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Nebraska Members Regain Jobs From Mexico

January/February 2001 IBEW Journal

When NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the U.S. trade deficit soared and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs went to Mexico, including some from the Square D circuit breaker plant in Lincoln, Nebraska, represented by the IBEW.

But today, says IBEW Local 2366 Business Manager Jerry Gulizia, some of them are coming back, thanks to the skills of IBEW members and an $8 to $10 million investment by the company, which is owned by the French conglomerate Schneider Electric. As a result, employment for IBEW members at Lincoln has stabilized, growing from 507 total employees in 1995 to 597 in 2000.

A long history of cooperation made that investment possible, says Bill Mohr, Gulizias predecessor as Local 2366 Business Manager and President. Cooperation lets us tap into employees knowledge, skills and abilityincluding the ability to make decisions that lead to increased production, quality and customer service, Mohr says. 

On a highly automated assembly line that took two years to invent and install, some 37 highly skilled IBEW members do the work of perhaps 250 assemblers at the Square D plant in Pacifico, near Tijuana, Mexico. Employment in Pacifico is expected to drop below its current 1,200, but Square D officials say the cutbacks will come through attrition only while the Lincoln plant continues to grow. And in Lincoln, the number of higher wage positions continues to increase, Mohr says.

The Lincoln plant once made both industrial and residential circuit breakers, but U.S. manufacture of industrial breakers has been totally exported, according to Fortune magazine in an August 2000 story on the Lincoln plant. Such Square D competitors as Cutler-Hammer and General Electric have plants in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as well as Mexico, and Square D had a maquiladora plant in Mexico 10 years before NAFTA. 

But an innovative and much smaller residential circuit breaker, about the size of a wallet, is bringing the Lincoln plant back into prominence. Success has been achieved, Mohr says, through a continuous education plan that makes use of the Internet and training-based CDs to teach such topics as math, blueprint reading and mechanical reasoning. Worker safety in Lincoln is emphasized at every turn, says Mohr, who sums up the alleged environmental, safety and labor standards in NAFTA for jobs in Mexico as something that for the most part has not happened.