In March 2021, Carlos worked a call center floor in Monterrey, Mexico, earning $3.15 an hour to troubleshoot AT&T internet outages for customers in Texas. His paycheck, after a 48-hour week, was $120—less than what his AT&T counterpart in Dallas made in two hours. Carlos and his coworkers did the same work, under the same brand, using the same scripts, but their labor power commanded radically different prices. That gap was not an accident of geography. It was a deliberate function of the border—a mechanism engineered by AT&T to slash its wage bill by 80 percent and extract surplus value from a super-exploited segment of the global working class.
AT&T Used the Border to Cut Wages by 80 Percent
Between 2018 and 2022, AT&T offshored more than 12,000 call center positions—largely union-held jobs at the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—to facilities in Mexico. The arithmetic is stark. A U.S.-based AT&T customer service representative earned a median wage of $22.50 per hour plus benefits. The same position in Juárez, Monterrey, or Tijuana paid the equivalent of $2.50 to $4.00 per hour, with no pension, no healthcare, and no union. The company’s annual savings on each offshored position exceeded $40,000. For 12,000 jobs, that amounts to nearly half a billion dollars in surplus value redirected from worker pay to shareholder returns.
This is not simply outsourcing. It is a class strategy that deploys the border as a wage-suppression mechanism. By maintaining a reserve army of labor—the Marxist term for a pool of unemployed or underemployed workers who exert downward pressure on wages—on the southern side of the border, AT&T could threaten its U.S. workforce: organize and we leave. The border became a disciplinary tool, a threat made tangible. When CWA refused to concede wage concessions, AT&T made good on the threat, shuttering union-represented call centers in Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix while simultaneously expanding its Monterrey and Guadalajara facilities. For further reading on how borders function to suppress migrant and cross-border labor costs, see Migrant Labor and the Border as Wage-Suppression Mechanism.
CWA Organizing Across the Border Challenged Capital's Division Strategy
CWA’s response broke with the standard nationalist playbook. Rather than campaign to “bring jobs back” or demand tariffs—both of which pit U.S. workers against Mexican workers—the union sent organizers south. In coordination with the Mexican labor federation STRM (Sindicato de Telefonistas de la República Mexicana) and the global union network UNI Global Union, CWA began organizing AT&T’s Mexican call center workers. The goal was not charity or solidarity as sentiment—it was structural: build a union on both sides of the production chain so that capital could no longer play one section of the working class against the other.
The strategy was effective because it recognized a fundamental contradiction in capitalism: capital requires the border to divide labor, but labor can organize despite and across the border. CWA helped Mexican workers file for union recognition under Mexico’s 2019 labor reforms—reforms passed partly as a requirement of the USMCA trade deal. The union leveraged the USMCA’s Rapid Response Mechanism, a new enforcement tool that allows workers in one country to file complaints against employers in another. In 2022, Mexican AT&T workers filed a complaint alleging the company interfered with union elections. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office opened an investigation. AT&T backed down, allowing a free union vote.
This was not charity from Washington. It was class struggle prosecuted through every available institution. CWA understood that trade deals are not neutral; they are fighting terrain. For more on how trade agreements trap migrant and cross-border labor in low-wage circuits, see The World Cup, Migrant Labor, and the Commodification of Cross-Border Workers.
International Labor Solidarity Requires Structural Not Moral Commitment
Liberal unionism stops at the border. It demands that capital treat domestic workers fairly while ignoring how capital extracts surplus value from foreign workers—or worse, it calls for protectionist walls that turn foreign workers into scapegoats. CWA’s cross-border organizing transcended this limitation, but it did so only by building institutional infrastructure that could withstand the contradictions of international solidarity.
The key infrastructure was the UNI Global Union framework, which connects CWA with its Mexican counterpart and dozens of other telecommunications unions worldwide. Under this framework, CWA and STRM negotiated joint bargaining demands: wage parity targets (not full equality, but a schedule of increases), safety standards, and the right to organize without retaliation. The framework also included a no-strike clause: neither union would cross the other’s picket line. When AT&T tried to shift work from unionized Mexican facilities to non-union Guatemalan facilities, UNI’s global network identified the move and mobilized a coordinated response across three countries.
What made this work was not moral appeals to “fairness” or “dignity”—liberal concepts that capital easily absorbs without changing its structure. What worked was a material reconfiguration of labor’s power: workers on both sides of the border now had the capacity to disrupt production together. If Mexican workers struck, U.S. workers honored the strike and refused to handle overflow calls. If U.S. workers struck, Mexican workers did the same. The border no longer divided the strike. For an analysis of how prison labor represents an even more extreme version of wage suppression through state-enforced immobility, see Carceral Wage Super-Exploitation: Prison Labor, Borders, and the Reserve Army.
“U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai: ‘The Rapid Response Mechanism is a new tool for workers. But no tool works without organized workers willing to use it. The credit belongs to the Mexican workers who filed and the U.S. workers who stood with them.’”
The statement is instructive precisely because it reveals the contradiction: the mechanism works only when labor organizes across borders to activate it. The state does not grant solidarity; solidarity forces the state to act. The USMCA mechanism was designed to prevent a race-to-the-bottom in wages, but capital immediately sought to evade it. AT&T responded to the 2022 union victory in Mexico by routing more calls to India and the Philippines—countries outside the USMCA framework. This is the endless creativity of capital: whenever labor wins a foothold, capital seeks an exit. Solidarity cannot be a one-time campaign; it must be a permanent, global infrastructure of struggle.
The Border Divides Workers But Cross-Border Organizing Can Reunite Them
The AT&T-CWA-STRM campaign illustrates a central truth of Marxist analysis: the border is not a natural line but a technology of class division. Under capitalism, borders serve a dual function. Externally, they mark the jurisdiction within which a state claims sovereignty over labor markets. Internally, they create a segmented labor force: domestic workers with partial rights and foreign workers with fewer rights—the classic reserve army of labor mobilized not just by unemployment but by legal exclusion. The Mexican call center worker is not an immigrant; he works in Mexico. But his existence as a low-wage, non-unionized worker undercuts the wages of unionized workers in Dallas—without either worker crossing the border. The border works as a remote-control wage suppression device.
Cross-border organizing challenges this by reconnecting the divided working class. When CWA and STRM coordinate bargaining, Mexican workers can demand wage increases that approach North American standards, and U.S. workers can demand protections against job flight. The class interest becomes transparent: both groups need higher wages for all, not lower wages for one group to compete. This is internationalism not as sentiment but as strategy—what Lenin called “the unity of the proletariat across national boundaries” in the struggle against capital.
The obstacles remain immense. The USMCA mechanism covers only a fraction of cross-border labor. AT&T’s response—diverting work to non-USMCA signatory countries—shows that capital will re-route production chains to escape worker power. Mexico’s labor reforms remain weak in enforcement; company unions, or “protection contracts,” still dominate many industries. And the nationalist temptation is strong: U.S. workers may demand tariffs, Mexican workers may demand independence, and capital happily exploits both impulses.
Yet the CWA campaign proves that the border can be overcome. It required not moral outrage but structural commitment: shared bargaining frameworks, mutual strike support, and legal tools wielded by organized workers. It required understanding that the enemy is not the worker on the other side of the border earning $3 an hour, but the capitalist who pays him $3 while pocketing the $19 difference. The border divides the working class only as long as workers allow it to. Organize across it, and the border becomes a bridge.
