Noam Chomsky: Democracy & Media Part 7 - NAFTA and Its Effects (1994)

November 1, 1994 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... Watch the full lecture: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/noam-chomsky-on-democracy-and-med...

The General Electric Company, or GE (NYSE: GE), is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in the State of New York. In 2010, Forbes ranked GE as the world's second largest company, based on a formula that compared the total sales, profits, assets, and market value of several multinational companies. The company has 304,000 employees around the world.

Honeywell (NYSE: HON) (legally Honeywell International Inc.) is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments.

Honeywell is a Fortune 100 company with a workforce of approximately 128,000, of which approximately 58,000 are employed in the United States. The company is headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey. Its current chief executive officer is David M. Cote. The company and its corporate predecessors were part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index from December 7, 1925 until February 9, 2008.

The current "Honeywell International Inc." is the product of a merger in which Honeywell Inc. was acquired by the much larger AlliedSignal in 1999. The company headquarters were consolidated to AlliedSignal's headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey; however the combined company chose the name "Honeywell" because of its superior brand recognition.

Honeywell has many brands that consumers may recognize. Some of the most recognizable products are its line of home thermostats (particularly the iconic round type), Garrett turbochargers, and automotive products sold under the names of Prestone, Fram, and Autolite.

Mexican labor law governs the process by which workers in Mexico may organize labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, and strike. Current labor law reflects the historic interrelation between the state and the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the labor confederation officially aligned with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI), which ruled Mexico under various names for more than seventy years. While the law, on its face, promises workers the right to strike and to organize, in practice it makes it difficult or impossible for independent unions to organize while condoning the corrupt practices of many existing unions and the employers with which they deal.

The PRI and Mexican employers' associations started floating proposals to enhance productivity of Mexican industry by allowing it more "flexibility" during the late 1980s, when "technocrats" such as Miguel de la Madrid, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo were in command of the PRI. Those proposals made no headway, however, until after the election of Vicente Fox Quesada of the Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, in 2000. Fox's Secretary of Labor, Carlos Abascal Carranza, a former head of one of the largest employer associations, initiated discussions in 2001 with employer associations and the official and independent union confederations aimed at achieving a consensus proposal for labor law reform.

The Abascal proposal presented in 2002, however, would tighten government control of unions and collective bargaining, without taking any steps to make information about unions' collective bargaining agreements or their activities available to affected workers or the public or make the organizing process any less cumbersome. On the contrary, the proposed reforms would heighten the risks for workers seeking to organize by requiring independent unions to submit the name and address of each of their members to the local Boards, which would then have the power to investigate the authenticity of their signatures. The reforms would also favor existing unions by barring the board from considering more than one election petition at a time and tightening jurisdictional rules defining which labor organization can represent which workers, according to their craft, enterprise and company, making it impossible for some independent unions to challenge incumbents.

Opponents of the law have challenged it under the provisions of the labor side letter to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While the CTM originally supported the reforms, some unions within the official labor movement have expressed reservations about it. The proposals are currently at a standstill.

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[jacksamurai23]

thanks for the upload!