The future of the Mexican labor movement
Payne, Douglas W.
FIDEL VELASQUEZ, the ninety-seven-yearold Mexican labor baron, finally expired on a Saturday morning last June. Those Mexicans who owed him the most were in full attendance at his wake: the...
...influence over Mexico's economic policies...
...They should be exterminated," Don Fidel had said...
...DOUGLAS W PAYNE is a New York-based writer...
...That, as much as soaring crime, led to the militarization of the Mexico City police...
...They are among the country's top three foreign exchange earners and the only sector of the Mexican economy that is actually growing...
...When the CTM needs reinforcements, the government will use the police and the army to deal with labor indiscipline...
...M EANWHILE, IN an effort little reported outside Mexico, up to a quarter million dissident Mexican teachers have been taking on their own union and the state at great personal risk...
...Labor Department's national administrative office, the first stage in the NAFTA labor-rights review process, was brought by Human Rights Watch, the International Labor Rights Fund, and the National Association of Democratic Lawyers of Mexico...
...Together, they have established a worker education center in Juarez, Mexico, and coordinated organizing efforts in maquiladoras...
...Long-standing antagonisms between the PRD and the PAN could easily cause that alliance to unravel...
...The military budget has nearly doubled, even as social spending has been slashed...
...unions also backed a complaint against the systematic firing of pregnant women workers by maquiladora managers to avoid paying constitutionally mandated maternity leave...
...Veldsquez, who almost singlehandedly transformed Mexican workers into an arm of the ruling party, was to the end a servant of the state...
...The UNT had come out against the pactos and, with the expectation that the CTM leadership would continue to support these wage-suppressing agreements, it hoped that more CTM unions would defect...
...As he had so many times before, Velasquez snarled threats about strikes and withdrawing labor from the agreement...
...In exchange for such loyalty, the PRI heaped economic subsidies and lucrative government posts on CTM bosses and provided wages and benefits that made CTM members the elite of the Mexican workforce...
...Unions formed outside the CTM therefore find it virtually impossible to obtain official recognition and strikes are routinely declared "nonexistent...
...SINCE THE early 1990s, a number of independent unions, some of which are now in the UNT, have been risking life and limb by trying to organize workers in foreignowned plants and striking for better wages in the public sector...
...The FAT, one of the more militant groups in the UNT, is a federation of unions, worker-owned cooperatives, and farmworker and community organizations...
...There is now an AFL-CIO Mexico committee at the staff level which is aiming to coordinate wider cross-border efforts...
...The CTM, which Velasquez commanded for nearly six decades, claims a membership of five million in more than twelve thousand affiliated unions...
...Whatever money was left in the pockets of Mexican workers lost nearly half its value overnight, Mexican businesses sank amid massive debt, unemployment soared, and foreign capital flew off to other markets...
...But even with a weakened CTM, Mexican workers are still up against "a wall of power," as it was put by a U.S...
...But that is often used as a cover for targeting government opponents, including independent unionists...
...DISSENT / Winter 1998 23 Only days before, substantial numbers of the CTM's rank and file had disobeyed orders by voting for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leftwing opposition candidate who won the election for mayor of Mexico City...
...The day of the union representation election, workers had to vote out loud in the presence of two hundred CTMhired thugs wielding pipes, sticks, and guns...
...Human rights violations in Mexico, including torture and disappearances, have soared under Zedillo...
...unions have been active in Mexico, including the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters...
...Mexican rights groups say more than 150 dissident teachers have been killed since 1980...
...It also provides for equal pay for equal work, a federally mandated minimum wage, and maternity leave...
...Just before the vote, Han Young management said that if the FAT affiliate won, the plant would be shut down, a common management tactic in the maquiladora zone...
...Workers who step out of line are fired...
...But limousines seemed to outnumber workers that day at the seven-story, bunker-like CTM headquarters...
...union official involved in the Maxi-Switch effort...
...The Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) has been developing efforts since 1996, when Mexico replaced China as the top textile and apparel supplier to the United States...
...Although the UNT seemed set on establishing a collective leadership, the attention of many has been focused on Francisco Hernandez Juarez, the forty-eight-year-old head of the telephone workers...
...The Teamsters have lent support to the FAT, and along with the UE and the CWA have filed or supported worker-rights complaints against Sony, GE, and Honeywell through the NAFTA mechanisms...
...Indeed, by keeping organized labor enchained, Veldsquez had done more than any single individual to avert a social explosion during the peso devaluations, privatizations, and International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity of the last fifteen years...
...Then, during one of his regular Monday press conferences, ashes spilling down his shirtfront from the cigar crooked in the corner of his mouth, he mumbled his assent...
...High-level delegations from the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) were present to support the UNT at its formation in Mexico City last August...
...That meant the Maxi-Switch union could be declared illegal on a technicality, which the company seemed prepared to do if the union kept pressing for the rehiring of workers previously fired for organizing...
...In another case, last April, the Mexican telephone workers and the Communications "On November 10, the government labor board in Tijuana denied certification of the independent union on trumpedup technical grounds after a clear majority of the workers voted for the union...
...Maquiladoras currently account for more than 40 percent of Mexican exports...
...When President Zedillo took office in December 1994, the Mexican peso collapsed, after having been recklessly propped up by Salinas to ensure Zedillo's election...
...and Mexican religious and labor groups that filed a 1994 complaint against Sony for firing rebel workers at its Nuevo Laredo plant...
...The alliance worked well enough until 1982, when the PRI finally mismanaged oilrich Mexico into bankruptcy and a new generation of PRI Ivy Leaguers led by President Carlos Salinas decided to refloat the PRI dynasty with foreign capital...
...The PRD was committed to ending state unionism and Cardenas had promised full labor autonomy under his municipal administration in Mexico City...
...When Han Young workers formed their union last summer, the company countered with firings, physical intimidation, and bribery attempts...
...Which is just what happened after he died...
...Velasquez ordered unions to stay home again in May 1996, and was horrified when 24 DISSENT / Winter 1998 two hundred thousand rebel workers staged their own parade...
...In the early 1990s it formed an alliance with the independent United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE...
...The petition, accepted in July 1997 by the U.S...
...During the 1996 May Day spectacle, Velasquez threatened to expel Foro unions from the Workers' Congress (CT), the CTMdominated umbrella organization created by the PRI in 1967...
...Moreover, the PRD was now in an alliance with the three other opposition parties in the Congress—the center-right National Action Party (PAN), the PRI's other principal opponent, and two small parties, the Green Ecological Party (PVEM) and the Workers Party (PT...
...Bilingual Indian teachers command great respect in the indigenous communities of the Southern Sierra Madre, where anti-Indian and anti-teacher repression now coincide (see "Between Hope and History: Mexico's Indians Refuse to Disappear," Dissent, Summer 1996...
...Maxi-Switch workers had organized an independent union and were up against the usual collusion of the government, the company, and the CTM...
...The day of the funeral, a cartoon in La Jornada newspaper depicted a row of CTM leaders, slouched in wheelchairs and covered with cobwebs, wondering what to do with Veldsqueis now-empty wheelchair...
...By the end of 1995 the cost of basic subsistence for a typical family was beyond the reach of three-quarters of Mexican workers...
...That unprecedented act spared Zedillo, who normally would have presided from the balcony of the National Palace, from a frontal blast of labor discontent...
...With salaries as low as thirty dollars a week, many teachers have to work two and three jobs to feed their families...
...Standing with Zedillo, Clinton said, "No two countries are working together on more important issues with a more direct effect on the lives of their people, than Mexico and the United States...
...those who keep at it are subject to attacks by thugs in the pay of local CTM chieftains, who generally are in league with management...
...The UNT is a mixed bag...
...But there was little reason to believe he would not continue to play rough to satisfy foreign capital's appetite for cheap, docile labor...
...According to Amnesty International, CNTE activists are being jailed, tortured, killed, or "disappeared" by security forces in the strongly indigenous southern states where the organization is strongest...
...Two key questions are whether the UNT can hold together, and whether it can capitalize on the PRI's loss of its majority in the Congress to achieve reform of the labor code...
...The government has responded with bureaucratic runarounds and mounting repression...
...Active or retired officers now command police forces in Mexico City and twenty-one of Mexico's thirty-one states...
...Yes, DISSENT / Winter 1998 25 Zedillo had allowed the electoral reforms that led to unprecedented losses for the PRI...
...To the delight of multinational enterprises, Mexican workers are now among the poorest, lowest-paid in Latin America...
...Within a few weeks, dozens of other unions and peasant organizations had signed up and UNT leaders claimed a membership of 1.5 million...
...The PRI was more concerned about the pent-up anger in worker ranks, so much so that in 1995 Velasquez canceled the official May Day labor parade...
...In September, the company finally conceded to a union election.* But even if an independent union were to gain formal recognition at Han Young, there is no guarantee it would be able to operate as such...
...Velasquez supported the PRI when it sent the army to crush a wildcat railroad workers strike in 1959, and again in 1968 when soldiers massacred hundreds of students demonstrating in Mexico City against authoritarian rule...
...That meant adhering to the IMF playbook and betting the store on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA...
...DISSENT / Winter 1998 27 Cross-border cooperation has helped pick up the momentum of independent organizing in Mexico...
...Still, Mexico did not blow...
...Hernandez raised eyebrows last September when he invited President Zedillo to the telephone workers' national convention...
...Most belonged to the newly founded Forum of Unionism Facing the Nation, a diverse group of about two dozen unions led by the telephone workers...
...Among the independents spearheading the effort in the maquiladora industry is the Authentic Workers' Front (FAT...
...Possibly stung by the publicity generated by the case, the Mexican government ordered the local labor arbitration board to recognize the MaxiSwitch union...
...unions, which have come up against a CTM wall in their efforts at cross-border cooperation against multinational corporations...
...Although its combined membership probably does not exceed fifty thousand, FAT represents manufacturing workers in at least half of Mexico's thirty-one states and has been willing to engage head-on the combined strength of state unionism and multinational corporations operating in Mexico...
...But then the government turned around and permitted the company to change its name from Maxi-Switch to something else...
...The law that counts is the labor code...
...28 DISSENT / Winter 1998...
...The CNTE has repeatedly defied the stateunion machine to strike for better wages, free textbooks for children, and the release of teachers jailed for their union activities...
...The Zapatista guerrillas initially spooked the government but were now bottled up by the Mexican army far to the south in Chiapas...
...unions are hopeful that the creation of the UNT will provide expanded opportunities...
...unions continue to operate individually, and labor has a long way to go before it catches up with the internationalization of corporate business...
...It includes former CT members as well as more militant unions that have always fought from the outside against the PRI's labor monopoly...
...The next day the CTM announced that one of them, Leonardo Rodriguez Alcaine, a relative youngster at seventy-eight, would be the interim chief until the next CTM congress in March 1998...
...Last May President Clinton made his first trip to Mexico...
...They also put out a biweekly newsletter, Mexican Labor News and Analysis, which can be found on the UE web site and provides an indispensable window into the uphill struggle of independent labor organizing in Mexico...
...In both arenas, the majority of workers are women...
...The stated purpose is to combat drug traffickers and the surge in violent, poverty-driven crime...
...The assembly-for-export sector has nearly doubled in size since 1994 as multinational corporations have swarmed in to exploit wages that have tumbled to seventy-five cents an hour and safety rules that exist mostly on paper...
...After a second rebel insurgency emerged in southern Mexico in mid-1996, Mexican military intelligence began tarring the CNTE as a front for the guerrillas, a pretext to arrest activists during counterinsurgency sweeps...
...Most voted for the CTM...
...Last September, FAT-supported workers at a Mexico City auto-parts factory owned by the Connecticut-based Echlin company tried to contest a CTM protection contract...
...Differences were put aside to unite behind the principles of labor democracy and independence...
...Hernandez was a favorite of former president Salinas, who took him along on tours of the United States, and he has been portrayed in El Financiero, Mexico's foremost independent business daily, as an example of "new corporatism...
...In mid-July Zedillo and Rodriguez pledged to maintain the "historic alliance" between the CTM and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...Mexico has become increasingly militarized under Zedillo...
...Han Young workers were rebelling against the imposition of a "ghost union," a common ploy in which a CT or CTM affiliate is hired by a company to "represent" workers, but shows up only to get paid or to intimidate workers when they try to organize independently...
...The CWA and the Mexican telephone workers, which established links in 1995, filed a complaint on the Maxi-Switch workers' behalf through mechanisms set up under the NAFTA side agreement on labor...
...Still, many UNT unions felt the confederation's political focus should be on Congress, not on flirting with Zedillo...
...But the more militant unions of the UNT are wary of him because of his checkered past...
...But as everyone jockeyed for position and leverage in a highly fluid political environment—from the UNT and the CTM, to Zedillo, the PRI and the opposition parties in Congress—another equally crucial battle for labor freedom continued in the trenches...
...Most of the few hundred blue-collars who showed came from a Chrysler plant, whose managers enticed them with gifts of new uniforms and a free bus ride to the city...
...Workers of America (CWA) won an apparent victory at the Sonora plant of Maxi-Switch, Inc., a Taiwanese-owned company that manufactures electronic games such as Nintendo's Game Boy...
...Velasquez grumbled, but in the end agreed to policies that would make Mexican workers pay dearly...
...To prevent the type of mass demonstrations that occurred in May 1996, the Zedillo government set up police and military cordons throughout the city...
...U.S...
...The CNTE was joined by dozens of independent worker organizations in planning peaceful protests in Mexico City against NAFTA and U.S...
...The contracts are already in place when workers are hired, so affiliation with another union such as the FAT means no job...
...Those Mexicans who owed him the most were in full attendance at his wake: the free-market, rulingparty elite led by the government finance minister, and Velasquez's fossilized, millionaire lieutenants in the Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM...
...His apparent contempt for reform was on display last September, when he and other government officials snubbed Pierre Sane, the head of Amnesty International, during his visit to Mexico...
...VELASQUEZ HELPED deliver organized labor to the PRI in 1935, laying the groundwork for the entire corporatist structure...
...That was taken as good news by Mexico's economic elite and foreign investors...
...The Mexican Constitution, fruit of the 1910-1917 Revolution, establishes in Article 123 the right to freely organize unions and to strike...
...The most direct effect on people that day was the arrest of scores of teachers who were to have led the protests, but instead found themselves in jails on the outskirts of the capital...
...But neither the CTM nor the PRI is capable of keeping their end of the bargain as they used to...
...Mexico and Cuba are now the only two countries in Latin America where human rights groups do not enjoy freedom of movement and access to top officials...
...Charismatic and smart, he had been the prime mover and principal voice of the Foro since its first days...
...Together, they held a narrow majority and were aiming to undo the legal underpinnings of the corporatist state, including the labor code...
...On Mexico's national teachers' day in May 1996, the CNTE stunned authorities when tens of thousands of teachers from a dozen states brought downtown Mexico City to a standstill with demonstrations and blockades...
...In the rest of the country, worker votes contributed to the PRI's unprecedented loss of its majority in the Mexican Congress...
...That concerned emergingmarket honchos on Wall Street, but heartened U.S...
...It stipulates that all union elections and strikes must be authorized by the government...
...At an assembly last August, seventeen Foro unions announced that they were forming the National Union of Workers (UNT...
...The "Foro," as it's commonly known, demanded freedom for labor from government control, the dismantling of patronage ties that bind union bosses to the PRI, and new labor laws...
...That Ford, Sony, Daewoo, General Motors, General Electric, and others did not send emissaries to honor Velasquez's legacy was an act of utmost ingratitude...
...According to Mexican Labor News and Analysis, the CNTE reported in September that there were arrest orders against at least 120 teachers in Mexico City and ten states in the southern and central regions of the country...
...The FAT also has been a pioneer in crossborder cooperation with U.S...
...Since the beginning of the NAFTA debate, a number of other U.S...
...Each year from 1988 to 1994, Velasquez signed off on the so-called pactos, agreements orchestrated by Salinas among government, business, and labor to keep wages low, cut public spending, and otherwise abide by the demands of international financial markets and foreign investors...
...As of last September it could brag to foreign investors that not one maquiladora had been successfully organized by a truly independent union...
...By reaching out to Zedillo, Hernandez risked alienating the many UNT unions that had backed Cuauhtêmoc Cardenas and his Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the elections just a few months before...
...That has led to the formation of an opposition movement within the union, the democratically run National Coordinating Committee of the Education Workers (CNTE...
...Then, in August, unions representing up to 1.5 million workers broke from the CTM's grip to found an independent labor confederation...
...As the undisputed boss of the CTM since 1941, Velasquez endorsed every Mexican president, put the CTM machine behind every PRI candidate, required every CTM member to join the PRI, and used CTM goon squads to steamroll any attempt at independent organizing, often relying on government might for backup...
...It cooperates with the San Antoniobased Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, a coalition of more than thirty U.S...
...In recent years the AFL-CIO itself has reached beyond its traditional ties to the CTM to establish relations with independent Mexican unions...
...But the corporatist relationship between the PRI and organized labor left Article 123 suspended on the winds of unchecked power and corruption...
...In October, the FAT was hoping for a breakthrough at the Han Young factory in 26 DISSENT / Winter 1998 Tijuana, which produces tractor-trailer parts for the Korean giant Hyundai...
...When asked by reporters why so few workers came to pay their last respects to the man known as "Don Fidel," Rodriguez growled, "Because it was a weekend...
...But the leadership of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) invariably cuts deals with the government for meager wage increases...
...As reported by the newsletter Working Together: Labor Report on the Americas, more than fifty were fired...
...In early October, the UNT said that a number of CTM unions were preparing to join the UNT...
...Meanwhile, the number of Forbes-certified Mexican billionaires jumped from three to twenty-four, multinational corporations cashed in on Mexican labor now cheap enough to compete with Asian sweatshops, and Carlos Salinas was rewarded with a seat on the board of Dow Jones at the end of his term...
...But for the time being, U.S...
...unions, civic organizations, and their Canadian counterparts...
...Ghost unions are a variation of the "protection contract," a widespread practice in which companies arriving in Mexico sign lowwage contracts with PRI-allied unions, usually kicking back to the union bosses as part of the bargain...
...There are now close to one million maquiladora workers, most of them women, toiling in more than three thousand factories...
...To lure back investors meant renewing the pacto...
...They were told to return for the funeral on Sunday, but not many were on hand when President Ernesto Zedillo extolled Veldsquez for his role in maintaining social and economic stability...
...While a majority of them are still found along the border with the U.S., the Zedillo government is promoting their expansion throughout Mexico...
...There are two principal fronts: the burgeoning maquiladora sector, the centerpiece of the Zedillo government's lowwage, export strategy, and central and southern Mexico, where dissident teachers have rebelled against cuts in the education budget...
...Still, the union continued to demand recognition, supported by the FAT and a campaign by the San Diego-based Committee for Maquiladora Workers, which organized solidarity missions to Tijuana and demonstrations outside Hyundai's San Diego office...
...Nine others, however, stayed away, including the millionplus teachers union, whose leaders opted to remain within the CT...
...THE UNT represents the first major fissure in Mexican state unionism...
...Still, while the end of state unionism can now at least be contemplated, the guts of the state-party system remain intact, and the next stage looks to be a drawn-out, uncertain, and ugly affair...
...But Velasquez did not follow through, apparently fearing the Foro would establish a rival coalition...
...The agreement offers little toward the enforcement of workers' rights, but does provide channels to highlight their systematic denial...
...Between 1982 and 1994 Mexican workers' real earning power shrank by a staggering 70 percent to 75 percent...
Vol. 45 • January 1998 • No. 1
