LABOR MEXICAN LABOR: THE OLD, THE NEW AND THE DEMOCRATIC
By Matt Witt Matt Witt is director of the American Labor Education Center's Mexico-U.S. Labor Project. MEXICO CITY-- The "dinosaurs" claim to be patriots who put loyalty to country ahead of special interests. The "neo-cowboys" prefer to call themselves "modernizers." The "dissidents" say they are simply "democrats." Behind the colorful battle over nicknames lies a bitter competition between the three camps in Mexico's labor movement. The outcome of this competition will have a major impact on multinational corporations which have been shifting operations to Mexico and on U.S. and Canadian labor groups concerned about the flow of jobs across the border and the brutal exploitation of Mexican workers. The "dinosaurs" are the official labor federations affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which has ruled Mexico for more than 60 years. Frequent defenders of government and corporate policies that have devastated workers during the past decade, the official federations have lost so much credibility that the regime shows signs of looking for an alternative set of "responsible" labor spokespeople. The "neo-cowboys" are a group of union leaders in strategically important sectors--communications, transportation, utilities, education--who say they are that alternative. They describe themselves as allies of President Carlos Salinas in his efforts to "modernize" the economy and make it more "competitive" by attracting foreign investment. Those efforts, they say, require workers to make sacrifices and resolve differences with management through negotiation rather than pressure tactics. The "dissidents" are a mixture of independent unions and opposition groups who, instead of trying to revitalize traditional ties between PRI and the unions, want to create a democratic, militant labor movement free of government and corporate control. "Everyone supports 'modernization' in Mexico," said Alfredo Dominguez, longtime leader of the independent Authentic Labor Front, "but not everyone agrees on what it means for the labor movement. Does it simply mean more productivity and more profits? Or does it mean a democratic debate over what and how goods are produced and how wealth is distributed?" Dinosaurs: symbols of the past For the past 50 years, the dominant institution in Mexican labor has been the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM is officially affiliated with PRI, as are some smaller private- sector federations and the Federation of Unions of Federal Workers (FSTSE). As a condition of employment, workers in many industries and public agencies have dues automatically taken from their paychecks both for their PRI-linked union and for the party itself. The PRI often buses workers covered by the official federations to demonstrations supporting party policies and to the polls on election day to vote for its candidates. The CTM's traditional claim has been that its ties to the ruling party pay off in benefits for union members. From the 1940s to the 1970s, many organized workers did enjoy wages and benefits that, while low in view of the profits extracted, were higher than those received by millions of even less fortunate Mexicans. But even workers who, in return for a steady job, accepted Mexico's great inequalities of wealth and near-total lack of democracy began to lose faith in the 1980s. Due in part to a wage-control program accepted by the CTM and other union leaders, Mexican workers' buying power dropped during the decade by more than 60 percent, with the basic wage now only about $4 per day. Meanwhile, business's share of the annual gross national product rose from 48 percent to 65 percent. The CTM and other PRI unions loyally supported their party while it cut real spending on education, housing, health care and other social benefits by more than 50 percent. More than half the adult population is now unemployed or underemployed. "Behind the statistics and figures, we are living through grave tragedies--as individuals, as families, and as communities," wrote a group of 1,500 unionists and other lay church members to Pope John Paul II during his May 1990 visit to Mexico. At individual companies, the CTM and other PRI unions have actively worked with management and the government to defeat workers' movements for a living wage, decent working conditions and democratic rights. For example: At Ford's Cuautitian plant in the state of Mexico, CTM officials agreed to cut pay and benefits in half, helped engineer the firing of the workers' elected leadership and brought in armed thugs who opened fire on the workers, killing one and wounding eight. The government has refused to reverse the firings and has not brought any company or union officials to justice for their role in the murder. [See "Mexican Workers Reveal Problems at Ford," Multinational Monitor, July/August 1990]. At the Modelo brewery which makes Corona beer for export to the United States, the CTM recruited strikebreakers to take the jobs of union members demanding job safety, health protection and a meaningful retirement program. For years, the CTM allowed the Tornel tire factory in Tultitlan outside Mexico City to pay its workers less than their contract required. When employees sought a government-supervised election so they could leave the CTM, management fired 650 workers. On the day workers were scheduled to vote, CTM thugs beat anyone who showed up--and the government labor agency postponed the election. At the Fernandez egg farm on the Yucatan peninsula, CTM loyalists beat up 250 workers organizing for decent conditions and the right to an independent union. The government took seven workers and two of their attorneys hostage for nearly two months, releasing them only when all the workers agreed to turn their jobs over to CTM strikebreakers. Fidel Velazquez, chief of the CTM for 47 of the past 50 years, denies the federation's involvement in any such acts of violence, blaming "dissidents" and the press for spreading "false information" even when he is confronted with hard evidence. When asked about published photos of CTM violence at Tornel, for example, the 90-year-old union chief told reporters, "We don't have photographers. To us, the facts are obvious." Government collusion with the "dinosaurs" belies the reformer image President Salinas has tried to project to the world by arresting or forcing the resignation of a few corrupt union chieftains. While Salinas has portrayed these moves as attacks on corruption, in each case the offending leaders were causing political problems for the government through conflicts with multinational corporations, PRI's opposition or the government itself. The attack that received the most international attention came in January 1989, when the army arrested oil union boss Joaquin ("La Quina") Hernandez. La Quina was viewed as an obstacle by the multinational oil companies that Salinas is allowing to re- enter the petrochemical industry which President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized in 1938. The union magnate's replacement-installed by the government without a membership vote-quickly agreed to significant concessions in workers' contracts, paving the way for the eventual arrival of Shell, Exxon and other multinationals. Other targets of recent government attacks were two CTM leaders in the maquiladoras, plants mainly owned by U.S. multinationals, which assemble goods for the U.S. market and generally pay workers--mostly young women--less than $1 per hour. In many maquiladoras, the CTM or other PRI federations maintain "ghost unions" or "unions of protection"--paper structures that collect dues and protect the company from any effort by workers to organize a genuine union. In other maquilas, official unions perform the functions of a corporate labor-relations department, enforcing discipline and removing militant workers from the plant. The government attacked the two corrupt maquila leaders for occasionally orchestrating strikes and insisting on a 40- hour work week, when 48 hours is the maquiladora norm. Within hours after receiving marching orders from Salinas in September, 1990, Fidel Velazquez announced he was replacing the two officials--not with democratically elected unionists but with CTM bureaucrats more acceptable to Salinas and the multinationals. "Apparently, the maquiladora owners in Matamoros and Reynosa didn't feel they were getting enough protection for their money," said the leader of a garment union in a nearby town. "They complained to Salinas, and he solved their problem." Neo-cowboys: a modern alternative? In addition to the nickname "dinosaurs," the traditional PRI union bosses are often referred to by workers as charros, best translated as "cowboy" or "wrangler." The term comes from the nickname of a prominent railroad union leader during the 1940s, "El Charro," who habitually dressed as a horseman and who accepted money from the government to sell out a major strike. Playing on this term, many workers accuse the younger generation of government-allied union chiefs of being "neocharros." The most prominent target is Francisco Hernandez Juarez, head of the telephone workers' union and of a newly formed Federation of Unions in Goods and Services (FESEBES) that so far includes the electric utility workers, airline pilots, flight attendants and two smaller unions. (The leader of the million-member teachers union has said her organization will soon join as well.) In the past few years, the telephone, utility and airline unions all faced government plans to privatize their companies. Rather than oppose privatization, union leaders chose to negotiate. Many union members suffered major reductions in purchasing power, job rights and working conditions, and, in some cases, large numbers of jobs were lost. In return, union leaders were assured that their organizations would continue to exist and that the companies would expand after privatization. "Only 17 percent of Mexican families have telephones," said a top aide to the telephone union leader. "This means there is the possibility of a great expansion of our market. But we need capital to modernize. Obviously, we must develop a culture of cooperation within the company in order to attract foreign investment." FESEBES was formed, he added, because the traditional labor federations "are no longer functioning as intermediaries between the workers and the government. The government needs someone to negotiate with who is considered legitimate. President Salinas obviously cannot say so publicly, but we know that he is in favor of the alternative we are creating." Critics of the "modernizers" argue that cooperation with the government and multinational corporations can succeed only if the unions first mobilize sufficient grassroots power. Private ownership, especially by foreign multinationals, will mean that decisions about essential services will be based not on human needs but on profitability, they contend. Investment capital would be available internally if the Mexican government limited the interest payments to foreign banks that now consume more than half the annual federal budget, if corporations and wealthy individuals paid a fair share of taxes and if controls were implemented to stem the flow each year of billions of dollars to private bank accounts abroad. "We have been told that modernization would be carried out in a way that benefits the Mexican people," said Martha Flores, a telephone operator and union steward. "But in preparing for privatization we have already lost many rights that took years to win. Ten thousand operators' positions will be eliminated by new technology, yet we have not been allowed to participate in decisions about alternative positions, additional services, retraining and other ways of preventing the loss of jobs." FESEBES is different from the traditional federations because it stands for "union democracy and autonomy" from the ruling party, according to pilots union leader Homero Flores. Yet, the FESEBES unions have not participated in mobilizations supporting workers actually demanding democracy and autonomy, such as those at Ford, Modelo, Tornel or Fernandez Farms. Both Hernandez Juarez and Jorge Sanchez, leader of the utility workers (SME), signed the agreements establishing and then renewing the government- imposed wage control program-agreements which they then criticized as being unfair to workers. In an appearance at a U.S. union convention, Sanchez gave his hosts similarly mixed signals concerning the Salinas administration's top foreign affairs priority, a U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. On the one hand, he touted free trade's supposed benefits, even though the agreement's primary effect would be to make it easier still for multinational corporations to profit from lucrative U.S. and Canadian markets by exploiting cheap Mexican labor. At the same time, he called for a binational labor conference to discuss proposals the negotiators should take into account. Dissidents or democrats The third force in Mexican labor is a loose collection of left- leaning groups that call themselves los democraticos--the democrats. Some, including university workers, seamstresses in Mexico City's garment district and certain groups in iron and steel companies, have tried to function as truly independent unions despite strong government opposition. Such independent unionists have often received crucial training and organizing support from the Authentic Labor Front, a group originally established with support from Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America that now functions independently. Because the government so rarely grants legal recognition to independent unions, other democratic groups, like the Ford and Tornel workers, have tried instead to switch to different official federations willing to promise some degree of worker control. In addition, there are reform movements within many of the government-dominated unions. A leading example is the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) within SNTE, the national teachers union. Founded more than a decade ago, CNTE had gained enough strength by April 1989 to call a three-week, nationwide wildcat strike by nearly half a million SNTE members. As a result of the strike, the old-line PRI politico who had controlled the union for 17 years was replaced by order of Salinas himself by Elba Esther Gordillo, a PRI political operative. The strike also forced the government to accept majority rule by the democratic forces in several of the largest union locals. Reform efforts continue, however, as average wages for teachers remain at about $200 per month, most union officials are still not democratically chosen and the government is pursuing plans that could divide the national union into 32 state-level units. In contrast with the official unions that are dominated by PRI, the democratic forces shun formal connections with political parties, leaving individual activists free to participate in politics as they choose. But the democrats also recognize that it is necessary that they develop alternatives to the government's economic and social policies, from the uncritical welcoming of multinational corporations to the privatization and reduction of public services to the failure to seriously address environmental problems. "The democratic movement has to move from simply opposing to being capable of proposing," said Jesus Martin del Campo, a longtime CNTE activist and spokesperson. "For example, parents and people in the communities know that teachers' salaries must be raised, but they want to know what else we propose to do to make education in Mexico more effective and more democratic." In April 1990, more than 60 independent unions and democratic movements formed the Unified Union Front, the latest in a long series of efforts during the past 10 years to improve coordination and mutual support among the democraticos. In addition, the democraticos have increased efforts during the past year to exchange views with their U.S. and Canadian counterparts, as integrated investment by the multinationals, free trade agreements and continuing immigration intertwine the fates of the three countries. A major theme of such meetings has been the common interest of Mexican, U.S. and Canadian workers in promoting decent living standards and democratic rights in Mexico. In recent years, more than half of the 100 largest North American corporations have set up operations in Mexico to exploit cheap labor, with a resulting loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. and Canadian jobs. The democraticos argue that North American unionists ought to support their struggles as a way to raise Mexicans' buying power, creating a larger overall market that would result in more secure jobs, equitable trade, and stable communities on both sides of the border. They hope the AFL-CIO and its national affiliates will change their traditional policy of only maintaining official ties with the CTM and begin working with independent, democratic labor groups. In the meantime, the democratic groups have been organizing their own exchanges with North American unionists, including an international women workers' conference sponsored by the Seamstresses "19th of September" Union, a Mexico-Canada labor conference on free trade, a multi-union "Common Interests" conference, a trinational "Solidarity or Competition?" conference in Minnesota and a visit to Mexico by a U.S. teachers' delegation hosted by the democratically controlled SNTE locals. "We need to improve labor's international network for communication and mutual support," wrote two participants in the October 1990 Common Interests conference, Mexican Ford worker Marco Jimenez and Minnesota Ford worker Tom Laney, in a recent joint op-ed article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "Our goal must be to push the companies and our governments to bring Mexican living and working conditions up toward U.S. levels, rather than allowing U.S. levels to be brought down."