When Jobs Go South--a True Parable : Green Giant workers are fighting on two fronts.

Three years ago, the full meaning of free trade hit Watsonville, a farm town 90 miles down the coast from San Francisco.

The shock wasn’t entirely a bolt from the blue. Watsonville has been a major provider of vegetables for the frozen-food industry, and these days many North Americans are getting their produce, fresh, from Chile and other “export platforms.”

So Watsonville had already lost 3,600 out of 6,000 jobs in the frozen-food industry when Grand Metropolitan gave pink slips to 370 Green Giant vegetable packers whose jobs were being relocated to Grand Met’s plant in Irapuato, Mexico. (The London-based Grand Met bought Pillsbury in 1988, Pillsbury having earlier ingested Green Giant.)

Now see the great debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement spelled out in the aftermath of that business decision of Grand Met.

From the corporate point of view, the Irapuato move seemed sound enough. Green Giant’s Mexican workers in Watsonville were getting $7.61 an hour. Green Giant’s Mexican workers in Irapuato get $3.76 a day. The Watsonville workers were unionized, in Teamster Local 912. Green Giant’s Irapuato plant has, as they say in Mexico, a “white,” or company, union.

But vegetable processors shifting to Irapuato have found that life doesn’t always fit the business blueprint. True, labor is cheap, but the truckers hauling the green stuff from Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City, to the Texas border either have to use costly toll roads or make time-consuming detours. And there are a lot of saints’ days on the Mexican calendar. The culture moves at a different pace, very frustrating to the time-and-motion folk hunched over their spread sheets in London. So the hemorrhaging from Watsonville has stopped.

Back in the summer of 1990, the Green Giant workers in Watsonville figured out how to fight a transnational company headquartered half a world away. They organized a boycott of all businesses owned by Grand Met, which include Burger King, Alpo dog food, J&B; Scotch, Haagen Dazs ice cream and kindred staples.

Some of the workers had families near Irapuato. One of the boycott organizers, Yolanda Navarro, went down and visited the local offices of the Frente Autentico de los Trabajadores (FAT), the militant labor confederation. She talked about what had happened in Watsonville. Later, Local 912 provided help for a FAT organizing drive in the Green Giant plant in Irapuato.

A supporter of the Green Giant workers made a film, “Dirty Business,” about conditions in the fields around Irapuato.

“As a result of our efforts,” the president of Local 912, Joe Fahey, says, “Grand Met . . . promised to create a water-purifying plant in Irapuato, and they spent $2 million on a severance package for the Watsonville workers, with a super-duper retraining program.”

Fahey also points out a problem with retraining: there are no jobs to train for in Watsonville. And, since the average educational level of the displaced workers is between second and fourth grade (in Mexico), it’s going to take a lot of retraining to make them into biophysicists or the symbolic analysts invoked by Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

But those Green Giant workers managed one big thing. They made the job flight south from their plant symbolic of what NAFTA means. Yolanda Navarro made the July 12 cover of Fortune magazine.

At the start of August, she and Fahey, in a group including two Canadian workers, will head down to Irapuato. The trip is being supported by the Teamster International, now headed by the reform president Ron Carey. They are scheduled to meet workers, farmers, union organizers and social justice and religious activists.

It’s a parable about international solidarity about which Fahey and Navarro are unromantically realistic. Those early trips to Mexico three years ago were greeted with suspicion and outright hostility by workers in Irapuato, who thought a $3.76-a-day job was certainly a lot better than no job at all. That organizing effort failed.

For the corporations, “free trade” means security of investment in Mexico and a stable pool of cheap labor.

For labor, free trade means a savagely difficult organizing effort to raise international working standards and rates, to preempt the whipsaw bids of capital to find the cheapest hourly rate. As Fahey says, the Watsonville workers have to persuade their opposite numbers in Irapuato that there is, along with self-interest, a common interest, and that whereas the corporate drafters of NAFTA want to see the hemispheric wage drop from $7.61 an hour to $3.76 a day, workers want the momentum to be in the other direction, a joint concern that requires joint action.