctions in the 9th Circuit to the letter, engaging in a step-by-step approach to each requirement. Thus, in my opinion, the district court evaluated the evidence on both sides and applied the burden shifting analysis of Right Line in an appropriate manner.

A hearing was held on the merits of the LCF case in San Francisco during November and December of 1994. The hearing was presided by Gerald Wacknov, an administrative law judge in the NLRB's division of judges. At the outset, I find it striking and significant that both the district court deciding the Section 10(j) matter and the ALJ deciding the merits of the case both viewed the evidence in a similar fashion. The fact that two independent decisionmakers reviewing much of the same general evidence have reached similar conclusions with respect to such evidence tends to corroborate and lend credence to the view that the Right Line standard was properly invoked and appropriately applied.

The ALJ applied the Right Line standard in deciding the dispute between management and labor. In my view, this standard was appropriately applied given the quality of the evidence presented by both management and labor. It is precisely when there is good evidence on both sides of a dispute that the Right Line standard is appropriate invoked. There is nothing in the opinion that is unusual or remarkable compared with other ALJ decisions that I have reviewed that apply the Right Line standard in a dispute of this nature.

A review of the record evidence shows a sufficient amount of evidence to make out a prima facie case under a Right Line analysis. However, the record also shows substantial evidence to conclude that the employer met its burden of proving that LCF would have been closed for legitimate financial reasons.

The employer's evidence concerning a $12 million variance in forecasts versus outlook for LCF in 1994 and the employer's evidence concerning the future of LCF given competition by MCI and AT&T was persuasive, tending to support the ALJ's conclusion that the employer's burden under Right Line was met.

Based on the very detailed findings of facts set out in over 30 pages of the ALJ's decision, I can fairly conclude that the ALJ reached a reasonable decision under the Right Line approach.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Professor Corrada.

The chair is advised that one of the registered speakers, Mr. Calvin McDaniels, is unable to be present with us this morning. Should Mr. McDaniels appear in the hall later today, we will allow him the opportunity to make his presentation.

At this time, we will call the next person that registered in sequence.

I would like to invite to the podium Ms. Dora Vogel, who is a former employee of La Conexion Familiar.

MS. VOGEL: Buenos Dias.

MR. OTERO: Good morning.

MS. VOGEL: (UNTRANSLATED TESTIMONY IN SPANISH.)

(THROUGH TRANSLATOR) ... terrible conditions under which we had to work. I had to know how to sell the service and I could reach my quota that we had to fulfill. The manager told us that we would fill our quota, we would get a commission and continuously we were being reminded how much more we could make with this commission. Sometimes the sales quota would go up. If we would manage to sell 15 sales, then the quota immediately went up to 18. It was never important to see how many sales we made. We never got the commission, even though we would ask when are we going to get this commission. They always had a reason or an excuse why we were not being paid that commission for our quota.

We could not speak amongst ourselves. We were told to continue working, that we had to keep making call after call after call. The pressure to sell was enormous and constantly we were being watched to see what we were doing. We were allowed to go to the bathroom at lunchtime or during our rest periods. We had to ask for a special permission to go to the bathroom if it wasn't done during our rest period. Sometimes we would ask for permission and they would tell us that we would have to wait until the regular time to go to the toilet.

Whenever we had the meetings with our supervisors, we were told that we should not drink too much water so that we didn't have to go to the bathroom all the time. Since we were on the phone constantly, we got very thirsty, but we didn't have any water to drink. There was a water fountain for everybody, for the 130 telemarketers, and this was broken. It didn't work. Most of us would bring our own water.

About the first of May, the manager announced that the work schedule was going to change. That very same day we were told what was going to be our next schedule. We had two schedules. Monday to Fridays we worked from 12:30 to 9:00 and Tuesdays and Saturdays we worked from 10:00 to 5:00 p.m. My schedule was changed for Tuesday and for Saturday. I was very frightened because I could not work on Saturdays because I had to take care of the children. My mother-in-law would look after my two children during the week. My baby was barely four months old and I knew that my mother-in-law could not take care of them on Saturdays because she worked on Saturdays.

So therefore other workers and myself went to talk to the manager about this problem, but we were told that this schedule would not be changed, that we had to work according to the days that were given to us. For me, this meant more expenses because I had to pay somebody to baby sit my children on Saturdays.

Also, besides the tensions that we felt all the time because we had to make so many calls to make our quota, we also had the tension that we were going to be fired any moment.

One day, one of the colleagues was called to the manager's office. She's here. I saw her. She used to sit in front of me. All of us who sat around here were waiting anxiously to find out what had happened to her, what had the manager said to her. A while later, she came back with the manager. The manager was shouting at her, saying that she couldn't take anything out of her desk and that she had to leave immediately. The manager told her that he was going to call the security guard so that he would see and escort her out of the office. This is what they would do always with any worker who was being dismissed.

My colleague said that the guard would have to bodily carry her out because she was not going to be escorted out. All this was going on around me. I got very nervous but I looked around and then I broke out in tears. I started to cry. Others started to cry also. I just could not hold back my tears. Somebody came and helped me to the bathroom. They gave me a little bit of water. And I couldn't believe that somebody could be so shabbily treated in front of all the colleagues and all the other workers. Everybody heard and saw what was going on.

When I found out about the union, I felt a little better. I was a little calmer. I felt that we needed a union in order to improve our working conditions. When somebody asked me to sign up, I did so immediately and I even asked around and took the petition around for others to sign to.

At the beginning of June, we all used union T-shirts to show our solidarity. And even though we were also nervous because we didn't want to so openly show our support of the union, nevertheless we felt pretty good about wearing our T-shirts because we saw that the majority was supporting the union.

Then I heard rumors that if I went into the union the office would close, but I didn't believe it because why on earth would they close? They were selling very well. We knew that the business was going very well because we were the ones that were making the calls that were bringing in the sales. I felt that many of the workers were in unions and I figured that Sprint would then pay us better.

The supervisors tried to show us that sales were very low. During a meeting they had different graphs where they showed us that sales were off, but we knew better than that.

On the 14th of July, the day that they announced the closing down of the facility, I heard somebody saying that the office would be closed and I saw that there was a lot going on and I suspected that something was up.

When they made the announcement, we were all taken by surprise. I thought that I would call my husband, but then I figured how upset he was going to be because I was really being the only breadwinner in my family. My husband could not work. He had hurt his wrist. There was no money. How were we going to pay our rent? How were we going to purchase food? What was going to happen to the children?

After the office closed down, it was very tough. My husband went back to work even though he still was in pain. His wrist had not healed completely. And to this day, he hurts because it was never healed properly.

We borrowed from other members of the family in order to continue living. Catholic Charities paid our rent one month. The food that we got from the union helped us to put some food on the table. It took us one year in order to be able to get on our feet economically once again.

I will never be able to forget the way they made us work, the promises they gave us that they never came through and all the pain and suffering that was brought about only because they did not want a union.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Ms. Vogel.

Mr. Federico Anaya, president of the Law Firm of Anaya Valdepena, Management Attorneys and Consultants, who are also counsel to the Confederation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Mexico.

Mr. Anaya.

MR. ANAYA: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) Thank you very much. Good morning.

I would like to complement Mrs. Vogel for her outstanding presentation. Certainly we are all fired up after listening to her so that we can look after and try to resolve these type of problems that affect humanity.

I would like to divide my talk in three parts. First of all, I would like to talk about some legal aspects. Number two, I want to talk about some commercial aspects and the third part will talk about the labor relations.

In the first place, I would like to tell you that the world is full of contracts. The contracts are accords and agreements of goodwill. Let's give an example. Let's say I come out of the university. I have just graduated as a lawyer and I don't have any clientele. I don't have any clients. I must have clients. In order to have the clients, I must be able to demonstrate that I am capable and I am professional. The title alone is not going to bring me clients.

We can also say that if I open up a business or a store the fact that I am just opened up for business is not going to bring clients to buy my wares and we can think the same about a union.

A union has to be formed because the laws of international says so. This is laws all over the world. But setting up a union per se does not mean that it is automatically a collective automatization and I am not trying to justify in any way the attitude of certain companies. I am not justifying it. But as I was saying, we need the goodwill of the person who is going to make a collective contract with workers. We cannot do anything against anybody's will.

It is so much so that at least in my country there is a very clear standard that determines the following. When a union tries to have a collective contract, they have to follow a certain procedure and this procedure is a document has to be written, officially sent to the National Board of Arbitration and the threat by the union is that they will shut down the company if this contract is not signed. What does the company do? What is the defense of the company?

The company either signs the contract or it doesn't want to sign the contract for other reasons and does not go before -- what can happen is that they will have to pay off the workers. But if these workers are fired unduly, the law protects the workers that belong to a union and when there is a dismissal of such grand magnitude, the companies also have to pay indemnization, which means paying three months salary if the conflict is not resolved.

Therefore, it is very clearly set forth that when the companies make use of their right not to have this collective contract they have to then pay damages and severance pay. In other words, they get penalized and they have to pay off all of the workers that are dismissed.

When a company is made up this company has a whole series of factors that are very specific to them and the company has to select vendors, personnel, the bank they are going to work with and also, why not say so, the company has the right to, let's say, lean toward certain factors that are going to make the company successful and to make things easier for the company. When there are great dark clouds in the sky, the company takes evasive action, just like a pilot does when he goes to a higher altitude or a lower altitude to avoid the bad weather that lies ahead. This, I think, occurs to everybody who is head of any company.

Now, regarding the third point that I mentioned, I would like to say to all of you that in my modest opinion nobody can discuss the fact that the workers don't have a right to unionize and nobody has to say anything against -- nobody can say anything against that the companies can also do something to protect themselves. Nobody can do that. So the value of the union value is parallel to the company whether it's going to select or not select or sign or not sign a contract with this or that union, which maybe will bring on problems later on.

I would like to insist on the fact that at this forum we are not just addressing an individual case. We are talking about the prospects for understanding between unionized employees and a group of companies which also have the right to carry out their program and I say this because there are assembly lines, there are organized services, financial services, commercial services, there are systems such as these, so the workers have the need to continue their associations. They exist as a need to defend the needs of organized employees.

What are these interests or needs? There are basically two: just wages and also just and fair working conditions that have to do with benefits and hygiene conditions and so on.

The businessman invests capital for a profit and when the economic conditions are adverse, for example, the price of materials does not allow him to be competitive in the market or when banks withdraw financial support, fear regarding a new and unknown trade union, and this happens to everybody when we don't know what's happening, a trade union which is coming about of which you know only that it is being created, it is sending a red flag regarding a risk. You don't know what will happen with a nascent or new trade union. You don't know the intentions of this group. It's not the same thing with a trade union that has been in existence for a time and the businessman knows what this trade union does day by day.

So you have to see what's happening. There are trade unions that would increase the risk factor for companies. This is not a problem regarding the law but a problem regarding attitudes and as Warren Edmondson said when he addressed the forum, you cannot legislate attitude, you cannot legislate goodwill, the desire to understand each other. This comes out of the quality of human beings and the quality of trade unions and companies. When companies seek only profits and they forget, as I told a son of mine, the best thing you have in your company is your workers and you should deal with them as though they were your best customers, when you forget this, problems crop up.

This social phenomenon, the establishment of a new trade union, makes every businessman think whether it is not better not to deal with this trade union because he doesn't know whether this trade union will be something he cannot control. He ignores whether his authority will be undermined. There is this fear installed. You don't know whether there will be a lack of discipline, a lack of respect and whether down the road this will mean that the company will go bankrupt or that productivity will go down, that you don't work so hard because in any event the employee will feel exploited, whether the trade union would be an enemy of the company or whether the trade union leaders are going to ask for special perks and benefits.

That is why if the trade union is known, is a known quantity, if it is famous for being a professional and authentic, an objective and a modern trade union, these risk factors go down to the extent that the trade union has shown that it has goodwill, that it wants to get involved in the company's decisionmaking, that it shows respect for management, that it promotes order and hygiene and good working conditions, and that it has concerns in terms of reducing waste for the company, that it wants to participate to increase productivity through training of workers, that it seeks friendly resolution of conflict without resorting to strikes, that it wants to improve the environment, the overall working environment, in the company and that it wants to bring up ideas that may lead to higher competitiveness for the company and increase profits which may be distributed among workers.

This is a good quality merchandise which you always buy. When companies and trade unions change their positions radically and get, closer collective bargaining will always be an instrument of goodwill and peace and you will have balance and justice in labor relations.

MR. OTERO: Thank you.

The chair wishes to correct the record. I failed upon introducing Mr. Anaya to underscore that he represents part of the tripartite delegation from Mexico, representing the employers' side.

At this juncture in the proceedings, I think it is fair that the chair express deep appreciation to all the presenters for the extraordinary discipline that you have shown in observing my admonition. Some of you have not used the 10 minutes that is allocated to you and in balance, we are doing very well on time. I want to thank you very much for this. We have also had a presenter that did not appear this morning, so we are doing well time-wise, but I want to signify my appreciation for your discipline and for your cooperation with the chair in ensuring the orderly process of these proceedings.

I would like to ask also if Mr. John Zucker from Congressman Tom Lantos' office is in the audience. If he is, please stand up. Okay. Thank you very much. I don't see Mr. Zucker.

Now, I will like to call to the podium the next presenter, Maria Blanco, Associate Director of the Women's Employment Rights Clinic at Golden Gate University School of Law.

Ms. Blanco.

MS. BLANCO: Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you. Good morning.

MS. BLANCO: Good morning. Good morning. My name is Maria Blanco and, as indicated, I am an associate professor of law at Golden Gate University School of Law here in San Francisco, a couple of blocks over.

Together with the director of the clinic, Marcy Seville, who is also here, and our clinic students, our clinic represents currently over 60 La Conexion Familiar employees who were denied California unemployment benefits after they were fired from La Conexion Familiar. Our lawsuit is a challenge to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board decision that workers who had received offset payments, in other words, payments because Sprint closed it's plant in violation of the notification law, the Board decided that they could not simultaneously receive unemployment benefits.

I am very honored to be here at this forum which is really historic and one of a kind and I think that given the globalization of labor and capital that others have talked about today it's no coincidence that the first case of this kind brought in the United States under the labor agreement is one in California involving Latino workers.

It brings together many of the elements that many of us working in the labor movement and unemployment issues and immigrant worker issues in California have been seeing develop over the years.

The purpose of my testimony here today is to describe how the sector of the United States workforce represented by the more than 200 employees fired from La Conexion Familiar is often unable to enjoy or assert the labor rights they are entitled to theoretically under state and federal labor laws. When I say this sector of the workforce, I am referring to fairly recent immigrant workers who are at the bottom of the economic ladder here in California and other parts of the country.

As you will hear today and have already heard, the workers at La Conexion Familiar were primarily Latinas, non-English speaking and, for the most part, unskilled. For many, this was their first full-time permanent job. Many of us in San Francisco thought a company like La Conexion Familiar represented the welcome possibility that the very consumers targeted by companies attempting to capture the Spanish-speaking market might also result in good jobs for those consumers. This would have been a welcome change from the concentration of immigrant workers in low paying, dead end jobs which in spite of the anti-immigrant clamor heard in many quarters these days few other workers are willing to perform.

Initially, the employees, and you will probably hear this today, of La Conexion Familiar felt fortunate beyond all their dreams when they got their jobs. With Sprint, they thought they had the unique opportunity to work at above the minimum wage and to be employed at jobs where their native language was an asset and not a drawback.

Yet the job also had problems. Very big problems. The hours, the speed-up, as Ms. Vogel testified today, the lack of breaks. Non-payment of wages. Non-payment of commissions. So the workers who felt so fortunate to have this job had the courage, or some would say the nerve, to assert their right to decent working conditions through seeking to join a union, their right under United States labor laws.

Unfortunately, as highlighted by the complaint filed by Mexico, United States labor relations law has failed them and for these highly vulnerable workers, the failure has occurred on several fronts, not just the National Labor Relations Act that we have heard about today.

For example, and I'll start with the National Labor Relations Act. You will hear substantial testimony today about the circumstances surrounding Sprint's closure, how the company sales were growing, how employees told that the workforce was going to grow. That is until over 50 percent of the workers indicated their support for representation by the Communications Workers of America.

Despite the decision by the National Labor Relations Board judge that Sprint's transfer was purely economic, the workers, the Union, many experts and non-experts and many people here today who followed this case very closely are convinced and know that the company's move was nothing but good old time illegal union busting.

To the workers of La Conexion Familiar, the protections of Section 8 and Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act proved meaningless. And the fact remains that La Conexion Familiar ex-employees will never see a remedy for Sprint's illegal actions and this forum is not a remedy. We are glad we are here, but it is not. Even if back pay were ever awarded, this would not compensate for the lost jobs, for the havoc created for the workers who faced this job loss, and for their then having to be thrust in a labor market where they face the triple barrier of being unskilled immigrant women of color with very few chances of employment in a city like San Francisco.

Violation of federal plant closure laws. La Conexion Familiar employees were also treated to a clear violation of federal law that required Sprint to give 60 days notice to its employees before plant closure. This protection is set forth in the Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification Act, known as WARN by many of us, which was passed in Congress in 1989. Thus, Sprint compounded its unfair labor practice with a violation of the WARN Act. The purpose of this long fought for provision is to give employees time to retrain, adjust and seek work when informed that their place of employment is about to close. No workers have ever needed notice to retrain and prepare more than those of La Conexion Familiar.

Often knowing minimal English and with few economic resources, the sudden closure threw their lives and that of their families into complete turmoil. I know you are going to hear more about that this afternoon.

Denial of California unemployment benefits, perhaps the part of this that I am the most familiar with. The process of applying and obtaining unemployment benefits should have been relatively simple for the ex-employees of La Conexion Familiar. Instead, their attempt to obtain this basic safety net turned out to be a nightmare. As a result of the California Department of Unemployment's decision that any penalties paid by Sprint for its violation of the WARN Act made the workers ineligible for unemployment benefits, the fired workers went months without unemployment. Even more incredible, the fired employees had penalties imposed upon them by the Unemployment Insurance Department that accused them of lying on their application when they stated that the plant closure fines they received were not wages. Thus the fired employees face two sets of unemployment hearings: one to determine their eligibility to benefits and another to prove that they had not made false statements and not be assessed penalties.

Failure to receive wages under California wage and hour laws. Among the working conditions at Sprint La Conexion Familiar which fueled the unionization drive was the employer's failure to consistently pay overtime penalties and commissions, as required by California law and regulations. To resolve this breach in the law, the workers turned to traditional federal labor law remedies, the National Labor Relations Act and the Section 7 right to join unions and pursue collective bargaining.

When the plant closure effectively eliminated that avenue of resolution for the wage claims, the employees were left to individually file wage claims. Next month, more than a year and a half after La Conexion Familiar closed, many of the claims for unpaid wages will finally go to a hearing before California's labor commissioner. With no union to help them, the ex-employees, many of them non-English speaking and from countries with no comparable laws, face this complex wage claim process alone. Fortunately, here in San Francisco La Rasa Central Legal has stepped forward to help with the wage claim and is representing many of the workers.

Thus, two years after Sprint's sudden closure of La Conexion Familiar in order to avoid collective bargaining, the majority of the workers are still unemployed, still engaged in complex legal proceedings to recover partial unemployment benefits, still trying to recover unpaid wages which Sprint owes them, and the NLRA case is winding its way through the legal process.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the eyes of many of La Conexion Familiar workers the United States system of labor laws has not worked. Wage laws, unemployment laws, labor relations law, plant closure notification laws, all failed in this case example. It is not an exaggeration to say that many believe that their attempt at unionization and collective bargaining fared no better here in the United States' system of labor relations than in other countries where labor rights are considered to be notably less than in the United States.

For now, they are left with serious doubts about the true right to freely associate and it may be a long time before they recover their faith in our legal system.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Ms. Blanco, before you depart, first of all, would it be possible for us to have a copy of your statement?

MS. BLANCO: Yes. I brought some copies.

MR. OTERO: And, secondly, I did not quite follow the sequence of your presentation. I was distracted, so I apologize.

MS. BLANCO: Perhaps it was me.

MR. OTERO: From the sequence of the WARN Act and the role of the California state unemployment insurance, would you please repeat that for the record, please?

MS. BLANCO: Sure. Do you want me to explain or to read it?

When Sprint closed without giving the 60 days notice required under the law, what it did was it gave he employees what are called offset payments. What an employee is allowed to do when a plant closes without notice is take the employer to court. That's the remedy. You take the employer to court for violation of the notice requirement and then you can get 60 days salary because you didn't have the advance notice.

Some employers rather than go to court anticipate that they're going to lose in court and they offset that and they give it to the fired employees at the time that they fire them.

The employees in this case received those offset payments and as a result when they applied for unemployment benefits and they filled out the section that says have you received any wages they said no because these are not wages. This is a penalty which actually you have to normally go to court to obtain. And the unemployment appeals board in California has decided that they are wages and we are currently appealing that decision and arguing that those payments are really a fine meant to enforce the plant closure law and they should not be considered wages.

MR. OTERO: The California state board has interpreted that that 60-day payment was wages.

MS. BLANCO: Exactly.

MR. OTERO: I see. Okay. That's the portion that I had not quite understood before.

MS. BLANCO: Okay. Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Ms. Blanco.

The chair now calls to the podium Ms. Liliette Jiron, a former employee of La Conexion Familiar.

Ms. Jiron?

MS. JIRON: Good morning.

MR. OTERO: Good morning.

MS. JIRON: Hello. My name is Liliette Jiron.

MR. OTERO: Do you want a glass of water?

MS. JIRON: A tissue would do.

MR. OTERO: A tissue? I don't have a tissue.

(Pause)

MS. JIRON: Thank you.

My introduction to Sprint's anti-union tactics of threats and intimidation began on my job interview. I applied for a telemarketer position at Sprint La Conexion Familiar in the spring of 1994. During my interview, I was told the Union was trying to organize at LCF but the troublemakers would get fired eventually. I was told I should have no part of them. I was told that some people who worked at LCF were ungrateful. My interviewer said that these people don't deserve a job this good because they don't speak any English. He continued to say they should be happy to have this job.

Although the tension in the workplace frightened me, I desperately needed the job so when it was offered I said yes.

I had been out of work for six months. My fiance was our sole supporter. Our bills were piling up and we were unable to pay rent --

MR. OTERO: Take your time, Ms. Jiron\. Take your time to compose yourself. There is no hurry.

MS. JIRON: We were unable to pay rent on our apartment. We had to move with my two children into a studio apartment. This job was an opportunity to make some money to help pay the rent, buy food, diapers and clothing for my children.

Within three weeks of arriving at LCF, I was asked to spy on my co-workers. As I was on probation for my first 90 days, I felt I had no choice but to do as asked. I couldn't lose this job. My supervisor asked me to search through my co-workers drawers after hours to see if anyone in my group was hiding union materials in their desks. I was also asked to talk with my co-workers and find out who was the leader of union supporters in my group.

During break, my supervisor would ask me what I had learned about my co-workers' involvement with CWA. I was hired along with four other women. Two of them signed their names to the union petition. My group supervisor told me to talk with them and try to get them to take their names off the petition. I was told they would find a reason to fire any new person who signed the petition. They said it would be easy as we were still on probation. There was a constant fear that we would be fired if we supported the Union.

About ten days after I started working at Sprint, they fired someone at her workstation right in front of everyone. They told her to get her things and get out. I don't know why she was fired but I felt even more threatened. I couldn't believe that they would fire someone like that in front of everyone. It made me want to stay away from the union supporters.

But I understood why my co-workers wanted to form a union. We had problems getting paid. Also we had a commission program. I never received a commission check. They kept changing the rules on the number of sales we needed. Every supervisor had a different quota. At one group meeting I asked about the commission program. I was yelled at and made to feel stupid for asking the question.

We were not allowed to go to the bathroom until our break time. Also, we were on the phone all day and our throats got dry and sore. They told us not to drink a lot of water so we wouldn't need the bathroom breaks.

On payday, we had to wait until our supervisor wanted to give us the paychecks. She said she didn't want to give them to us at lunchtime because we would go to the bank and take longer lunch. We were under such tight control all the time. They just didn't respect us.

One day when they were remodeling the floor above us, horrible fumes came through the vents. People were coughing. I got a rash on my arms, but they wouldn't let us leave. Finally, after two hours we were told we could go home.

We all knew we needed a union but the frightened and intimidated many of us. We were too afraid to say it publicly. They kept telling us if we voted for the Union, the office would close down and their threats to close the office came true.

A week before our chance to vote in the union election we were called in the conference room. It was just before lunch. They locked all the doors. There were security guards at each exit. They told us LCF was closing that day. They said we had until four p.m. to clear our stuff. As we left, we were each personally searched and they went through our belongings.

For me, everything fell apart that day. I couldn't face being out of work. I started abusing alcohol. I was so depressed. I fought with my fiance and I yelled at my children. It was hard for me to get out of bed. I didn't want to do anything. I felt so helpless.

Financially, we were having a hard time. I was too depressed to look for work and the bills were piling up. I was unable to pay for my car insurance, so it was eventually canceled but I still had to drive so I did and I got caught. I had to spend five hours in jail for driving without insurance and a license.

It took me a year to finally make sense of everything and to start to get myself together. I thank my fiance for seeing me through this. I got another job through the unemployment with an Internet provider. Next month I celebrate my year anniversary at this job.

After a very tough year, I am happy. My fiance and I are still saving money hoping to buy a home.

But my experience at Sprint changed everything for me. I will always carry around the fear of being fired and I will remember the threats to close if we voted for the Union. And I will remember the day that they did what they said. And to think all we wanted was a union.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Ms. Jiron.

We had two no-shows this morning which added to the cooperation of all the presenters have made the morning session go faster than we had anticipated.

I wonder if I could perhaps call someone who is scheduled to be here this afternoon, have one more speaker, and then we will recess until the afternoon session to allow the interpreters an opportunity to have a longer rest. They have been doing an excellent job and we have not given them the opportunity to rest.

So I wonder if Mr. Sergio Tapia is in the audience and I wonder if he would mind speaking now rather than later. Is that okay?

Let me introduce formally Mr. Sergio Tapia, who is with the Consultants Associates in Monterrey, Mexico. Mr. Tapia is a management consultant and we invite him to come to the podium.

MR. TAPIA: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) Thank you very much, Mr. Otero. I thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.

Actually, I had brought with me the paper I wanted to submit to this forum this afternoon. However, I believe it's not worthwhile. I think that I will present in a somewhat different format and I am modifying it or I am adapting it to what I have heard so far.

With due respect, I think it sounds like an encounter between the good guys and the bad guys. Naturally, the presentation of working conditions in such a dramatic manner under which -- or the dramatic way in which the workers have presented how they were working at Sprint make us believe that they are the good ones and also the presentation or the introduction that was given to this forum recognizing, of course, the sacred right to unionization of workers not only in this country but in the three countries represented here and also in most parts of the world and, of course, that leads us to admit it is a real situation. The press, the media, are present and this also gives recognition to the good guys, only the poor management I think in this case is very poorly represented. The manager of the company, I think, was under shock and did not want to attend. The attorney who submitted the case and who explained the legal resolutions already left -- I can see that he already returned but, I mean, he only received applause by three people, I counted them very discretely.

Mr. Anaya, who represents an important section of the Mexican management, also received only very little recognition on behalf of the forum but, of course, I believe this is rather natural considering this intense participation and attendance on behalf of representatives of the workers.

Considering all these circumstances, I can only adhere to the good guys and recognize, of course, the sacred right of workers to form a union. I don't think that any rational person in this day and age denies that. Of course I recognize the success Mr. Hernandez Juarez has had in directing his trade union and the success he has had achieved for his union. It is very impressive what successes have been achieved also on behalf of other union leaders throughout the world. This dramatic representation of the Sprint case really motivates us, really fills us with emotion, feelings of empathy towards workers. I can think of other dramatic and emotional cases that have been shown on the big screen. For example, the case of Norma Rae, there's a great movie by Depardeau called "Termination" about the workers in Europe and simply the kind of epilogue I would like to talk about in the last part of my presentation.

I want to make the following reflection. Social justice traditionally tends to create a balance between opposed rights or opposing rights. Also traditionally workers rights have been considered weaker or more vulnerable than the rights of its counterpart or the complement which is the employer, the management. However, in recent years, this situation has tended to revert and has created situations in which workers rights exceed sometimes those of the management, recognizing that these circumstances, of course, vary from one region to the other or from one industrial sector to the other. For example, we could say that labor rights of the agricultural worker in California are weaker than those of the steelworker in Pittsburgh or that the labor rights of the workers, for example, in the state Chiapas are weaker than those of the workers in general in the State of California.

Therefore, we need to be very cautious in studying case by case and not making generalizations and saying that the workers rights are in general more vulnerable or weaker.

I believe that workers have the right to unionize if they so wish, but I also defend the right of the employer to close a plant if its not cost efficient or if it's strategically convenient for his business. I also believe that this forum in a certain way cannot really resolve the controversy that is being presented here. It is a controversy that the United States through its legitimately represented agencies and through its laws that have also been approved in this country have resolved.

Unfortunately in this case, for the employer -- of course I believe that the workers have the right to unionize, that is something that the forum needs to recognize, but also the forum needs to recognize that the employer has the right to create successful businesses.

I believe that by recognizing these rights this forum will have fulfilled its commitment with specific cases with such as Sprint's case in this country or Sony which will soon be admitted to Mr. Otero and maybe some other people of this forum in Monterrey, my hometown, will be resolved according to the laws of each country and according to the circumstances of each specific case.

Thank you very much and I know that I will not get a lot of applause.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Mr. Tapia.

Your presentation gives the chair the opportunity to wrap up this morning's session by underscoring two or three points that I think are germane.

The intent of this forum was never to put in question the process of law that has been pursued through the National Labor Relations Board. That is a process that speaks for itself. A decision was made by the judge. The Union is appealing. The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board is appealing that process. It's there on its own.

The reason we are here today is because we have a duty under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation to examine the question of labor law and its application in the three NAFTA countries. Mexico, the United States, and Canada pay the greatest of importance to the principle of freedom of association and the right to strike and we want to underscore by this forum and by a number of other activities how sacred we, the three countries, the three governments, believe that such freedom is.

We had hoped through this forum, and we still have this afternoon plus a number of other activities, to try to examine in more detail and an in-depth analysis of the impact that the sudden closure of plants and factories have on that very principle of freedom of association.

Naturally the forum is generated as a result of the case that was filed with the Mexico NAO pursuant to the Sprint case and that's what gave rise to this forum, but we hope that in the process of this discussion, as well as in the study that we have commissioned through the Labor Secretariat in Dallas that we will be able to examine cases other than just the case of Sprint, other instances in the United States, in Mexico and in Canada where similar sudden closures may have an impact on that very basic freedom which is embodied in Convention 98 of the ILO.

And so it is in that context that we hope that these discussions as well as the study of the Labor Secretariat will enable us to examine in more detail what impact the incidents have on that freedom of association which is one of the main components of our labor agreement on cooperation between the three countries.

So I thank you, Mr. Tapia, for giving me the opportunity to make this clarification just before we break for lunch.

Let me suggest that we will have a little longer period of recess than we had anticipated. We will not come back here until 2:00 this afternoon, but I will ask you if you will kindly be here before 2:00 so that we can proceed on time precisely at 2:00.

This forum is now recessed for lunch. Thank you very much.

(Whereupon, the forum was recessed, to be reconvened this same day, Tuesday, February 27, 1996, at 2:00 p.m.)

   AFTERNOON SESSION

2:00 p.m.

MR. OTERO: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Muy buenos tardes a todos, senoras y senores.

I ask that you take your seats, as we are about to begin the second session of this public forum today.

I would like to announce that in view of the fact that we have received word that some of the registered speakers are unable to come to present the testimony, we are going to have a little more time this afternoon than I had anticipated and I also have a special request from the interpreters.

This morning, some of the speakers because of the pressure of having to give their speech in 10 minutes, they spoke too rapidly, thereby making it difficult for the interpreters to properly translate and enunciate every word.

So this afternoon, I am taking the liberty as chair to expand the period of each speaker from 10 to 12 minutes, given the fact that we have some vacancies in the speaker slots.

But I will ask the speakers if you already have a 10-minute speech, try to give it in 12 minutes, all right? Let us not be running far afield, but you can speak slower so that you can allow the interpreters to do their job very well.

And I would like to say parenthetically that I have been listening to the speakers from time to time and the interpreters are doing an excellent job of accurately and properly doing both English to Spanish.

(Applause.)

Very well. The program this afternoon calls for the first speaker to be the Honorable Mayor of the City of San Francisco, Mr. Willie Brown, but we have not heard whether he is on his way or not, so we are not going to prolong the meeting any longer.

We do know, however, that Congressman Tom Lantos, who is from this district is unable to be here, but we are very fortunate that Mr. Lantos has asked one of his key collaborators in the Congress, Mr. John Zucker, who is a member of his staff, he is a legislative assistant, and he is here with us to deliver a presentation on behalf of Congressman Lantos.

So I would like to ask Mr. Zucker to come forward to the podium.

Please proceed.

MR. ZUCKER: Thank you, Mr. Otero.

Thank you to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. And I have timed this speech, it's only about eight minutes.

My name is John Zucker. I am a legislative aide to Congressman Tom Lantos in his Washington office.

Congressman Lantos wishes to express his profound gratitude for being invited to participate in this important public forum and his sincerest regrets at not being able to attend. As you may know, the Congress is now back in session and several important votes were scheduled for today. He was therefore compelled to return to Washington. Nevertheless, he feels very strongly about the purpose and importance of this forum, and so he asked me to deliver his address to you exactly as he wrote it, so I will begin.

STATEMENT OF CONGRESSMAN TOM LANTOS: I would first like to commend you for holding this hearing which is the first of its kind under the terms of the NAFTA agreement on a case involving violations of workers rights in the United States.

As you know, I was strongly opposed to NAFTA, but it is now the law of the land and we must live by its provisions. I will be the first one to make sure that the spirit and intent of the principles contained in NAFTA's side agreement on labor cooperation are given maximum attention in the enforcement of NAFTA's provisions.

The North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation states plainly that every effort will be made to guarantee to all workers the right of freedom of association and the right to union representation. The Sprint workers who are the subject of today's hearing were clearly denied these rights.

Sprint's shutdown of La Conexion Familiar demonstrated that reality falls well short of the goals of the NAFTA agreement on labor cooperation. This is the case of a company which willfully violated our labor law and which was cited with more than 50 violations. It is also a case of human pain and suffering.

As you know, on July 14, 1994, 235 individuals were thrown out of work by Sprint. Many of these workers live in my congressional district. Today we heard and will hear from several of these workers who have told us in their own words the turmoil they have had to endure. I have heard their pain from the beginning of this tragic situation and I have observed firsthand the wrenching consequences of Sprint's behavior on these workers' lives.

In a split second, these workers were unemployed. Their families were in disarray and the promise of the American dream was destroyed.

"How could this happen?" they asked, "After all, this is America where laws as supposed to mean what they say and are supposed to be enforced to the letter."

When Sprint abruptly shut it's La Conexion Familiar facility one week before an organizing election, we had a classic case of U.S. labor law not adequately protecting American workers. Two hundred thirty-five workers lost their jobs, victims of an illegal campaign against workers rights.

More than a year and a half after losing their jobs, the workers at La Conexion Familiar are still struggling and awaiting justice. Out of the 177 workers who were scheduled to vote in the union election, fewer than half are working. The rest are still out of work.

The National Labor Relations Board moved as quickly as current law permitted, but in spite of their efforts it took over four months until the case was heard and well over a year until a decision was issued and the process is far from over. As of today, this case is 593 days old and it will take many more months before the Board issues a final decision, even as they expedite the case.

It will take years before all parties exhaust available appeals. In the meantime, the workers are the ones paying the price for the inability of our system to provide prompt and effective remedies for this obvious and egregious violation of the law.

The Sprint case is not atypical. The latest data available from the NLRB show that by the end of 1994 the median number of days it took for an unfair labor practice case to reach a decision by an Administrative Law Judge was 360 days and the median number of days to reach a Board decision was 601 days. What this means is that half of all these cases took even longer.

The average age of cases pending before the Board as of September 30, 1994 was 758 days. After that, years of appeals through the courts and we have to recognize that our current system of labor law is in fact an easy and inexpensive tool for companies to use to break the law rather than abide by it.

It is simply unjust for workers who have lost their jobs as a result of unfair labor practices by their employers to have to wait so long for a remedy. Our labor laws and their enforcement mechanisms must be strengthened.

Under these circumstances, I admire the courage of the workers at La Conexion Familiar. They stepped up to the plate and took a swing at their rights. They did not know that the game was rigged against them and that Sprint was throwing a spitball.

What would you do if you were a worker in a plant or a facility such as La Conexion Familiar and you were told by your supervisor or your manager, look, don't even try to organize because we'll shut the plant down and it will take you four to five years to prove that the company did anything wrong? In the meantime, you'll be out of work.

Under these circumstances, would anyone try to organize? There's no question that the average worker would say no.

This is want's so admirable about the Sprint workers at La Conexion Familiar. In spite of all the threats, the coercion and the spying, they still tried. They demonstrated that the importance of organizing a union is not from a bygone era but that organizing a union is more relevant than ever.

It is our system of labor law and its enforcement which must be brought into the 21st century. This is why I am testifying today in support of Sprint workers and all workers who want to organize. I will continue to do everything I can to seek a remedy in this case and will continue to push for labor law reform which provides prompt and effective penalties against labor law violators.

Workers must feel secure in their belief that they can exercise their right to organize without fear of retaliation by their employer and without running the risk of losing their job.

One reason I opposed the NAFTA agreement was that it perpetuated the ineffectiveness of U.S. law in protecting workers rights. In the case of the right to organize, the NAFTA agreement provides only a mechanism for exposing violations of these rights and this forum is part of that mechanism.

It is important for workers to demonstrate the widespread abuse of workers rights, but it's clearly not enough. The objectives of the NAFTA side agreement on labor cooperation are admirable, but the law itself should contain penalties against the companies who benefit from expanded trade opportunities but at the same time violate their workers' rights, whether in Mexico, Canada or the United States.

I will fight hard to ensure that the NAFTA agreement is amended to include real penalties and appropriate enforcement provisions.

I support calls for an international code of conduct for all companies operating on a global scale. This code will ensure that workers rights which we in the United States are at least committed to on paper and which are contained in the NAFTA side agreement on labor cooperation will become part and parcel of acceptable behavior in international commerce.

The promise of international investment and trade must go hand in hand with the promise of improved working conditions and living standards for workers both in the United States and abroad. By recognizing and protecting the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining, we are not giving workers entitlements or handouts. We are giving them the tools to stand up for themselves and claim their fair share of economic progress that they had a hand in producing.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Mr. Zucker, speaking on behalf of Congressman Tom Lantos.

Next on the list is Fernanda Recio, a former employee of La Conexion Familiar.

We ask Ms. Recio to come forward.

MS. RECIO: Hello, everybody.

This is a very special day for those of us who used to work in Sprint La Conexion Familiar. We thank our union brothers and sisters in Mexico for caring enough about us to file a NAFTA complaint and today provide us with a unique opportunity to tell our story and give us hope that other workers won't lose their job in the future simply because they want a union.

This experience has provided me with both joy and sorrow. One positive result was an invitation I received from the telephone workers union in British Columbia to visit them and tell the La Conexion story. They were so outraged by Sprint's behavior they demonstrated outside a performance by Sprint spokeswoman Candace Bergen. It was a wonderful experience to meet with my Canadian union members who cared about our plight.

I continue to be amazed at the support this case has generated round the world. Although we were devastated by the closing, it is heartwarming to know others care.

When I began working in Sprint La Conexion Familiar in August of 1993, I had high hopes. I thought if I worked hard there would be opportunities for me to move ahead. But soon after my arrival at Sprint, I realized Sprint's public image is very different from its behavior as an employer.

From the start, I had problems getting paid my commissions. I was in sales and my motivation to sell was based on extra money I got for each sale. Every time I asked my supervisor to explain the payment procedure, I got the run around.

When I asked why I wasn't getting paid for sales I knew I had made, I was told I had to wait for the computer report. Then the report would be delayed. When it came, I was told it was wrong. I spent a lot of time meeting with my supervisor and the manager and got nowhere.

I felt I had to hire a lawyer. When I told my supervisor I was being represented by an attorney, suddenly he was able to give me a commission check. But it wasn't for the full amount due me. The check simply stated "commissions due." There was no breakdown of how many sales, when the sales were made, or anything. It was impossible to get an accounting from Sprint.

I kept a daily list of what I sold, so I had the records, even if Sprint didn't, and the check never matched my records. I still haven't cleared up the commission problem and I am working with a lawyer to get paid what Sprint owes me.

The difficulty in getting our commission was the main reason many of us were interested in forming a union. Everyone was having the same problem. We felt they weren't being fair to us and we weren't getting paid want we were owed. This was very frustrating.

There was a total lack of respect for us by management. The supervisors often yelled at us. They thought that we were children.

We had to sign a piece of paper to go to the bathroom. The paper lists the time that we left and the time we returned. We had to give this report to our supervisor each time we went to the bathroom.

We also were frustrated with the small cafeteria. There weren't enough chairs for us to sit and eat our lunches. We weren't allowed to eat at our desks. And there was only one microwave. We had 30 minutes for lunch and 30 people had to use the microwave in half an hour. We'd spend much of our lunchtime in line waiting to heat our food.

In October, I was promoted to an In Charge Supervisor. I was doing very well as a supervisor and still one of the top sales people. But, at the end of January 1994, I went with a few of my co-workers to a meeting with an organizer from the Communications Workers of America. When I returned to the office, my co-workers asked me where I had been and I told them about the meeting with CWA.

My supervisor heard me talking and started asking me all kinds of questions. He told me I shouldn't be talking with others about the union. I didn't know I needed to be secretive about wanting to form a union. In Chile, where I am from, being for the union is a good thing.

Many of us felt the union was our only hope.

On June 1st, we wore this T-shirt to show our support for the union. This is the only we thought we could make the things better.

We wanted to be treated fairly and with respect. We felt we didn't have anything to lose to join CWA, but we were wrong.

My supervisor asked me all the time about my connection with the union. My co-workers were told not to talk to me. If they did talk with me during a break, they were immediately asked what we were talking about, were we discussing the union?

For me, once they knew I supported the union, the rules changed. I was told to take a vacation day if I got sick. When I was too late to work, instead of getting a verbal warning like everybody else, I received a written warning in my file.

They couldn't bother me about my sales because they were so high, but they did other things to harass and intimidate me. One day there weren't any seats left in the cafeteria so I brought my soup to my desk. There wasn't anyone working in the area at the time. The supervisor came and told me I couldn't eat at the desk. He told me to go and eat in the bathroom. I couldn't do that. I threw away my soup.

After a few months of this pressure every day, I started getting palpitations. I went to the doctor, who gave me a monitor to wear to test my heart. A co-worker asked me about the monitor and how I was feeling. I said not too good. My supervisor came over and gave me a warning for talking.

I got so nervous. I couldn't talk to anyone and my co-workers were afraid to talk to me.

When I went to the bathroom, my supervisor would log out my computer so that when I returned I had to log back on. This took time to do which affected my productivity which affected my wages and commissions. No one else had to do this.

We heard over and over that if we voted for the union the office would shut down. We knew that this was against the law, that they couldn't shut us down, but they still told us all the time. Some employees did believe our supervisors and were afraid to support the union.

By April 1995, I couldn't take the pressure any more and my doctor advised me not to return to work and get in treatment for my stress. By the time I felt ready to try to return to work, Sprint had closed the facility.

I talked with my supervisor a year after the closing and I asked him, "Why did you treat me like that? I thought that you liked me."

And he said, "Fernanda, I had to follow instructions. I didn't have a choice."

My experience at Sprint has taught me many things. I am still a strong union supporter. I believe we would have been able to make things better at La Conexion Familiar if we formed a union. But I also learned that Sprint is a company that is willing to do anything to keep the union out and that frightens all of us.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Ms. Recio.

The next presenter is Veronika Altmeyer, Managing Executive, from the German Post and Telephone Workers Union of Germany.

Ms. Altmeyer, welcome.

MS. ALTMEYER: Thank you.

(THROUGH INTERPRETER) Ladies and gentlemen, as a representative of the largest union in the postal and telecommunications industry in Germany with more than 530,000 members in Germany, I would like to thank you very much. I would like to thank the United States Department of labor and the representatives of Canada and Mexico for giving me the opportunity to express my union's point of view in front of this very important panel.

Through our international cooperation with the CWA, the union of communications workers in the U.S., we learned from Mr. Bahr in June 1994 about the case La Conexion Familiar and it was the first time we heard about Sprint Corporation violating labor laws and the right to organize.

In meetings of our international union organization, PTTI, on multi-national telecommunication companies, all member unions of this organization agreed to coordinate their activities with these multi-national companies. Since at that time it was already known that the German telephone company Deutsche Telecom AG and its French counterpart, France Telecom, intended to form a joint venture with Sprint Corporation, we, the CWA and DPG, decided to have the unions cooperate very closely.

After hearing about the complaints against Sprint Corporation, we acted in two ways. First, we wrote letters in July of '94, in August of '94 and in September of '94 and in February '95, we wrote letters to the chairman and chief executive officer of Sprint Corporation, Mr. Esrey, asking him to respect the right to organize in his company.

In addition, we also pointed out that Sprint's management guide contained a declared company object to keep Sprint union-free. We criticized this company policy and asked Mr. Esrey to guarantee the right of free choice of union representation and also to stop the threat to workers on the grounds of their union activities. To date, we have not received a satisfactory answer to these charges and indications.

Secondly, we informed that Mr. Esrey that the Supervisory Board of the Deutsche Telekom AG had decided in December of 1994 upon a code of conduct for the participation of the Deutsche Telekom AG in global telecommunications ventures. The then chairman of the board of the Telekom AG, Mr. Helmut Ricke, stated in an article of the employees' newsletter of the Deutsche Telekom that, and this is a quote, "Union rights will be respected. A common philosophy appears to be indispensable within the joint venture."

In view of the planned cooperation between the Telekom and Sprint, we asked Mr. Esrey to participate in joint talks with CWA and us. Unfortunately to date, these have not taken place.

We informed the board of Sprint Corporation that as a union of the telecommunications workers in Germany we had developed and established a high level of participation in German companies and that our working relationship was based on mutual recognition and respect.

As already mentioned, the board of directors and the supervisory board of the Deutsche Telekom, including the owner's representatives and the representatives of the Deutsche Postgewerkschaft, who are equally entitled members of the supervisory board, have set the code of conduct of the Deutsche Telekom AG in global telecommunications ventures.

These state as follows: "In all global ventures in the telecommunications industry, the Deutsche Telekom AG declares its support of its company principles. These company principles are announced to the partners in global ventures.

"These principles specifically the Deutsche Telekom AG's responsibility in society and responsibility towards its employees.

"The Deutsche Telekom AG recognizes the elected body representing interests of the employees, including unions, in any global venture.

"The Deutsche Telekom AG acts so that the company principles are taken up by the partners in the global ventures and are applied accordingly. This also means that the relations that are customary in Germany between employers and employees in all business areas and organizational departments in which the Deutsche Telekom AG works with global partners and their subsidiaries in Germany, are recognized and respected."

The company principles of the Deutsche Telekom AG further sates as follows in one paragraph: "All employees contribute to the success of the company. We are willing to perform and take on our responsibility. A special feature of good cooperation is mutual give and take. The work has to be fairly compensated according to performance. In its decision-making process our company takes into consideration the effects on its employees. We cooperate with the elected representatives on a basis of trust."

Ladies and gentlemen, you probably all know that in the meantime the venture between Sprint Corporation, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom AG has been stipulated in a legally binding agreement and has been approved by the supervisory authorities of the United States and the European Union. In principle, we welcome this international cooperation. But on the other hand, we demand the acceptance of employee rights.

This venture between these companies means that more than previously in the telecommunications field the principle of freedom of association laid down in the Constitution of the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the Agreements 87 and 98 of the International Labor Organization have to be respected, even if these agreements have not yet been ratified by all member states of the International Labor Organization. The member states worldwide do support the control mechanisms of this special UN organization, especially regarding the principle of freedom of association.

Thanks in no small part to the United States of America, social criteria and also the rights to freedom of union association, are still on the agenda of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The European Parliament as well as the competent bodies of the European Union support taking the International Labor Organization's standards more into consideration in developing foreign trade policy.

I am pleased to say that there is a worldwide international trend which sees the freedom of association of employees as an integral part of social standards. Not least the World Bank has pointed out in reports that in many countries union activities have contributed to the establishment of free and democratic structures.

My union together with PTTI intends to make the "threefold declaration of principles on multinational companies and social policy" of the International Labor Organization an issue in the agreements between multinational telecommunications companies and their respective unions.

Subparagraph 41 of this threefold declaration states under the heading "Freedom of Association and Right to Form Associations" among other things: "The employees of multinational and national companies should the right indiscriminately without prior authorization to form an organization of their choice and t join such organizations, the only condition being the respect of its bylaws. Furthermore, the employees should be protected from all discriminatory treatments and against freedom of association in connection with their employment."

Subparagraph 42 states: "In the areas of setup, actions, and administration, the organizations representing multinational companies or the employees of these companies have to receive adequate protection against interference from the other side, both for the organizations and for their representatives and members."

These aforementioned regulations of the so-called threefold declaration of principles on multinational companies and social policy are based on Agreements numbers 8 and 98 of the International Labor Organization.

Subparagraph 44 of this threefold agreement states: "The governments are called upon to apply the principles laid down in Article 5 of Agreement No. 97 if they do not already do so, since it is important in connection with multinational companies that associations representing these companies or their employees can join international associations of employers and of employees of their choice."

Today is a very important day for the development of workers rights in the future also in the international sphere. The signal sent by this forum goes far beyond the United States. Thus, we welcome this kind of public forum because it contributes to show where the rights are infringed, where the workers' rights are violated, and it discusses this and it makes them public.

The results and the outcome of this public forum will also be followed closely outside of the United States. And in my union but also in the media of the Federal Republic of Germany the actions of Sprint Corporation against its employees have attracted a lot of attention. Hence, we would greatly appreciate it if the authorities of the United States of America continued to support their previous policy of social responsibility in the rules of the game as well as actions aimed at balancing relations between employers and unions.

Thank you very much for your attention.

MR. OTERO: Fraulein Altmeyer, dankeschoen. Thank you very much, Ms. Altmeyer, for your presentation. We appreciate you coming all the way from Germany to help us in this process.

The next presenter is Mr. Jose Luis Mendoza, Legal Counsel for the Telephone Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico.

Mr. Mendoza?

And I would like to say at the same time that Mr. Mendoza is part of the Mexican delegation to this event.

MR. MENDOZA: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) First of all, I feel deeply committed for participating in this platform because as legal counsel for this union I was part of the procedures to bring all this into the open.

The Telephone Workers Union of Mexico, faced with a severe violation of workers rights by Sprint and its subsidiary, La Conexion Familiar, based itself on the agreement labor cooperation in order to submit its protests against this company that had dismissed over 200 employees because they had decided to exercise their freedom of association because these workers wanted to claim their right of collective bargaining with their employer.

The doubts and concerns increased when we heard that throughout the United States there were 16,000 long distance operations or long distance workers who were not unionized either. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, leads us to the fact that we have to confront new situations. It affects productivity systems. It affects organizational structures, it affects financial systems. Equally it affects company policies.

These new ways of existence bring us vis-a-vis of certain structures of the organizations. We are being affected at all levels. The agreement on labor cooperation consistently with this evolution foresees in the way it is drafted and in its principles and obligations the way the situation could be regulated. You could think that under their protection North America could make progress and achieve these new ways of existing based on respect for basic workers rights.

The problem with Sprint can be analyzed from different points of view. From a legal point of view, we could arrive at the conclusion or at the analysis or ask ourselves if within the American legal system there is enough protection for the freedom of association and for the freedom of collective bargaining. We could also bring up the question of the procedural standards of the American legal system establishes proper penalization when certain infringement has happened and how compensation of damages can be brought about.

However, this would lead us away from the main issue. It would lead us away from those issues that are really transcendental.

I respectfully disagree with my colleague Sergio Tapia. The problem that we're living is not a problem of the good guys and the bad guys. It is a problem of ignorant and weak ones. Weak ones, the workers. Ignorant, the management who has forgotten that there are new ways of existing, of structuring. Sprint with its behavior creates damages in at least three ways. It creates a social damage, it damages the workers and it harms itself.

Maybe the kind of management leadership, the destructive policy towards everything that has to do with unionization prevents the company from understanding that it's harming itself, that they do not realize that firing employees also bring about strong social economic and family hardship.

We have heard the presentations of our colleagues that have been really moving and dramatic and this is a result of ignorance.

The world of quality that is established or talked about in NAFTA and in the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation demands that certain principles and institutions are fulfilled and upheld. It demands for certain resources and instruments to be implemented in a positive environment.

With what aim? For the purpose that within this positive framework team work can take place, participation in leadership, good communication and motivation.

We need to understand that within working procedures the human factor is of utmost importance and transcendental. The leaders who year after year meet in Switzerland have stated that at the top of the pyramid in the companies should be the client. This point of view changed recently, particularly at this international forum. Today, it is said that at the very top, at the very point, at the very tip of the pyramid the worker should be placed and it's very easy to understand and to explain how this change came about.

Productivity and quality are a result of workers' efforts and there can be no productivity or quality in a negatively determined working environment. Changes that are brought about are harmful for society, for the company, for the worker, when these principles are not fulfilled.

In the history of mankind, we have learned that unionism is a noble institution to defend the weak one. It is politically, legally, ethically and philosophically defended and there is no doubt about it.

When we analyze the different effects that have been brought about by Sprint's behavior, we find that there are caused just by one factor, by one reason, to avoid unionization of workers, prevent them from defending their rights in a collective way. If we analyze the situation we are forced to reflect upon very basic elements such as management-labor relationships.

The world over it is understood that these relationships are integrated by three elements: trade union, workers and management. In Sprint, it is understood that labor relations represented by just the management and the pressure they exert on the workers. Whereas in the modern world we are finding out that workers should be at the top of the pyramid, at Sprint they say they should be at the very bottom, that their rights should be stomped and that not even the most basic conditions need to be fulfilled.

We Mexican workers believe that the NAALC is a very good instrument to achieve its goals through its principles and it talks about situations through which we can bring about a change, a change where we can share wealth, a change where under the stewardship of workers and management we can create new living conditions for the world for the way work is performed.

There are countries, for example, certain Asian countries, that have demonstrated that if you give workers participation in decisionmaking you can get excellent results. The lack of participation leads also to the lack of participating in solution of problems. We understand that by participating we satisfy a human need and we can solve problems that can exist within a company and we can arrive at more rational and more reasonable solutions.

It is said the standards of international law lack efficiency because there are no coercive measures. In the case of the NAALC, we can see a really exceptional phenomenon, an idea defined as the tool that will allow to wake labor conscious in North America where the outcries cannot be silenced by fear or oppression.

Mexican workers, in particular telephone workers of Mexico, support decidedly the plight of the workers at Sprint. they show their empathy towards them and with their effort they have brought about the fact that they are being noticed in North America and that we all reflect upon these measures, considering that they harm companies very severely, not only the workers involved. They affect negatively the society as a whole.

The consequences of the NAALC also suggest us to be more daring, to be more bold. We can find means to assure that progress of humanity is through a well balanced respect of workers rights.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) Thank you very much, Mr. Mendoza.

The next presenter is a member of the Canadian tripartite delegation, speaking for the employer's side.

I ask Mr. Lawrence Bertuzzi to come to the podium.

Mr. Bertuzzi is a partner in the law firm of Miller & Thompson.

Mr. Bertuzzi.

MR. BERTUZZI: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

May I begin by thanking our hosts, the U.S. Department of Labor for this kind invitation and I thank the head of our Canadian delegation, Mr. Edmondson, for including me in the delegation.

I see that I will perform a rather unique function here today. There are very few of us from the management side and I think they all got used up before lunch. I may be the only banner carrier for the afternoon, but nonetheless, let me address you from a Canadian perspective.

Let me start by saying I am not here in any way, shape or form to comment on the Sprint situation. It would be most inappropriate for me to do so and I will not pick up that particular baton.

I understood the purpose of the forum to be to study the effects of the sudden closing of a plant on the principle of freedom of association and worker's right to organize. I would like to take the word sudden out for a moment and say to you that the closing of a plant on the principle of freedom of association and the worker's right to organize is in Canada a relatively straightforward matter. The word sudden complicates it because it depends why.

I hope to speak of three things during my brief 10 minutes. One is to tell you a bit about the Canadian law covering this top. Two is to make a pitch for what I call balance. I think balance is critical as we approach the task with each other. And the third is to comment on the procedure, if I might, Mr. Chairman.

Firstly, under Canadian law, freedom of association and the right to organize unions of the employees' choosing is protected by every statute we have. As Mr. Edmondson said, we have 11 different labor statutes in Canada because we have 10 provinces, similar to your states, and each of them have primary jurisdiction over most matters except those which have been deemed to be federal like intraprovincial transport, telecommunications, et cetera. And for that, the federal government has thrown in their hat into the ring to create the eleventh jurisdiction.

Every jurisdiction clearly recognizes, as does our constitution, the right to organize a union of the employee's choice. In fact, in most jurisdictions in Canada, the right to select a union can be done even without a vote. The presentation of membership cards of a certain amount, either 50 percent or 55 percent, in some jurisdictions more, will get a union organized, the union of the employees' choice, without a vote.

Now, all jurisdictions, all 11 jurisdictions, prohibit taking actions or threats against employees because of union activity. I believe that the Canadian law may well go further than the American law in this regard, Mr. Chairman, because as I understood it, you have the Right Line test which essentially says ask two questions: one, was there anti-union reason for the decision and, secondly, was there any good business reason for the decision. And then if the answer to each is yes, then balance them.

The Canadian law in fact is less onerous on the unions and the employees than that. The test in Canada is was the decision motivated in any part by an anti-union motive. And, if so, if so, then the business interests may well have to take a back seat.

The second major distinction is the employer, while in the U.S. as I understand it bearing the onus of proving the business rationale, the employer in Canada bears a reverse onus of proving that it did not have an anti-union animus.

These are important distinctions but what the Canada law does and must continue to do even better is to attempt to put in a balance. We have a balance which in some respects comes from a sense of timing. It's not as good as it could be, but employers can decide to close or to relocate if that is not motivated by an anti-union animus.

Sound economic reasons, capital decisions, location considerations, especially in this era of in Canada increasingly older workplaces which don't meet environmental or safety concerns, these are all legitimate reasons for moving a location or closing a location and are not banned by our labor laws, nor should they be banned by our labor laws, if they are not accompanied by an anti-union animus.

Now, in many provinces, the scope of the union's jurisdiction is really only city or region-wide, so this right even can extend within only a few miles. And that is a right that they have in an attempt to have the balance in Canada and it's a right that seems to be working.

The certification system in our countries is rare in the commercial contract world and it is my suggestion and submission that the right to locate on business considerations, even if the impact is to deny union representation, is legitimate if it is not motivated by anti-union motivation.

It is the flip side of the certification procedure. In the commercial contract world, there are very few situations where an employer is told this is the party with whom you must make your commercial contract and under Canadian law told even further and here are key elements that must be contained within that commercial contract. When I go to buy my product, I have a number of suppliers to choose from. When I go to pick my energy, I have alternate sources. But in labor, under the certification system, you have one bargaining party. And so the quid pro quo is certain rights to manage your business effectively to stay viable.

Now, the collective agreement is in Canada pretty well the costliest commercial contract an employer signs. Of all the commercial contracts it enters into, it's the one that costs the most. And yet it is one of the few in which it has no choice with whom to bargain.

In Canada, we also have in most jurisdictions many mandatory provisions which I suggest give balance on the union side to the employer's right to move. For example, we have in most jurisdictions mandatory payment of union dues by every member of the bargaining unit, the very antithesis of your right-to-work states.

We have mandatory first contract arbitration in jurisdictions covering far and away the majority of our workers. We have in two provinces the banning of temporary strike replacements and in pretty well every province the prohibiting of permanent strike replacements.

So these are things that give leverage to the union side and things that tell me that I should continue to expose for a balance so that business can react accordingly in this environment.

Now, in recognition of the balanced approach, labor boards look at things like timing of decisions. For example, a decision made suddenly in the face of an organizing campaign may well attract a different response from the labor board than a decision made during the course of a mature relationship or even a decision made during a strike when the union demands are such that they make the business uncompetitive.

In one case, the realities have sent the labor board to say we must intervene. In the other cases they say we're all big players in a big market. When you exert your economic power as a union, you must do so within the context of realities and sometimes it doesn't work out that well. And employers have exactly the same difficult decisions to make. This is the balance that we must strive for.

An employer chooses his location for a number of reasons. Location, transportation, energy, cost of money, government incentives, government restrictions, health costs, very important in Canada, skilled and available labor and the cost of that labor. So long as no anti-union motivation exists, it must be permitted to take those matters, all of those matters, into consideration in deciding where to locate or where to relocate. The availability, quality and cost of labor are factors which must be weighed with all the other factors, whether as between provinces in Canada or as between states in Mexico and the United States or as between our respective countries. If moves in the right direction in any factor drive investment away, the parties and the government must take heed.

NAFTA is all about breaking down walls and recognizing our respective places in a bigger society, not about building walls to keep us in and others out. So, too, with our labor laws.

Now, Mr. Chairman, the third point I wanted to comment on, and gently, I might add, is a bigger concern I have with the potential interference with the internal administrative and court mechanisms in a country.

In Canada, we have a system of labor relations boards, 11 to be exact, in each jurisdiction and they have primary jurisdiction to consider matters of certification and matters of unfair labor practice when employees lose their job.

The matters have been removed from the court in first instance because of the recognition of the need for specialized, expert, independent tribunals to consider such issues. This has always been considered a positive development by both management and labor and it has been copied in a number of other areas in Canadian society. For example, environmental tribunals, real estate tribunals, et cetera. And those tribunals deal with their specialized matters, rather than the general court system.

Now, the courts are still there. They ensure review, to ensure fairness, natural justice, due process and to make sure the tribunals stay within their own jurisdiction, so they have a role.

I understand from my experience that the U.S. system, although distinct, is based on exactly the same principles.

Now, in view of this, the NAOs and the ministries of labor must be careful not to interfere with this system as it progresses. Such action, I submit would be most unwelcome as the parties rely on these specialized tribunals for consistency, direction, certainty and finality.

Public international fora on the merits of an incident or the merits of the review process while it is in process must take care that it not detract from a tribunal's independent and expert function.

So I urge caution. External interference in a working review system, even if it has imperfections will only add to its imperfections and likely extend the delays. This is especially so where the system has a specialized review process. It should not be usurped by this process.

In conclusion, let me say this. Bad facts invariably make bad law. It is a mistake to change the law because of an extreme case. That's the slippery slope to creating a set of laws and protections which makes a country uncompetitive, discourages new investment which, of course, is well beyond the arm of the law because it's not here yet. And ultimately does the greatest harm to those the law purportedly is created to protect, the workers and their jobs.

There must be a balance. Violations when proven by due process require appropriate remedies but they do not require legal amendment which further restrict others who willingly comply with the law.

In our workplace we sometimes joke about 95 percent of the rules are made to control 5 percent of the people. That should not be the principle in creating statutes. The statute should not be created to control the activities of 2 or 3 percent of the people.

Simply, as Mr. Anaya alluded to earlier, union organization is not a guarantee against normal economic decisions, whether they are good or bad from an employee's perspective.

Union organization has a vital and essential role in the employer-employee relationship. In Canada, the role of unions are influential well beyond their 37 percent coverage. The healthy push-pull between business and labor in our country has produced much success but only when a balance is kept because when it gets out of balance we do not have success.

Any analysis of the freedom of association and the right to organize must be seen in a realistic context which recognizes all the dynamics which go into running a business in the international marketplace. In Canada, we, and by that I mean business, labor and the government, must always be cognizant of that as we sit in such close proximity to our two much larger and attractive neighbors.

Thank you for this opportunity to address you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Mr. Bertuzzi.

I have some comments to make but before you leave, I wanted to ask you a question. I am cognizant of the fact that labor law in Canada by your own determination is a matter of the provinces, unlike the United States where we have a single application of the labor law.

When you were alluding to the fact that the burden of proof on an employer in a contest for an election is to demonstrate that the employer had no anti-union bias, is this something that is applicable uniformly in Canada or were you speaking about one specific province?

MR. BERTUZZI: No. I can't answer the question that it's applicable uniformly, although I suspect it is. I can tell you that it is the law which covers at least 65 to 70 percent of the workers, because it is the law of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and the federal law and that would represent 65 percent or better of our workers.

If there's an unfair labor practice charge laid against an employer, the onus is on the employer to prove that it did not commit an unfair labor practice. That's the check on one side and the rights go on the other side.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much.

As you take your seat, I want to make some comments. First of all, I would like to thank you very much, Mr. Bertuzzi for bringing back the discussion to a broader picture of the impact that sudden closure of plants have on the freedom of association separating that from the instant case of Sprint which is what generated this forum in the first place. But that was the intent of the three countries in conducting this hearing, was to look at the Sprint case, since it was the case that we had before us, but also to broaden the inquiry to try to ascertain with a model of clarity what happens in similar instances, not only in the United States but in the other two countries as well. And, in fact, we have, as I said before, tasked our labor secretariat in Dallas to undertake an empirical study of this matter, looking not only at the Sprint case but going as far afield as the information will permit us.

And so I thank you very much for refocusing the discussion of this afternoon. You made a lot of very interesting points.

I only want to assure you and the public here assembled that the United States and Mexico and Canada indeed in the process of conducting the ministerial consultations that were requested by the government of Mexico were extremely careful and cognizant of protecting the process.

I would like to say for the record that shortly after Secretary of Labor Bonilla from Mexico requested ministerial consultation from Secretary Reich who promptly accepted, at the time the judge of the NLRB had not rendered his decision and the parties, Mexico and the United States, agreed to suspend the ministerial consultations until the judge had concluded its analysis and rendered a decision so as not to give any appearance, however slight it may be, that this process that we were instituting under the treaty had in any way any design to influence the outcome of that decision because we, like you, recognized the importance of separating this process on the two tracks. And so it was not until the judge in this case had rendered a decision that we decided then to proceed with the ministerial consultations and enter into an agreement as to how we could deal with this problem without doing any harm.

In fact, i would like to say also for the record that we were also very careful in consulting throughout the process with the NLRB itself to make sure that any of our steps did not in any way interfere because it would have been in reality improper for this process to have anything to do with that. This is being handled, as I said earlier, on two tracks.

And so your caution is very well taken. We appreciate the fact that you thought abut it and that you brought it to our attention, but at the same time, we have been extremely cognizant of our responsibility to protect the process because one case does not change the process, in our opinion.

And I would like to say finally as another commentary, is that whatever maybe the result of these endeavors which our objective here is to find more specificity as to what impact this either closure, like you said, without the word sudden or sudden closures have on the principle of the right to organize and the freedom of association to which Mexico, Canada and the United States attach the greatest of importance, that is our objective here.

And I think that you have made a significant contribution this afternoon by putting this discussion in the context that we thought from the very first moment, which was to look at the Sprint case, of course, but also look beyond at the entire picture and you have been most helpful in your presentation and I want to thank you for doing so.

Let me now recognize the next presenter.

Mr. Philip C. Bowyer is the General Secretary of the Postal, Telephone and Telegraph International known as PTTI which is one of the 14 international trade secretariats associated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions ad Mr. Bowyer has come from Europe. We also thank him very much for crossing the Atlantic to be here with us today.

Mr. Bowyer.

MR. BOWYER: Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman, as you said, I am the General Secretary of the Postal, Telegraph and Telephone International, the PTTI, to which various colleagues have referred to earlier. The PTTI represents 4.6 million workers in 22 affiliated trade unions in 117 countries of the world who work in the communication industries.

I would like to begin by first commending the Mexico Secretary of Labor and the U.S. Secretary of Labor for their decision to initiate this public forum on the closure of La Conexion Familiar. And I would like also to thank you for presiding over this forum and for allowing me to share the views of the PTTI and its affiliates around the world concerning this case and the question of freedom of association.

As you said, the PTTI cooperates with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Within the European Union, which is probably the largest trading block in the world, we represent telecom workers. Also, and I think more relevant to this particular hearing, we participate in the activities of the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD. And we are also active within the ILO, the International Labor Office.

Now, in particular, the latter two organizations have a great deal of work, have done a great deal of work in connection with the question of freedom of association and, of course, the United States of America is a member of both of these organizations and we believe has certain obligations to try and implement the standards which those organizations make.

We think, therefore, Mr. Chairman, that given our activities we are in the PTTI well positioned to try and place the sudden closure of Sprint/La Conexion Familiar within a global context.

We do believe that the U.S. Government must now face the responsibility that comes from liberalized trade and a more open scrutiny of practices in enforcing trade union rights in the U.S.A. and we are very clearly interested in the practical outcome of these proceedings.

Throughout most of the world, the telecommunications industry has had one of the highest unionization rates of any industry. It's a highly profitable industry, it's characterized by continuous innovation, high productivity and a highly skilled workforce.

It's also a key industry in the development of trade and for the strengthening of democracy. And here in the United States, the telecommunications and information industries hold the promise of creating more and better jobs.

The fact that telecommunication workers enjoy relatively high standards of living we do not think is an accident or an achievement of benevolent employers. It is the legacy of this high unionization rate. But we also recognize that over the past 10 to 15 years we have undergone extremely rapid change.

Competition and liberalization in the sector as the result of liberalized trade have propelled an economic war with giant multinational companies buying each other out as they try to win part of the market. And, of course, U.S. telecommunications companies with some $170 billion of revenue at their disposal are amongst the most aggressive players in this economic battle.

And for us there is clearly a social dimension to this war because when companies penetrate a foreign market, generally they also take with them their labor relations practices and, of course, Sprint is one of those companies and that is why we are so concerned about this particular case, because it can affect our members wherever they might be working in the world and wherever Sprint decides that it wants to be active in the future.

Telecommunications around the world, I must say, are determined to ensure that Sprint respects its workers' right to freedom of association and to bargain collectively and they are determined that the company will not be successful in undermining their right to a decent standard of living. These rights are embodied in the conventions of the International Labor Organization, of which the U.S.A. is a member, and they are referred to in Annex 1 of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. And the PTTI has been cooperating with our colleagues in the Communications Workers of America and with the Union of Telephone Workers in Mexico to try to ensure that Sprint is in compliance with these internationally recognized principles of labor law.

And, Mr. Chairman, i will submit in writing an analysis of the relevant international standards, particularly of the ILO and of the OECD, the ways in which the actions of Sprint have violated these standards and also the ways in which the U.S.A. has failed to implement its obligation under those standards.

We in the international trade union movement were shocked to hear that Sprint had closed La Conexion Familiar only days before a scheduled union election. Since then, Sprint was found guilty of committing over 50 violations of the U.S. Labor Code, Sprint has been permission by the U.S. Government and by the European Union, to enter into a multi-billion dollar alliance with France Telecom and German Telecom, the project known as ATLAS, but in the meantime 235 Latino workers faced a loss of income, the uncertainty of finding other jobs and, in many cases, having to uproot their families from the communities in which they lived. And in these circumstances, it would be hardly surprising if they have lost faith in the ability of the U.S. Government as the guarantor of their rights as workers and as citizens to from a trade union.

As an international observer, the Sprint case in my view is one of, if not the most, outrageous examples of the violation of workers' rights to form a union to occur in our industry worldwide. Even more shocking for us is the fact that the entire law enforcement apparatus of the U.S. Government, and even of the U.S. Federal Court systems, have proven inadequate or unwilling to either prevent or to remedy the flagrant violation of basic trade union rights by Sprint.

The company's actions against these 235 Latino workers would be considered morally reprehensible, socially intolerable, and most certainly illegal in many other industrialized countries. As we have heard from spokesmen today, in Canada, the labor code would have facilitated recognition of a trade union based on a simple review of employees' legal signatures.

In Europe, under the treaty and the directives established by the European Union, all member states are obliged to enact legislation strictly regulating collective dismissals. For example, the European Court of Justice, one of those special institutions of the European Union which don't exist under the NAFTA agreement, but the European Court of Justice in a case against the United Kingdom confirmed the following principles:

They confirmed that governments must require an employer contemplating collective dismissals to consult the workers' representatives with a few to reaching an agreement.

Even more important, they confirmed that governments must provide for the designation of employee representatives even where an employer does not agree to this.

And, finally, they say that governments must provide for effective sanctions in the event of a failure to consult workers' representatives.

In other countries in the region, in Europe, in countries such as the Scandinavian countries or the country in which I live, Switzerland, Sprint would have been obliged to recognize industry-wide agreements on working conditions.

Now, our view of the inadequacy of the U.S. Labor Code to deal with such cases is shared by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

In its 1995 Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights, the ICFTU concludes that in the United States, "Workers often have no effective redress in the face of abuses by employers. Inadequate remedies available to workers who have been fired illegally for trade union activity and ineffective penalties against employers who illegally fire them place severe obstacles in the path of workers seeking to join trade unions."

According to the ICFTU survey, at least one in ten union supporters campaigning to form a union is illegally fired and one union supporter is fired for every 30 people who vote for a union in union elections.

The ICFTU also quotes a poll conducted in 1994 which found that 79 percent of all Americans believe that workers are likely to get fired if they try to organize a union at their place of work.

And, finally, the ICFTU concluded that the example of La Conexion Familiar was one of the most blatant illegal actions in 1994.

The cumulative effects of this anti-union behavior on the part of employers in the U.S.A. is nothing but shocking. While thousands of workers are fired every year during union organizing drives, the U.S. Government can take years to make decisions on illegal firings and anywhere from three months to three years to effectively conduct union representation elections.

And, finally, as the Sprint case demonstrated, employers in the United States appear to have the ultimate weapon at their disposal, which is to close the facility all together in order to avoid unionization without any fear of effective sanctions being taken against them.

Now, in the written analysis which I said I would submit, after looking at the conventions of the International Labor Organization, it must be said that even if one could accept Sprint's extremely improbable economic necessity argument, then the company's conduct would still be incompatible with the international recognized standards of the ILO of which the U.S.A. is a member.

To Sprint, the cost of breaking the law has been negligible but 19 months after the closure those workers remain fired and the company is still bidding for government contracts. In our view, this indicates that the U.S. Labor Code and its enforcement mechanisms need to be overhauled in the most pressing manner and in full consultation with the trade union movement.

I agree with the president of CWA, President Bahr, that Annex 1 of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation contains all the necessary objectives. However, the aggressive anti-union behavior of companies like Sprint show that we need to add strong economic sanctions to prevent companies from closing down facilities and shattering workers' lives under the guise of global competition.

The PTTI believes that the violations of their rights that workers suffer in the United States must be prevented by the introduction of the Code of Conduct that President Bahr and STRM General Secretary Francisco Hernandez Juarez outlined during their testimony, which is based on the principles of the ILO and the other international institutions of which the United States is a member.

I's our expectation that this recommendation should be given full consideration as the NAO considers steps to be taken as a result of this examination.

In my view, and also that of many other observers, the NAO investigation must ensure that the practical outcome goes far beyond an intellectual exercise on the inner working of U.S. labor laws.

Mr. Chairman, what began for us in the PTTI as a simple exercise in international solidarity with our colleagues in the CWA has grown into a campaign with a life of its own. Telecommunications workers around the world are taking the initiative and opposing entry of Sprint and its brand of anti-union practices into their countries. Just since 1993, workers in the United Kingdom, France, German, Mexico, Canada, Portugal, Brazil and Nicaragua, to name a few, have acted to oppose Sprint's anti-union activities.

In fact, I've heard just recently that Sprint is about to bid for a part of the privatized telecommunications in Nicaragua and our affiliate in Nicaragua will be opposing that and they will be supported by the PTTI and our affiliates around the world.

Mr. Chairman, the lives of more than 200 workers, most of them women, were shattered in an instant simply because they were determined to exercise their right to freedom of association, to speak collectively through their union and to negotiate their way out of injustice. Until this is resolved, the PTTI and its affiliates will continue to undertake whatever actions are necessary to deny Sprint Corporation entry into other telecommunications markets and we will do whatever is necessary to ensure that Sprint is brought into full compliance with internationally accepted standards.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Mr. Bowyer, thank you very much indeed for your presentation and for coming all the way from Europe to be with us. We share your interest in the practical outcome of these proceedings and, of course, we welcome your offer to provide us with analysis of the ILO and the OECD standards that may have been involved in this case.

I think I feel compelled to say that shortly after President Clinton was installed in office in consultation with Secretary Reich we proceeded to install the so-called Dunlap Commission, fully aware that American labor law is in need of some reexamination and revamping. And the Dunlap commission has labored long and hard with the participation of several former Secretaries of Labor from both political parties, I might say, as well as representatives of the AFL-CIO and representatives of the business community. And the Dunlap report has been recently completed and forwarded to the White House for presentation to Congress.

Of course, at the present time, the climate for labor law reform in the United States is not entirely conducive to success and so I believe that their report itself is worth reading for those of you who may not be familiar with that effort because it offers significant changes to expedite the process and to make it easier for both employers and workers to have a more expeditious process of settling these disputes and, of course, making the organizing of workers more in tune with the ILO standards. But I appreciate very much your offer to give us an analysis of the ILO and the OECD standard from your perspective and I will ask you that you kindly forward that to our office in the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C.

Thank you very much, Mr. Bowyer.

At this point now, I would like to call on another presenter, Ms. Marie Malliett. If I am not pronouncing your name correctly, please, I apologize. The president of Local 9410 of the Communications Workers of America, CWA, AFL-CIO.

Ms. Malliett. Good afternoon.

MS. MALLIETT: Good afternoon.

My name is Marie Malliett and I am the president of Local 9410 of the Communications Workers of America located here in San Francisco. My local provided the support and assistance to the workers of La Conexion Familiar in their organizing drive.

My local was privileged to observe the tremendous worker solidarity and resolve to unionize their workplace. In a little more than four months, the La Conexion workers came within one week of achieving what no other workers in Sprint's long distance division had been able to accomplish. we observed this worker solidarity on a daily basis. By pure chance, the La Conexion Familiar moved into a building right next to our local union in 1993. It didn't take long for the La Conexion workers to hear about CWA and, in fact, the workers made contact with us in February of 1994.

From that point on, the Sprint workers held regular, daily meetings in our union hall. They came before reporting to work, during their breaks, during lunch hours, and after work. They asked us a million questions about how to change their working conditions at Sprint and how to organize themselves into a union. They really became part of our local family.

We shared with them the day-to-day painstaking tasks of building an organization and the exhilaration of imminent success.

We soon recognized that an overwhelming majority of the Sprint workers wanted a union. I have been through many organizing drives and we do not evaluate lightly the potential of a drive nor the timing of an election. I have always been aware of the risks that workers face in organizing and I am especially aware in today's current environment of a tax on workers rights and particularly Sprint, which has an anti-union corporate culture.

During the organizing campaign, we assessed very carefully the business conditions at La Conexion and Sprint, the company's anti-union campaign, the strength and resolve of the workers to overcome these incredible odds.

At every turn we concluded that these workers were committed to unionize the workplace. Based on these assessments we filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board on June 3, 1994. The NLRB subsequently set the date for an election on July 22, 1994.

Management itself confirmed our estimate of La Conexion/Sprint's prospects. In one of Sprint's own employee newsletters, it reported in the June 1994 issue, and I have provided it in an exhibit for you, just one month before the closure that, and I quote, "La Conexion Familiar is different than other carriers and very successful.... Using the grass roots strategy in conjunction with the power of Sprint's Marketing and Operator Groups, La Conexion has grown at an astounding rate in the last three years because it has targeted cities with large Spanish speaking populations."

Other statements by Sprint management also confirm that La Conexion was financially prospering.

During the last weeks of the campaign I devoted myself full-time to the drive. I participated in daily meetings and made home visits to the workers. Based on this intimate knowledge of the campaign and 70 percent of the workers who had signed their name to the petition for an election, I can tell you with absolute confidence and certainty that the union would have prevailed in the July 22nd NLRB election.

On July 12th, i was informed by our national union staff that Sprint Vice President of Labor Relations, Carl Doerr, had requested to meet with CWA in San Francisco on July 14th. I attended the meeting, which was held at our district office in Burlingame. As I and other CWA representatives were waiting for Mr. Doerr to arrive, we received a telephone call from my local. We were told that a Sprint worker had just reported that Sprint had shut down La Conexion and it was shut down effectively immediately.

When he arrived for the scheduled meeting, Mr. Doerr confirmed the announcement. As Mr. Doerr spoke, never as a union representative have I heard a corporate executive trash the integrity of his employees at the very same time that he was throwing them into the street. He said, and I quote, that La Conexion workers only spoke "Hispanic," that they were all "illegal immigrants" who had "bought" their $7.00 an hour jobs. To find out later that this same executive was deeply involved in a conspiracy to submit evidence to an agency to the Federal Government only added more insult.

The workers took the announcement very hard and so did I. Nothing could have prepared us for the suddenness nor the brutality of the mass execution. Upon hearing the brutal announcement over loudspeakers, workers burst into tears. One woman fainted and paramedics had to be summoned. The workers were told to immediately gather their things and leave the building. As they left, Sprint security searched all their belongings and in some cases, workers were bodily searched.

As you can imagine, my local became a second home for many of these workers. We worked very hard to document their legal case against Sprint to ensure that workers received the social services that they were entitled to and to supplement the wholly inadequate training and out-placement services provided by Sprint.

We continued to hold regular meetings with the workers to keep them informed. We organized a food bank. We worked with them to take their case to the public. We held an all night vigil in San Francisco to make the public aware of Sprint's anti-union/anti-worker philosophy. And we took our case home to the Latino community and to the Latino businesses that Sprint had been courting.

We took their case to our local elected representatives of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, to members of Congress, and to you, our elected federal officials.

Through it all, the workers have shown amazing stamina. In spite of their unemployment and the burden that places on their family, they have kept up the fight. What they can't understand is why it's taking so long to get a remedy from Sprint.

Why do these workers have to pay the price of months and years of waiting? Why is it taking so long to get justice?

I try to give them hope. I tell them that we will get justice, Sprint will be forced to pay for what they have done. But in my mind I wonder how long will it take, what will it take? You see, to me there is a very fundamental issue at stake. The Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of association, therefore, it logically follows the freedom to organize and become members of a union. However, Sprint in this country has been allowed to place themselves above the law. They fired the 177 La Conexion workers because they had dared to exercise their lawful rights to unionize their workplace.

You would have had to have lived through this organizing campaign with me to understand the human fallout of illegal corporate behavior and the inability of our political system and our legal system to stop Sprint. From this entire experience, I am a changed person.

Sprint didn't suffer at all. The same day they shut down La Conexion they mailed out a notice in Spanish to all La Conexion customers with the heading "Good News." They promised better service, $100 of free calls, lower rates and a calling card. And to this day, Sprint continues to market its services to the Spanish-speaking community. La Conexion became the first runaway shop on the new information highway and Sprint's customers were never told about the more than 50 violations of the federal laws which it had committed against its employees.

The workers of La Conexion did what they had to do. They believed in the American dream, they believed in the rule of law, and they acted upon it.

Now, it's time for you, our elected representatives, to act upon what you have learned from this tragic experience. This forum is the first national opportunity these workers have had to state their case to the public.

On behalf of all the La Conexion Sprint workers, I want to personally thank your brothers from the Mexico Telephone Workers Union for making this all possible. We hope the results of this forum will match its promise, so that other workers will not have to relive the trauma which befell the workers of La Conexion Familiar.

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Ms. Malliett.

By agreement between the next scheduled speaker and the last speaker on the list, we are going to switch the order because Mr. del Campo has a problem of child care and he has to go home by 4:00.

Let me introduce formally Frank Martin del Campo, President of the San Francisco Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement.

Mr. del Campo.

MR. DEL CAMPO: Muchas gracias, Jack, y Jaime.

The issue of responsibility I will touch on today and I am very pleased to be able to have the support of my associates in LCLAA in being able to secure my own personal responsibility with respect to child care.

I will offer my words in both English and Spanish, which will reflect the binational perspective of those of us who have the great fortune of having lived in two wonderful countries.

(THROUGH INTERPRETER) First of all, I will speak in English and then in Spanish. Addressing the topics that we have discussed today on labor organization, I will offer some remarks trying to focus on workers' organizations in our countries of origin and also in this country. As a Mexican and as a Latin American, I would say that in this country, we have many millions, many million colleagues working here, seeking dignity.

I come from a family that has a lot of pride. We are in Jalisco, in Guadalajara, there is a town called Ameca. On the way to Ameca, halfway through, there is a farm called Encalison. On this farm, my parents and my relatives have lived for 100 years. Recently, I went back to Ameca because there is no country like Mexico and all of us Mexicans go back to Mexico and in talking with my relatives, it was said that all my childhood friends, all of the people that I grew up with, summer after summer, year after year, none of us, none of us stayed in Ameca. Nobody, I repeat, stayed in Ameca.

(IN ENGLISH) In many ways, we did not decide to leave Ameca. In many ways, although we as people in our family made the decisions personally, the decisions that were made that had an entire town leave Ameca, Jalisco had more to do in the boardrooms of New York City and San Francisco, and in some regards, perhaps, in some regards, perhaps, in other countries of the world.

But really these decisions that were made for us affected us much deeper than anyone else. Effectively, it is the central point of my offering today that the transnationals who make decisions in New York and San Francisco have dominated the political decisionmaking of all three countries.

The irony of this particular case is, of course, that this particular company makes its living off of the separation of our families. The very process of immigration and our need to stay in touch with our families was the endeavor which united the companera La Conexion Familiar.

In many ways, however, we remain the recipients of these decisions, the movement toward the global economy and the corresponding decisions around privatization and layoffs are the results of the political and economic dominance of a few that affect all of our countries.

Let's talk about the waves of immigration.

My father came to this country looking for opportunity. Those who come to this country now are looking for survival and escape from repression in their countries of origin. The circumstances of that have a lot to do with the domination that I have described.

What have the recent immigrants found? Speaking as a Latino workers, they find an environment of 187 that denies them the very right to exist, incarcerates them in a prison of subemployment for the rest of their lives. They find a climate of retreat on affirmative action that deprives not only them but their children of the very fact of education which in my case it was employment and education which was the path to the middle class and it's now currently being deprived.

These decisions around moving from La Conexion Familiar can be hidden behind a very nice trapping of legal argument. Fundamentally for the workers of La Conexion Familiar to whom I am privileged to be with here today, what we have is a case that has been described as to what the outcome is, alcoholism, difficulty with your children, et cetera. They pay the price.

In many ways, many of us here in the labor movement have examined the lack of enforcement of labor laws and the illegal process ad infinitum which means we are effectively disenfranchised of our rights and it's a sad reflection on the U.S. labor laws today that we search for ways around them rather than submitting to them, that in SEIU and many other unions of this country we reject the NLRB. We think it's a trap and what we look for is to find justice in the workplace, evading that trap which is an employer dominated trap for us.

To conclude, I believe that there should be concrete recommendations being offered here today and I would respectfully offer the following:

Strengthen NAFTA and put some teeth into it so that rather than informational gathering here that we have a court where we can have sanctions to protect the employees from La Conexion Familiar.

With respect to the question of Latino workers in this country, stop the racist immigrant bashing which encourages the denial of their rights and the racism that they exhibited on their final day of employment which denied them their language, their culture and their heritage.

For the United States Government from whom I have learned much and can thank for my education on the G.I. bill, I would submit respect the political decisions of other countries. Treat other countries as a cooperative arrangement and not one of domination and respect their political decisions with respect to the directions to which those countries wish to go.

There must be cooperation, not domination, internationally and in the absence of that, in the absence of incorporation of the various sectors of society, we will always have disputes.

Two last comments.

With respect to Mexico and the country to which I have my most affinity given my cultural upbringing and the way in which I was raised, i would respectfully offer that perhaps you might resolve the question of Ruta Cien in Mexico to find a resolution through a negotiation.

I'll conclude my remarks in the following way.

For those of us in U.S. trade union movement who have knowledge of Latin American unions, we know we will never go back to the days of Lazero Cartinas and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nor are we attempting to. However, the principles that were involved in both of those governments in a historic period, that workers should be included, respected and find dignity in the process of their own labor and that their rights must be respected should be incorporated and that the lack of balance that we find today is because workers do not have the same rights as those who employ them and there is this disequilibrium, we will continue to have the problems that we face until such time as we address the problem of disequilibrium between those forces that employ us and those forces who are employed at the workplace.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Mr. del Campo.

The next presenter is a member of the Canadian tripartite delegation speaking for the Canadian labor movement.

I would like to invite Mr. Dick Martin, Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Labor Congress, CLC, to come forward.

Mr. Martin.

MR. MARTIN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Perhaps before I just proceed, I should for the information of the delegates here explain that the Canadian Labor Congress is the major central labor body in Canada and represents some 82 affiliated unions and 2.3 million members.

My role in the congress as secretary-treasurer amongst other administrative matters is responsibility for Latin America in terms of all issues, including human rights, trade union rights, economic matters and, of course issues circulating around NAFTA.

I want to pay, first of all, my personal regards to the workers of Sprint who have testified here today and certainly educated me as to what had happened in your situation. You have courage, I know, to even come here and speak out.

I also want to complement Francisco Hernandez Juarez, the president of the Mexican telephone workers of his determination and courage to insist on laying these complaints and then coming here to testify in particular in view of his comments this morning that it was certainly suggested that he not come here and put his views forward.

I also want to pay my regards to the leadership in terms of the Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, and to Jack Otero for holding these hearings because at least in spite of the criticism that will follow from me at least it allows the workers here in this city and in this state and perhaps across the country to air their grievances and it also allows the representatives of the working people of the United States and Canada and Mexico to put their opinions forward. And so I think from that extent it's beneficial and I do know that the department has taken some risk in order to have these hearings.

When we look at what has happened here, I think you should know that the Canadian Labor Congress strongly opposed NAFTA along with the AFL-CIO in the United States, for a great number of the reasons that we are here today.

We were very, very concerned that this was going to have a major push, a downward effect on the standards that we enjoy in terms of Canada both in terms of labor legislation but ancillary legislation that is very important to us, such as occupational health and safety, workers compensation and, indeed, our social programs.

Of course, we were at considerable worry that there was going to be a dramatic loss of jobs, simply because of the discrepancies and differences between the three countries.

In a report that has been put together by us, it goes on to talk about, and this was a joint report of which the AFL-CIO and a number of community action groups in the United States and Canada put together, we talked about the U.S. firms that break promises in both Canada and the United States.

Large corporations made sweeping predictions that free trade would enable them to hire more workers. Studies conducted in both countries indicate that just the opposite has occurred.

A U.S. consumer organization, Public Citizens, followed up on the jobs promise of about 80 pro-NAFTA companies. In nearly 90 percent of the cases surveyed, the companies had made no significant steps toward fulfilling their promises of U.S. job creation or export expansion.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, a number of leading NAFTA promoters have laid off U.S. workers as the result of NAFTA, such as Allied Signal, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, Mattel, Scott Paper, Xerox, Baxter International, Alcoa and Zenith.

Likewise in Canada. Most of the corporations which promised to create more jobs if the Canadian U.S. Free Trade Agreement known as FTA was signed have instead destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives has monitored 48 of the country's largest corporations and found that 37 of them have slashed more than 215,000 jobs since the FTA passed in 1988. The other 11 companies created only 11,993 jobs. All of the firms are members of a powerful business council on national issues in Canada which lobbied strongly for the FTA and NAFTA.

Throughout Canada and the United States there is now, and indeed I will corroborate that which Mr. Edmondson talked about this morning that we do have in relative terms a good record of certification, applications and certifications, in Canada relative to the United States and certainly it seems up here Mexico. But that does not mean that there are very, very strong interests, and in fact some provincial governments in Canada have stepped substantially backwards in terms of a number of laws that are very important to workers in our country and certainly this happens in the United States.

They have stripped away or are attempting to strip away the enforcement power in the U.S., OSHA, and, indeed, in provincial legislation in Canada, occupational health and safety legislation. There are attempts to legalize company unions, abolish overtime pay, outlaw corporate campaigns targeting company's lenders, suppliers or customers for picketing or other actions, reduce workers compensation, outlaw union shops, and repeal laws that guarantee prevailing wages for construction workers on federally funded projects. That is just the beginning.

What we as labor have to understand and those that are in the general community have to understand is that the corporate world is not created nor exists nor continues to exist to make anything better for anyone except to generate profits. That's what they're created for, profits for the shareholders, and indeed give CEOs some very big paychecks.

Private corporations are not created nor do they exist to enhance or sustain social programs. They are not created to enhance the environment or make sure workers have clean and healthy working conditions. They are not created by individuals to enhance the betterment of the state or create a new era of health, prosperity or peace.

They are created, as I simply said, to create dividends and increase their share prices for shareholders.

The concept of being a good corporate citizen is alien to their creation and ongoing operations. If being a good employer and good corporate citizen is beneficial to their bottom line, then smart management will do it. But also we do not necessarily have a lot of smart management.

Consequently, they use confrontational, legal, bullying and threatening ways to meet their bottom line of increasing profits. The corporate group, U.S.A. and NAFTA, for example, proclaimed that NAFTA itself will improve working conditions by generating economic growth which will enable all three countries to provide more jobs with higher pay and a better working environment. There is not one shred of evidence that NAFTA has done that.

For example, in the United States and Canada, whipsaw bargaining is taking place, where a corporation threatens to shift production to Mexico unless unions agree to concessions. There abounds all kinds of examples of this. There is whipsaw legislation. For example, when President Clinton proposed an increase in the U.S. minimum wage, Newt Gingrich and his gang of Contract of America fought back by arguing that this would force more U.S. firms to move to Mexico.

Although Mr. Edmondson talked of success rates of Canadian unions obtaining certification, and he is right, we are haunted by the specter that if a law is so weighted in the U.S. and in Mexico against workers organizing, we shall eventually be at those dismal statistics.

It is ironic, I find, in a country like the U.S. that has probably more elections for anything than any of the other countries, certainly in terms of obtaining and sustaining a public position, that the will of the majority right down to the very bottom in terms of election for dog catcher or sheriff must be sustained at the same time that when workers try to organize by a majority vote they are thwarted at every turn. They seem to be harassed, intimidated, fired, sometimes beaten, sometimes jailed. And that's from their colleagues in the United States. Democracy for all things, but not for workers who want a union.

With all due respect to my American friends here, the United States, as has been repeated before, needs a complete overhaul of its labor laws and enforcement of its labor laws.

A previous speaker from Mexico spoke of employers becoming nervous if a new trade union comes into their company that they don't know or can't control, a union that won't impose discipline and order. With all due respect to my colleague, Mexico has signed more ILO conventions than either the United States or Canada and indeed has obeyed the least in our opinion.

The United States and Canada should be castigated for not having signed more and not enforcing many of their provisions, but nevertheless the record stands for itself.

Quite bluntly, it is not the business of the company to approve or disapprove of a union the workers choose. As long as the workers democratically choose their union, their officers and approve or disapprove collective agreements, it is their business and no one else's.

We are fed up. We are very fed up with corporations saying to government don't intervene in our business but intervene in the rights of the workers.

We demand as the Canadian Labor Congress that NAFTA and new trade agreements implement social charters that address and enforce basic human rights or our opinion will be of little value and the workers and citizens of all our countries will be the worse off for it and a very small top elite will be very much more wealthy.

Thank you very much.

MR. OTERO: Thank you, Mr. Martin. Your remarks are well taken and I appreciate it.

The Chair now calls Ms. Janice Wood, Vice President of District 9, Communications Workers of America, CWA, AFL-CIO.

Ms. Wood?

MS. WOOD: Thank you, Mr. Otero. As you said, my name is Janice Wood. I am vice president of CWA District 9, which covers in part the states of California and Nevada. CWA represents 56,000 union members in these two states who work in telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing, the public sector and other fields.

I have some brief prepared remarks which I'll turn to in a moment, but I did want to comment briefly, if I may, on some things that I heard here today.

There were three speakers who to my ears seemed to defend the actions of the Sprint Corporation and each of them said something that I found very interesting. There was Professor Corrada who said that the Right Line standard gave Sprint the right to do what they did at La Conexion Familiar because they had dual motives, one of union animus and a second of financial interest. But we believe that that's just not the case, that there was a single motive for the closing of La Conexion Familiar and that motive was anti-union behavior.

Never was there any discussion, indication or intimation of non-profitability of LCF until that issue was raised as a shield against the charges brought by the CWA and the workers at LCF against the Sprint company.

And, Mr. Anaya, I believe that I understood you to say that collection bargaining should be a demonstration of good will and cooperation, and I would agree with that.

But, frankly, sir, the obstacles to organizing non-union workers in the United States are so enormous that it is nearly impossible to unionize workers at any company where an employer is willing to show even the smallest demonstration of good will or cooperation with its own workers.

And Mr. Tapia said that it seemed that we were attempting to create an impression of good guys versus bad guys and he reminded us of the right of employers to close non-profitable businesses. We don't have to prove who the bad guys are. That proof has already been made in federal court. The bad guys are Sprint. They were found guilty of 50 different violations of federal labor laws.

They may have the right, they may have the right to close a non-profitable business, but that isn't what they did. They closed LCF and moved the work, the customers and the profits to other facilities in the Sprint Corporation, after they assured the workers at LCF that they were profitable, that Sprint benefitted from their labor, after they spent tens of thousands of dollars to remodel the office of the manager who directed the threats against employees at LCF just a couple of months before the facility closed.

If finances were the issue in the closing of LCF, why in God's name would Sprint have paid every worker there the equivalent of 60 days pay for no work at all? Why would LCF not have stayed open so that people could continue to work profitably for Sprint Corporation until the 60-day notice period had passed?

Because LCF did just what they said they'd do. They threatened to close the facility if people wanted a union and they did it.

The problem, however, is not that the La Conexion Familiar closed. The problem is that there are thousands of American employers who can and who will do the same thing, that it is the very industry in which we work that has created the technology to make this possible.

Work can be moved from one facility to another instantaneously using the telecommunications network and that worked for Sprint.

I am not here to prove who the bad guys are. I am here because I am an officer of the union that promised people that they had the right to organize and to be members of a union, that they had the right not to fear if they did what the law allowed, to say that they wanted to be unionized.

I am here because we asked the workers at LCF to put their jobs on the line and they did. And because the government that promises that they can't be fired for doing so has nothing to offer them but the chance to come here to tell their story and to hope that having heard their story that you will act to change the system that makes these promises we all know won't be kept.

The practice of union busting is so common in the United States that we have a term of union busting, that there are people who make their living as union busters, advocating openly to employers that it is cheaper to violate the law because the penalties for having done so are less expensive than the cost of wages and benefits under a union contract. I am ashamed to be from the country that allows this.

But my report is about the freedom to associate and the right to organize and I want to focus for a minute on the impact that the actions of employers like Sprint have on broader social and economic trends, on the decline in living standards among working people in our society.

Just three weeks ago, the Federal Government passed a sweeping new telecommunications law that ushers in a new competitive age in telecommunications.

California got a jump start on this legislation when it opened the in-state long distance market to competition earlier this year.

These changes have been heralded as creating millions of new jobs in the growing information sector of our economy and only time will tell if this is true or just more hype from an industry eager to get into new markets. But one thing is certain: Unless workers in the fast-changing information industry have the right to organize free from threat of plant closure and job loss, there will be a constant downward pressure on workers' wages and benefits in this industry.

Historically, telecommunications has been the model of a high wage, high scale industry. Advanced technology, a skilled workforce and a union wage standard have translated into productivity improvements and rising wages and benefits for telecommunications workers.

Telecommunications is the only U.S. private sector service industry with a middle income wage standard and comprehensive benefits. Average annual earnings of non-supervisory telecommunications workers are $37,500 annually, which is twice the average annual earnings of other service sector workers.

What makes these statistics all the more impressive is that women comprise half the telecommunications workforce. In general, the higher proportion of women in the workforce of an industry or occupation, the less its pay. And yet the telecommunications industry has been the exception to the rule of low pay for female-dominated work.

It has also provided access to middle class jobs for minority workers. According to a study by the Washington, D.C. research group The Institute for Women's Policy Research, in 1994 non-supervisory women in telecommunications earned on average $27,040 annually, twice the average earnings of $13,000 of all non-supervisory women workers in the service sector.

Minority workers in telecommunications are also an exception to the rule of low pay. Nationally, minority workers in other service industries earn low wages, averaging $14,300 annually. This is just under the poverty level for a family of four. But minority workers in telecommunications average almost twice that much at $26,000 annually, closer to a middle class living standard.

And what explains this pattern? Simply put, it's the high rate of unionization in the telecommunications industry. Through 50 years of collective bargaining, workers in this industry have achieved middle class wage and benefit levels. Collective bargaining has enabled women and minorities in telecommunications to overcome labor market based pay discrimination that sets the standard in other female and minority dominated service industries.

But this model of a high tech/high wage union future in the industry is now threatened. Non-union telecommunications companies such as Sprint are pursuing a low wage, minimal benefits path. They are choosing to compete by undercutting middle income wage standards.

Women are particularly threatened by these trends. The pay systems that companies like Sprint Long Distance widened the gap between predominantly female and male jobs, undermining the progress achieved through collective bargaining by women in our industry.

New developments in the industry threaten the progress made by women and minorities also. New technologies and regulatory changes provide opportunities for telecommunications employers to follow the low wage, non-union business strategies of the rest of the service sector.

In the face of changes in the industry, it now seems likely that unless union representation is extended to the growing non-union segments of the information industry, average wages of all telecommunications workers will shift downward. The promise of the information age is to create millions of high skill, high wage jobs but that promise will not be realized if this trend continues.

I thank you very much for the opportunity to address this panel.

MR. OTERO: Ms. Wood, thank you very much. Is it appropriate for us to assume that this paragraph that you put in your testimony where you allude to the pay of minority workers in the telecommunications industry which average about $14,300, are you equating this pay with what actually transpired at La Conexion Familiar? Is this the kind of wage that was prevalent in the company?

MS. WOOD: The $14,300 figure is for the service sector generally. And, yes, if you figure it out, LCF was paying about $7.00 an hour. That would be significantly less than the average $26,000 paid to most minority workers in telecommunications. Or significantly less than the average $27,040 a year paid to female workers in telecommunications. Certainly I believe one of the reasons that the workers wanted to organize and form a union, to improve their wages. To be paid like union workers at the Sprint Corporation are paid.

MR. OTERO: Very well. Thank you very much.

MS. WOOD: You are very welcome.

MR. OTERO: We appreciate the clarification.

Now I would like to invite to the podium Ms. Kate Brofenbrenner, Director of Labor Education Research, New York School of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Welcome, Ms. Brofenbrenner.

MS. BROFENBRENNER: Thank you.

Deputy Under Secretary Otero and forum members, than you for this opportunity to present the findings of my research on the impact of plant closing and the threat of plant closing on the right of workers to organize.

I am the Director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University. Starting in 1988 and continuing to the present, I along with my colleague Tom Juravich from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have conducted a series of studies to analyze which factors contribute most to union success and failure at organizing and first contract campaigns.

Today, this research provides the most comprehensive analysis of the determinant role played by employer behavior, both illegal and legal behavior, in election and first contract outcomes and it's the only research that controls for other factors such as election background, bargaining unit demographics, union and employer characteristics and union pay.

As you have heard in testimony today, Sprint Corporation engaged in an extremely aggressive campaign to prevent its workers at La Conexion Familiar from organizing.

Throughout the campaign, Sprint threatened and harassed union supporters, used electronic surveillance and coercive interrogations to ascertain and undermine union support, vowed to never bargain with the union and threatened repeatedly to shut down operations if the workers voted the union in.

After the union staged a solidarity day were 100 of 170 workers wore the T-shirt we saw here today, the company knew for certain the union was going to win the election and they shut La Conexion Familiar down. They even went so far as to fabricate documents to fraudulently claim that the decision to close La Conexion Familiar had been made long before the union campaign got off the ground.

As you have learned here today, even the company did not dispute those facts. Neither does the NLRB administrative law judge who found Sprint guilty of more than 50 different egregious labor law violations.

Yet, despite the mountain of evidence that this was an extremely successful marketing division in the process of expanding operations and that Sprint's sole reason for shutting down the operation was to maintain their union-free status, the judge did not find that the shutdown itself was in violation of labor law.

What I can tell you based on my years of study in this area is that Sprint's actions during this period represent an all too familiar pattern of aggressive union avoidance on the part of American private sector employers. The judge's decision also reflects a labor law that in both its standards and enforcement provides weak and ineffectual protection of the right to organize free of coercion and intimidation, which is the stated mission of the National Labor Relations Act.

Given the extent and intensity of employer opposition to union organizing, we should not be surprised that less than 50 percent of elections in the private sector are won by unions and that less than a third of all workers who attempt to organize end up under a union collective bargaining agreement.

This contrasts sharply with the data that we've found about the public sector, where win rates average 85 percent and unions win with 85 percent victory margins in public sector elections, in a climate where very few, if any employers oppose union activity. In fact, we found 25 percent of employers in the public sector don't campaign against the union whatsoever and only 8 percent run aggressive campaigns.

What my research shows is that more than three-quarters of private sector employers run aggressive anti-union campaigns, including some combination of discharges for union activity, threats, surveillance, captive audience meetings, bribes, promises of improvements, illegal wage increases, anti-union committees, leaflets, letters, meetings.

As shown in Table 1 that's attached to my testimony, most of these tactics were associated with win rates 10 to 20 percent lower than in units where these tactics were not used. And the individual employer tactics, when included in a regression equation, were found to decrease the probability that the union would win the election by between 3 and 22 percent. That's individually. In combination, it's much, much higher.

Under the free speech provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, employers have virtually unlimited opportunities to aggressively communicate with their employees, in letters, in leaflets, in captive audience meetings and in supervisor one-on-one conversations.

Under our law, these employer communications can and often do include distortion, misinformation, threats and intimidation with very little chance of censure or penalty by the board or courts.

Not surprisingly, win rates decline dramatically as the number of employer meetings and letters increase. In fact, the probability of winning the election decreases 1 percentage point for each additional letter, for each additional meeting.

In these letters, leaflets, meetings and supervisor one-on-ones, employers tend to focus on three primary issues: strikes, dues, fines and assessments, and the threat of plant closing. In fact, my research shows that close to 30 percent of all employers make the threat of plant closing a primary focus of their campaign. In some cases, like La Conexion Familiar, the threat is very clear and direct. In others, it's more subtle, with management pointing to other places that shut down when there was a union drive. But the impact is consistently negative.

Where there are no such threats, the win rate is 59 percent. Where those threats are, the win rate goes down to 41 percent.

This aggressive anti-union behavior does not stop when the union wins the certification election. In fact, the majority of private sector employers continue to aggressively fight the union during the first contract process. They continue to fire workers for union activity. They continue captive audience meetings. And they continue to threaten to close the plant down. In fact, a quarter of employers even though the election is won, threaten the plant will close if there is a union contract. Four percent of employers actually shut their plants down rather than operate union.

In some cases, a third of the cases, the threat of a plant closure successfully erodes support for the union and the union is never able to get a first contract. In others, such as the laundry workers campaign in the late '80s in NASDCO in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the union wins the election, bargains a first contract, ratifies the agreement, only to be told that corporate headquarters decides to shut the plant down as they count the ratification ballots.

In still others, the threats serve to undermine union bargaining power, weakening the agreement but still reaching a settlement.

  UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

REPORTER'S CERTIFICATE

TITLE: Public Forum/ILAB

DATE: February 27, 1996

LOCATION: San Francisco, California

This is to certify that the attached proceedings before the United States Department of Labor, were held according to the record and that this is the original, complete, true and accurate transcript which has been compared to the reporting or recording accomplished at this hearing.

In some cases, a third of the cases, the threat of a plant closure successfully erodes support for the union and the union is never able to get a first contract. In others, such as the laundry workers campaign in the late '80s in NASDCO in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the union wins the election, bargains a first contract, ratifies the agreement, only to be told that corporate headquarters decides to shut the plant down as they count the ratification ballots. 

In still others, the threats serve to undermine union bargaining power, weakening the agreement but still reaching a settlement. 

These data, however, do not include cases such as La Conexion Familiar, where an election is never held because the employer initiates a full or partial plant closing before the election takes place. 

We will not have quantitative data on the percentage of union campaigns that never get off the ground or never get to an election due to plant closings or serious threat of plant closings until we get the results of the six-month study commissioned by the secretariat and unless the secretariat addresses that specific issue. 

However, we do know from case study data collected by the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO that plant closings and the serious threat of plant closings are significant both in number and impact in campaigns that never make it to an election. 

For example, we have a 1991 UAW campaign at Flex Cable and Furnace Products in Morley, Michigan. First, the employer threatened to shut the plant down if the workers unionized. When that threat didn't work, the employer then on the Friday before Memorial Day had the workers watch as they padlocked the gate. On the Monday after the holiday, they called back those workers who had not supported the union campaign, but the union supporters were never called back to work. 

Six months later, in an NLRB settlement, some of the workers got reinstatement, some got back pay, but the union campaign had been effectively broken. 

Some employers even go so far as to threaten the NLRB with plant closings. During the 1980s, what was then ACTWU and what is now UNITE campaigned at Farris Fashions in Arkansas. The employer repeatedly made statements such as "If you don't quit messing with this union, I will close the plant down, turn it into a chicken coop and manure." 

Although the union lost the election, they were able to establish at the NLRB hearing that a clear majority of the workers there wanted a union and the Board issued a bargaining order supporting the union's argument that it was employer threats and coercion that had undermined union support. 

In their post-trial brief, the company went so far as to state, "The Respondent will close if it ultimately has to bargain with the union. This is a fact that the union and that CGC," the counsel for the General Counsel of the NLRB, "should not doubt." 

What these cases show is that although Sprint's anti-union behavior at La Conexion Familiar was extreme, it is not uncommon. I am afraid, Mr. Bertuzzi, that Sprint's actions represent not the exception but the norm of employer behavior in the American private sector. 

Under our labor laws, employers have virtually free rein to threaten, to intimidate, to bribe, distort, with only minimal penalties for the most gross infractions of the law. If they fire half the workforce, as they did at ACTWU's campaign in Lichtenburg in Georgia, the worst penalty they face is reinstatement and back pay. There are no possibilities for punitive damages. 

If they absolutely refuse to bargain, after bargaining order after bargaining order, the worst penalty they face is another piece of paper telling them to cease and desist from failing to bargain in good faith and to go forth and bargain in good faith. 

And in the case of La Conexion Familiar, the only penalty was that Sprint be required to send a letter to employees informing them that they had a right to organize and pledging not to harass them in the future. 

As Arizona Congressman Ed Paster said, this ruling "would be laughable if it were not so heartless." 

Professor Corrada is correct that there are legal precedents for shutting down a plant for business reasons in the midst of a contentious organizing campaign, but the facts in this case speak otherwise. 

Sprint has shut down other facilities for business reasons and in all those cases they gave at least 60 days' notice. And in all those cases, they gave the employees an opportunity to bid for other Sprint jobs. But in this case, there was no notice and there were no jobs offered. 

It is clear that in this case, it was not a business decision, it was a decision based on anti-union animus alone. 

In the end, when we hear the testimony of the courageous women at La Conexion Familiar, I think we are struck by how workers still manage to fight for unions despite the odds. 

The only way that we can ever create the environment envisioned by the drafters of the National Labor Relations Act is through significant expansion of both worker and union rights and employer penalties in the organizing process. This will require not only more vigorous and rapid enforcement of current law, but also serious financial penalties and injunctive relief to restrain the most egregious employer violations, particularly plant shutdowns and the threat of plant shutdowns. 

It will also require expansion of union access to the workplace in order to counteract the captive and coercive nature of employer communication with workers during the organizing campaign. 

As CWA President Morton Bahr testified earlier today, these changes need to be accomplished not only by significant reform to U.S. labor laws but also by amendments to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation to provide an enforceable code of conduct for countries covered under NAFTA. This code must include both restrictions on the ability of companies to shift their operations to other countries to avoid unionization and guarantee for the right to organize free of management interference and intimidation. 

Most important of all, these new codes must include meaningful penalties for the violation of those rights. Then and only then will workers be able to exercise their democratic rights to have an independent voice of their own choosing to represent their interest in the workplace and then and only then will employers such as Sprint Corporation no longer be able to flagrantly violate labor laws at the expense of their workers' dignity and well-being. 

I sincerely hope that this forum, along with the six-month study to be conducted by the secretariat, will be an important first step in that direction. 

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Ms. Bronfenbrenner, thank you very much. I have a couple of questions. 

On page 3, you went off your prepared text and you cited some statistics which I failed to write down. 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: I condensed it. 

MR. OTERO: Would you please repeat them for me? What you were talking about is no surprise that less than half the NLRB elections held this year in this country result in union victory and then you went on and cited some -- 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: The public sector? 

MR. OTERO: Right. But I was not able to copy that. 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: Okay. 

MR. OTERO: Would you repeat that? 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: Okay. That's in the written testimony, by the way, but I'll go over it again. It's in the written testimony on page 8. 

MR. OTERO: Page 8? 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: Yes. The second paragraph on page 8. 

In the public sector, win rates are 85 percent across all unions and there are very few employers who engage in any kind of employer opposition. 

MR. OTERO: I see. Okay. My second inquiry deals with your intriguing statement on page 5 to 6, when you state that "We will not have quantitative data on the percentage of union campaigns that never get off the ground or never get to election due to plant closings until we get results from the six-month study." 

And I'm wondering if you're telling us that in your research you have been able to quantify that and, if that's the case, could you outline why? 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: I have not done that study to this date. 

MR. OTERO: I see. 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: It can be done. It's very extensive and expensive research. Now, Lance Compa from the secretariat met with me last week to ask my advice I designing a study and I explained to him that -- and what data we had and I explained to him the only way we can find out whether the threat of plant closings and plant closings truly affect workers' ability to organize is if we look at campaigns that never made it to an election and that can only be done by taking all campaigns where a petition was filed but then withdrawn and surveying those campaigns to find out whether there was a threat of plant closings or plant closings, which would be difficult but not impossible research to do.

MR. OTERO: That's very good. 

My final question deals with the research that you have done. Is this limited to the United States only? 

MS. BRONFENBRENNER: Yes. 

MR. OTERO: Okay. Thank you very much. We appreciate your help. 

I now call to the podium Ms. Giselle Quezada, union steward of Local 9410, Communications Workers of America. 

Ms. Quezada, please? 

MS. QUEZADA: Thank you very much. My name is Giselle Quezada and I am originally from South America, from Peru. I am a mother of four and I am a union steward and also very active in my community. 

Approximately three years ago I became a U.S. citizen because I realized that no matter how active I am I have no voice in this country, so I became a U.S. citizen. 

I want to also tell you how I met the workers. 

I was asked to help organize the workers from La Conexion Familiar, since I was a union steward and active in my union and they had lots of questions in regards to how does the union work, what are the contracts, and so I went in an helped. 

I was very impressed with the workers. At first, they were there, they had a lot of questions and were uncertain about where all this was taking them. But the injustices they endured were so great, you heard some of them, that it just empowered them and at the same time gave me so much energy that I wish I could share that with you with my words. They were empowering. They believed in what they stood for. They realized that the struggle was hard but they knew that in this country they had the opportunity and the chance to speak out and become part of a union, that that was a right they had, that they had the freedom of speech, and that they would be heard. 

And this is amazing when we hear of the stereotyping that takes place, that they'll only come here to this country to have children, just to reap the benefits that we have to offer, so that they could receive welfare and be taken care of. But yet these workers before you all wanted to have a decent job. They wanted to be very much a part of the American dream. They wanted to be able to become citizens, make a better living, and for their children, offer them the chance and opportunity of a good education. 

And I feel that the workers would have accomplished that if they would have been given the opportunity to have a chance to vote. But yet the place was closed, the doors were slammed shut in their faces without any regard of who they were or what they were. 

They also were told, well, where else could you get a job? All you do is speak Spanish. It's amazing when we stop and think that when they want our business, all of a sudden we are valuable, but when we become the workers then we are treated so differently with a lot of injustice and put down. 

When we stop and we think what is it that in shutting down La Conexion Familiar by Sprint it devastated the community which, by the way, it had promised that it would hire people and it would be a part of the community, and they were out there campaigning, selling, they had booths everywhere, saying this is a service, that we care. 

Let's look at the name they gave this company, La Conexion Familiar, which involves the family, but yet when it came to the workers and giving them their rights, they did not. 

The other part of who I feel feels the greatest part is the children as they watch their parents struggle up to this day without jobs. And when we talk about their chances and their opportunities, that we are in a land that they can speak out and voice their opinions and vote in a union and yet all they look at is having to move from one place to another because of the fact that their parents don't have a job, their mom. 

And some of these people, by the way, also contrary to what was said by Sprint to the president of my local, Marie Malliett, that they were illegal people, they had people in there of high education but the only unfortunate part was they did not speak the language, the English language. But yet if it weren't for the fact that they spoke Spanish, they wouldn't be employed, they wouldn't have been employed by Sprint to begin with. 

I think that I would like to see that we never forget these workers, these workers who gave up a great deal, who stood up and believed for their rights, who believed in the kind of power and what it took to be able to be recognized and stand up and to be treated equally with respect and dignity. 

I hope that we send that message loud and clear from one end of the earth to the other that what would happen to them as workers was wrong, unfair and unjust. 

Now, if I may say a few words in Spanish. 

(THROUGH TRANSLATOR) The fight as workers for us is very difficult and it's very rough and tough, but all of us together, we will never be divided. 

Thank you.

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much y muchas gracias, Ms. Quezada, for your presentation. 

And we now come to the final presenter of the day who by personal decision shifted with Mr. del Campo.

Let me ask Jaime Gonzalez, the field representative of the California Federal of Labor, AFL-CIO, to come forward. 

MR. GONZALEZ: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) First of all, Mr. Otero, I would like to thank you to share with you and all your colleagues this present opinions. 

I bring you greetings from the treasurer, Jack Kenney, who was unable to be here. 

I congratulate you by the way you used this dialogue, utilizing the manipulation of La Conexion Familiar. 

(IN ENGLISH) This forum is to examine the impact of sudden plant closures on the freedom of association and organizing by workers. The inference and common sense assumption based on the track record of corporate America is that the closing is done in order to prevent the successful organizing by workers. 

My intent is not to repeat the facts as stated by the workers of La Conexion or CWA and accepted by any common sense individual who has firsthand experience with labor-management relations and is not rendered naive by personal interests or potential business contents, but rather to share with you an opinion of possible consequences of further plant closures in an effort to prevent successful worker organizing. 

This opinion is based on an understanding gathered from different comments that have been made here today. 

It has been stated that there is an interest in reconciling the interests of both workers, unions and capital corporations. 

The reconciliation of the interests of what under NAFTA are considered units of production, not people, not workers, but units of production, and the interests of corporations begs the question what interests are more common, what interests are more important to our society if a decision had to be made between the interests of workers' well-being and corporate profits? 

The answer would depend on what type of society we would want. Some would want a society where only a minority would have the opportunity to fulfill aspirations and human potential and the majority live in subsistence standards and economic insecurity. 

These individuals would choose the interest of corporations in which they have a vested interest to live better than the majority. These individuals would welcome company unions that are not too radical or threatening. They would want free applause simply because of their title and not because of the substance or merit of their words. 

On the other hand, others would take a more risky attitude. They would choose the interests of workers, the people, the families, the majority. These would seek a society where people play by the rules according to the law, even if the law is not intended to lay a level playing field. 

They would choose to seek a society where the majority of the population, not the vested elite minority, get an opportunity to enjoy even the most simple of pleasures, a job, respect, dignity and even some free time and money to nurture a family. 

These individuals would choose the interests of the people, the workers or, as stated, the units of production. 

I thank those of you on this board who have a proven record of concern and commitment to the interests of people and not of capital profits for a noble attempt to bring justice and credibility to a deal that was not meant to produce justice but rather profits. 

I thank you for refusing to be accomplices to the exploitation of people by unchecked capital. I share with you this opinion. If justice is not rendered through some just resolution to this matter and other corporations continue to close their plants suddenly in order to prevent the organizing of workers, there will be other martyrs and other workers and their families will suffer as those of La Conexion Familiar. 

But these economic martyrs will become a powerful reminder that workers cannot depend on an enlightened government or a benevolent corporate agenda to secure a humane society. They will continue to remind us that a humane world for the majority will only come about through worker organization and international solidarity. 

These proceedings will at the very least strengthen and stretch the bond of cooperation and solidarity between and among the workers of the Americas. 

(THROUGH TRANSLATOR) And those who speak Spanish, I would like to remind you that everybody looks after their own selves and maybe that's why so many of them didn't show up here today. 

Thank you very much. 

MR. OTERO: Thank you very much, Mr. Gonzalez. Please convey my best wishes to the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Jack Kenney, a long-time friend. 

We have come now to the conclusion of this event, ladies and gentlemen, and before we all go on our own merry way, I would like to take the prerogative of the chair to make a few final comments. 

First of all, I must express my personal appreciation on behalf of the Department of Labor to each and every one of the presenters for their brief, useful, insightful and enlightening presentations. Most particularly, I am thankful to each and every one of you for the discipline and the cooperation you lent the chair in ensuring the orderly process of these proceedings in a manner in which everyone had the opportunity to say his or her piece. 

Let me also say that as we prepare to leave this room, everything that has been said here by every person must be respected as their own opinions, even if as they spoke some felt the opposite viewpoint. That is the beauty of the democracy in which we live, that we are able to be tolerant of others in expressing opinions, even on matters as controversial and as painful as some of these presentations here have demonstrated today. 

We came here with the hope that we would be able to learn more about the impact that cases where companies' shutdown have on this very precious right of freedom of association. I am going away today enriched by the contributions of each and every one of you. I hope that my colleagues from Canada and Mexico feel likewise. 

And, of course, we will pursue this matter to an even greater degree by working with our labor secretariat in Dallas in developing more empirical data, not only as these cases have occurred in the United States, but also in Canada and Mexico, and we hope that by the end of this summer we will have a report that we could elevate to the three ministers of labor who compose the Ministerial Labor Commission under the North American Labor Agreement, for it is they, the ministers of our countries responsible for labor matters, who are ultimately the judge of what can and should be done either collectively or individually by each country with regards to the problems at hand. 

Let me say also that on behalf of the Department of Labor we in the United States recognize that American labor law is far from perfect. We recognize that there are a number of areas that need to be changed. As I said before, Secretary Reich and President Clinton sought immediately upon ascension to power to undertake a study of these problems and commission a very respectable, highly respectable, commission, I should say, led by Professor Dunlap to undertake this study. 

We appreciate the constructive criticism and we hope that there will be more for only in true transparency can we hope ever to be able to change something that is not working very well and make it work even better for the benefit of those who toil every day for their livelihood. 

The report of these proceedings will be made public in a few days, hopefully, as soon as we get all of the technical aspects and they will be available as a public available information document through the Department of Labor, specifically through our National Administrative Office. If you have looked at all of our materials, the telephone number, the fax number and the address of our National Administrative Office at the Department of Labor is available in the documentation. 

I would also like to request that those of you who may have developed or who may have other information to offer upon return to your homes please feel free to do so. The record will not be closed because we have allowed a number of people who did not want to present testimony in public to have sent it to us in writing and we will keep the record open for the next two weeks so that we can have the opportunity to collect even more materials that would be useful to us. 

Finally, let me express my sincere appreciation to my colleagues, Mr. Warren Edmondson from Canada and the tripartite delegation that accompanied him here to participate in these proceedings; also to Dr. Luis Miguel Diaz of the Mexican Labor Secretariat along with the Mexican delegation, for their presence and the contributions that they have made to this process today. 

I would also like to say thanks to my very effective, very efficient but silent colleagues, Irasema Garza. She does have a tongue, believe me. And my legal advisor, Mr. Widom, who is very knowledgeable on matters regarding American labor law. He is in the Solicitor's Office now but he was for many years one of the principal people at the NLRB. They have been able to provide the technical support and the necessary legal advice that is required for us to do the job. 

I also would like to express my appreciation to our logistics and public relations director, Mr. Bob Z. I can't pronounce his last name. He was responsible in dealing with all of the arrangements for this event and also with the press. 

And I think also that we owe a debt of gratitude to the technical people, the interpreters, the people who actually wired the room and made sure that technically we were up to par. There was not a hitch in the communications today. And all of this only happens because of the dedication of these people who are behind the scenes and make people like me look very good. 

So I would like to thank everyone. And, of course, I say to them also the check is in the mail, you will be getting paid, I hope. 

And to all of you, ladies and gentlemen, unless you have anything else that anyone cares to say at this point, I bid you all goodbye. May you have a very safe and happy return to your respective homes and thank you very much for being here with us today. 

This concludes the forum officially at 5:04 p.m. 

Thank you very much. 

[Whereupon, at 5:04 p.m. the forum was concluded.]