Mexican Labor Bibliography

II – Mexican labor – review essays

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Edward C. Lorenzo. Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S. International Labor Standards Policy. Notre Dame, Indiana, 2001. Pp. x, 318. Index.

Edward C. Lorenz’s Defining Global Justice gives us the first attempt at a broad overview of the history of the role of the United States in the International Labor Organization. Based on an impressive command of a wide variety of sources, this well organized and clearly written account explains how the social gospel movement, progressive era reformers, academics and attorneys, feminists and consumers, and labor unions attempted to shape an international organization that could establish standards to protect workers around the world.

Lorenz explains how organizations such as the American Association for Labor Legislation and the National Consumer’s League worked to influence ILO policy. His particular strength lies in showing the role of policy makers, political leaders and ILO officials. One such figure is Republican Party Progressive and former New Hampshire governor John Winant, who would eventually serve as ILO director. Lorenz shows how Winant’s empirical approach provided leadership to the ILO between the 1930s and 1950s.

Yet, while he starts with a story about exploitation in the Mexican maquiladoras, and writes from a position of sympathy with workers, Lorenz’s approach to analyzing the history of the U.S. and ILO—and most important what to make of that history—prove inadequate. Lorenz cannot break with the Cold War framework that focuses on the role of the U.S. and the struggle against Communism. He writes about the Soviet’s state-controlled labor unions and lack of workers’ rights, but fails to mention the role of the AFL-CIO in backing the State Department and the CIA in thwarting radical nationalist and leftist labor movements in developing countries. Not surprisingly then, Lorenz praises George Meany as a genuine populist leader of the labor movement who advanced humanist ideals, rather than seeing him as partner of the U.S. State Department and American corporations.

Lorenz believes that the progressive coalitions of earlier eras, and Meany’s struggle with the ILO in the 1970s, prove that dedicated populists working within the framework of American political pluralism, and committed to the ILO’s tripartite structure, can force governments and corporations to take workers’ rights into account. The message would seem to be that coalitions of labor bureaucrats, reform-minded capitalists, and political liberals could make workers’ rights a reality today. Yet, he himself recognizes that the ILO, while establishing standards as lofty ideals, has never been able to meaningfully enforce them.

What might make for meaningful change for workers on a world scale? In passing Lorenz alludes to the theory that the ILO owes its very existence to the strength of European socialism and the Russian Revolution. Such a theory, which would focus our attention on class struggle, offers another more fruitful way of understanding and fighting for workers’ rights. Toward the end of Defining Global Justice, Lorenz mentions the Battle of Seattle in 1999 where radical youth, environmentalists, and labor unions forced the shutdown of the World Trade Organization meeting. That kind of struggle—magnified a thousand fold—would lead to some meaningful changes in workers rights. The future lies not in political pluralism and tripartite arrangements, but in class struggle.

Kevin J. Middlebrook. The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 463pp.

Kevin Middlebrook's new Paradox of Revolution is one of the most thorough studies in either English or Spanish of the relationship between the Mexican state and the labor unions. Paradox of Revolution provides a history and analysis of Mexican labor from the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) through the inauguration of Ernest Zedillo (1994). Middlebrook, director of research at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, of the University of California at San Diego, deals with the major Mexican government sponsored or "official" labor federations the Regional Confederation of Mexican Labor (CROM) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) as well as several the major industrial unions. At the center of Middlebrook's book stand detailed studies of the railroad and auto industries and unions, with particular emphasis on the attempt to create independent unions in those sectors.

Perhaps the most interesting and important chapter in Middlebrook's book is chapter six, "Labor Politics and Import-Substituting Industrialization: From Maintenance to Labor Insurgency," which is a fascinating study of the successes and failures of the independent and democratic currents which appeared in the Mexican labor movement from the late 1960s through the 1970s. At the center of this chapter is his analysis of the democratic movement among workers in the auto industry. Middlebrook asks, how did this movement arise and what was its impact?

Middlebrook argues that in the early 1970s the rapid growth of auomobile manufacturing plants overwhelmed the Confederation of Mexican Workers's (CTM) system of representation and control, the plant delegate (delegado de planta). When plants changed from assembly to manufacture, or when the size of the workforce grew suddenly, the CTM's plant delegate system broke down, and workers began to demand new and more democratic systems of representation. The democratic movement among autoworkers became generalized throughout the auto industry in the early 1970s.

Middlebrook notes that "union democratization in the automobile industry did not necessarily improve workers economic welfare." (237) Whether or not there was improvement in wages and income depended on other factors, such as the nature of the company and plant. But often, because the new more democratic unions were "more inclined to strike" they did win higher wages.

Where rank and file groups took power, they "substantially increased opportunities for worker participation in union affairs." (237) And, "Democratically elected union officials generally proved more assertive than their predecessors in defense of members' interests, both in the resolution of individual and collective demands within the firm and in grievance proceedings before state agencies such as the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) and labor conciliation and arbitration boards." (239)

Middlebrook describes how "Changes in workplace labor-management relations were among the most important consequences of union democratization in the automobile industry." (240) Rank and file reformers took more control over hiring, and attempted to eliminate the use of casual and temporary labor. The democratic union movement won contracts with better job security provisions. Workers took more control over the production process. And workers improved in-plant grievance procedures. Perhaps most important, where rank and file workers democratized their local unions, they called more strike and created more alliances with other workers and social movements. (240-54)

Yet, union democratization did not necessarily end corrupt and criminal practices in the unions such as theft of union funds or job selling. And newly elected democratic union leaders sometimes used the "exclusion clause"--a clause used to expel "disloyal" members form the union and requiring management to fire them from the workplace--against critics or opponents of the new leadership. (240) Anyone interested in the fight for union democracy and workers' power in the plant and in society will find Middlebrook's account of the democratic movements in the auto industry in the 1970s to be of great interest.

The rank and file movements of the 1970s were nearly all eventually defeated by the employers and the state, and those that remained nearly disappeared in the wake of the industrial reorganization and political changes of the 1980s and 1990s.

Middlebrook also analyzes that industrial reorganization of the 1980s and 1990s under Mexican presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, showing the ways in which the state-sponsored labor unions failed to find ways to defend the interests of the working class.

In looking to the future of Mexican labor, Middlebrook is rather pessimistic. He see a major trend of the decline of manufacturing in central Mexico, and the movement of industry to north-central and northern Mexico, areas dominated by anti-union employers--a trend which does not bode well for workers. At the same time, the CTM and other union federations have proven incapable in the 1990s of coming up with a coherent program to defend workers' interests. The official unions and even the independent unions have not been successful in building alliances with other social movements, or in creating a new political party to represent their interests. Middlebrook sees "the main problem is the concentration of political power in the state administrative apparatus." (326) Proposed labor law reform "is likely to be strongly shaped by the growing influence of business interests in Mexican politics." (327) A rather bleak picture.

But as Middlebrook argues in conclusion, "The prospects for preserving organized labor's role in the workplace and in national policy making and for promoting democratic regime change in Mexico would both be enhanced if the removal of major state controls on labor participation occurred in conjunction with the democratization of the labor movement." (328) The fight for union democracy is central.

Throughout this book Middlebrook relies not only of union records and contemporary newspaper accounts, and a wide range of secondary sources, but also makes use of government records, such as those of the labor boards. Middlebrook's new book will become required reading for specialists and a standard reference for experts in the field for years to come. Because of its academic style, however, the book is not likely to readily accessible to the lay reader or the union activist.

While a major contribution to our knowledge of the Mexican labor movement, Paradox of Revolution has a number of problems, and fails to deliver on several of its promises. First, Middlebrook has organized his book around a theory he calls "post-revolutionary authoritarian rule." He writes on the opening page of his book: "The paradox of social revolution is that popular mobilization and socioeconomic transformation most commonly eventuate in a new form of authoritarian rule." (1) Middlebrook's theory of "post-revolutionary authoritarian rule" is not as convincing to me as several other theories of Mexican authoritarianism and adds little to his often interesting account of the labor movement. The theory is a superfluous scaffolding that would have been better dropped. Perhaps more important politically, Middlebrook's theory strikes me as a rehash of the "iron law of oligarchy" found in Robert Michels Political Parties written at the opening of this century. All movements for social change culminate in new dictatorships--so why fight for social change? There is a conservative thrust to such an outlook.

To show the usefulness of his "post-revolutionary authoritarian rule" theory, Middlebrook promises that Paradox of Revolution will be a comparative study, comparing Mexico's state-labor experience to other countries, most important Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. But there is not really much comparison. Middlebrook, who devotes such detailed attention and conscientious study to Mexican unions, gives a rather swift and shallow overview of developments in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union, which is completely unsatisfying. The comparative parts of this book would have been better omitted.

Second, Middlebrook says he is trying in this book to overcome the problems of "state-centered and society-centered" analyses of Mexican labor. By this he means explanations which focus on state control of the unions, and other explanations which focus on union or worker opposition. This is an important debate about the degree to which governments and employers control people, and the degree to which people are capable of resistance, that is the degree to which they are really autonomous. Middlebrook argues, quite correctly, for a dynamic and dialectical resolution to the problem, that is that the state tries to control and the unions and workers do resist, and the interaction between the two makes history.

But if you are going to show that people resist state and employer control, then you have to show us some people, and unfortunately Middlebrook has written an institutional history in which real human beings seldom appear. In the entire book there is not one portrait of one union activist or leader, hardly one word from a worker about her experience, not one description of an important strike. Middlebrook might have profited from the use of historical documents and oral history to give life to his account.

Finally, and this is the most important point, Middlebrook revises the existing theory of Mexican labor unions, rejecting the theory that Mexicans unions are "corporatist," that is incorporated into the one party-state. In a long note (note 82 found on page 341), Middlebrook explains that he rejects the use of the word "corporatist" because he feels it has lost its explanatory power and because the corporate explanation tends to emphasize the role of the state. While Middlebrook has relegated this to a footnote, this is no small matter, but rather represents an important break with many other students of the Mexican labor movement.

In the 1960s and 70s, a group of young Mexican scholars developed a "corporatist" analysis of the relations between the Mexican state and the unions. (Among the best known: Arnoldo Cordova and Juan Felipe Leal.) They chose the word "corporatist" which comes from the lexicon of Mussolini's fascism, to emphasize the state's control over workers' unions and peasants' organizations. In the Mexican corporatist system, the state-party (the PRI) not only took control of the unions through legal procedures, but the PRI also forced the unions to become part of the ruling party, and involved itself intimately in the life of the unions. The very use of the word corporatist in Mexico implied two things: first, that Mexico's state control of unions was authoritarian or totalitarian, and second, that therefore the corporatist system should be overthrow. Democracy could not be achieved without the destruction of the corporatist party-state-union system. The very use of the word corporatist with its fascist connotations suggested a revolutionary attitude toward the Mexican one-party state dictatorship.

The problem is that while Middlebrook rejects the corporatist argument, Middlebrook has no theoretical substitute for it, but instead emphasizes what he calls "the labor movement's dependence on a broad range of state-provided legal, financial, and political subsidies." (p. 30). That is, the state provided a legal structure which recognized the official unions, the state gave them economic aid and provided jobs in the establishment. While all of that is true, as a theory it is less complex, less compelling, and less subtle than the best of the corporate theorists of labor. Corporate explanations of the unions, at least the most sophisticated ones, showed the ways in which the state controlled unions through the use of force, through cooptation, through political and union structures, through common ideology, through economic programs, and through the development of overlapping personnel and activities. (Alberto Aziz Nassif, El Estado Mexicano y la CTM (Mexico: Ediciones de la Casa Chata, 1989, #32).

Kevin Middlebrook seeks to redress the balance state-centered analyses, and wants to show that unions and workers had a certain latitude for action within the authoritarian system. While that desire to show the complexity of the system and the relative autonomy of unions and workers may be a needed corrective, ultimately I think one has to conclude the system remains fundamentally "corporatist." While workers in Mexico have struggled heroically--teachers, auto and rubber workers, steel workers, brewery workers and many others--the state and its official unions have kept the upper hand. If anything the official unions have become more rigid, more authoritarian, more reactionary, and less genuinely unions. (There are of course exceptional cases of opposition currents and democratic movements.) Though we may wish for another conclusion, in all really important matters--union recognition, strikes, wage policy, broader economic policy, and political action--in the last analysis, the state-party still controls the official unions.

The Congress of Labor (CT) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) controlled by the PRI remain fundamentally phony-unions, more transmission belts for government policy than expressions of workers' needs and desires. A genuine democratic rank and file movement from below would not only overthrow the existing union bureaucracy, but in effect destroy those government structures and create genuine labor unions and federations in their place. Such democratic and independent unions would reach out to other social movements and would tend to create a political force and probably a political party. If workers and peasants succeeded in creating genuinely democratic and independent unions and broad alliances, they would threaten the very existence of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The corporate analysis implies that the state's corporate control of the labor unions deserves to be overthrown by a democratic movement from below, and that posture, attitude and analysis remain fundamentally correct.

In any case, Middlebrook's Paradox of Revolution is an impressive work of scholarship and analysis and will likely be a standard work in the field for years to come.

Devon G. Pena. The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the U.S. Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas, 1997). Notes. Bibliography. Map. Tables. 460 pages. Hardback $45, Paper $19.95.

Devon G. Pena's The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the U.S. Mexico Border could be called the anarchosyndicalist, eco-feminist study of the maquiladora workers and their communities. Sometimes fascinating and often irritating, this book ultimately disappoints the reader because it touches on a dozen important issues and never satisfies our curiosity about any of them. In particular while advocating democracy, autonomy and workers' control, it doesn't address key questions concerning democracy in the movements and organizations it studies. Yet in the course of this long, meandering read, one learns a good deal about the maquiladoras and the way they work.

Pena informs us that this book about the mostly female maquiladora workers of Ciudad Juarez represents thirteen years of both field and library research. Most of Pena's field research appears to have been conducted during the early 1980s, though he apparently returned to do some more interviews around 1990. In the course of reading we learn that this research resulted in a funding raising proposal, a dissertation, and finally this book published in 1997. Throughout the book one senses big gaps between 1982, 1990 and 1997 which Pena does not fill or bridge, and which contribute to the reader's sense that there may be crucial omissions in the events.

The author tells us his thesis quite clearly in his opening pages: "Maquila workers, despite the terror of the machine, are capable of thinking for themselves, of inventing alternatives to capitalist production/destruction, of creating cooperative forms of organization that link workplace democracy with ecological sustainability....The maquila workers of Mexico's northern border are also challenging the assumptions of the dominant Western paradigm of progress and industrial development by taking a stand for an alternative to mass production and assembly-line work." (12) Pena suggests at various points that he sees the maquiladora workers' organizations as models of democracy and autonomy.

Then Pena goes on to tell three major stories intended to demonstrate and substantiate this thesis. None of these stories has been told clearly or completely so that it is left to the reader to figure them out. Let me give you the rundown.

One story deals with the shop floor struggles of the mainly women maquiladora workers and the ways in which they construct informal shop floor organizations and engage in work-to-rule campaigns and slowdowns, what Mexicans call tortuguismo or going as slow as a tortuga, a turtle. To tell this story Pena presents a detailed account of maquiladora work organization, and a fascinating picture of worker resistance. Pena tells us that the workers' shop floor organizations developed into work stoppages and wildcat strikes, reaching a high point in the early 1980s with the creation of a network of workers' councils and the organization of an independent union which led a wildcat strike at the Acapulco Fashions company. Unfortunately, Pena never discusses the workers' councils, the independent union, or the strikes, so we have no way of assessing and evaluating many of his assertions. One wonders why Pena who spent so much time on analyzing shop floor organization spends virtually no time analyzing strikes and union organizations.

In the course of his discussion of the workers' organization in the maquiladora industry, what he calls the "subaltern struggle," Pena puts forward two quite contradictory views, one inspired by a kind of eco-feminist anarchosyndicalist vision, and others more characteristic of typical trade unionism or perhaps socialism in its Mexican nationalist variant. For example, compare these two statements. First, Pena writes, "Maquila workers have consistently demonstrated good sense by circumventing formal mediation and opting instead for the underground struggle, which is organized as direct attacks on technological, bureaucratic, and social forms of control. In the real of subaltern struggle, workers can dispense with the ever elusive strike permit." (107) By this logic, workers around the world would have wisely avoided organizing labor unions or labor parties, since such formal workers' organizations nearly always require some sort of permit. But, at only a few pages later, Pena writes, "With work stoppages, the terrain of struggle can expand to include the workers' communities, unions, political parties, and the state." (127).

The latter statement seems more like the reality with which I am familiar, but unfortunately Pena never addresses the important and interesting questions this process raises. Should workers organize or join unions? If so should they form independent unions or join the unions of the one-party-state? What should be the relation of unions to political parties? Should workers and unions join political parties, and if so which one? The government party or an opposition party? And which opposition, left or right? Most important for someone with Pena's apparent sympathies, how can workers establish democratic controls over their own organizations and their leaders? We know that these were very real questions for the leaders and activists of strikes in the maquiladoras in the 1980s, but Pena avoids these issues at his peril, as we learn in the second story.

The second tale concerns Guillermina Valdes and COMO. In one sense the book could be called an institutional history of COMO, the Center for the Orientation of Women Workers (COMO) of Ciudad Juarez. However, we only piece together the history and structure of COMO very incompletely and inadequately in the course of Pena's narrative. In the early 1960s Guillermina Valdes de Villalva, the charismatic leader of COMO for over twenty years, went to the University of Michigan where she studied the theories of Paolo Freire and Erich Fromm. She then returned to Mexico and in 1968 she and a group of left-wing social workers founded COMO as a women's social service center which helped women maquiladora workers. Those workers engaged in many strikes and work stoppages, and if we are to believe Pena, COMO was at the center of many of these movements.

But while it was under the leadership of Valdes for twenty years, COMO also did many other things. COMO sought and got funding from the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) established by the U.S. Congress in the 1960s, which gave COMO almost half a million dollars in 1978-1980. COMO also got funding from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation of the German Social Democratic Party which funds many labor organizations in Mexico. When Valdes experienced a religious conversion, COMO did too, and developed a close relationship to the Roman Catholic charismatic St. John the Baptist Community. Later COMO established ties with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and got funding from the Mexican government. One has the impression that those ties to the PRI and the government were what made it difficult for COMO to take a position opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as some independent Mexican unions did. Finally, after Valdes left to take an academic job at the College of the Northern Border (COLEF) and then died in a plane crash in 1991, the center's leadership was taken over by her daughter Luchi Villalva. (Much of the biography of Valdes and the story of COMO is buried in the footnotes.)

As this story unfolds, one wonders just who Valdes and her left wing social worker associates were. Were they the members of some Guevarist or Maoist group as anyone who knows Mexico would suppose? What was the organizational and political relationship between COMO and the workers' informal organizations and the more formal groups such as the independent union? How did workers feel about the ties to U.S. government philanthropy, German social democracy, Roman Catholicism and to the PRI? Pena suggests that the ties to the PRI were not significant, but his answer did not satisfy this reader. Did the workers have democratic organizations to control Valdes or later her daughter Luchi Villalva? Could the workers be autonomous as long as they were dependent on COMO and Valdes? Pena not only does not seriously address most of these questions, but throughout the telling of the story acts as an apologist for Guillermina Valdes who was his friend and mentor.

Pena's third story has to do with SOCOSEMA, the Cooperative Society of Selectors of Materials. In 1975 a group of pepenadores or scavengers who had been living and working in the Juarez garbage dump formed the SOCOSEMA cooperative. COMO supported the SOCOSEMA cooperative, which Pena argues became a model of working class democracy. "SOCOSEMA's organizational structure is actually reminiscent of that of the worker factory councils of Antonio Gramsci's Italy," writes Pena. (228). Calling upon mutualist traditions and their experiences in the comadre networks, the 28 women involved became the real leaders of the total of 203 members of the cooperative. Pena claims that the scavengers' cooperative represented the original recyclers, and developed an "ethnoscience" of recycling aimed at sustainable, environmentally benevolent development. He writes "...their experience with recycling comes precisely from their location outside the consumer markets and the logic of capitalism." (234)

I don't doubt that the scavengers established a democratic cooperative, and that women played a leading role in it. But as he does throughout this book, Pena exaggerates with his comparisons to the Italian workers' council movement of the 1920s which involved hundreds of thousands of workers whose near revolution precipitated Mussolini's fascist backlash. Also the suggestion that garbage pickers are somehow outside the consumer market or the logic of capitalism simply ignores the reality that the scavengers are the bottom feeders of the consumer market, the end of the capitalist food chain. Pena seems to have forgotten that he told us that they had originally established the cooperative as a condition of bidding on the scavenging concession. The cooperative began as a workers' business in competition with capitalist scavengers. Pena also forgot that he mentioned that somehow the tiny coop of the poorest workers purchased a $2.5 million recycling plant and a fleet of twenty large trucks. But he never explains where they got the money. I suspect that if the money didn't come from a bank it came from the PRI-government, but in any case it came from that world of consumerism and capitalism.

One key idea of the book is what Pena, following Valdes, calls "transference methodology," the idea that maquiladora workers could transfer their skills and working knowledge to other branches of production and to the community. Pena contends that the maquiladora workers developed not only manual skills, but also technical skills which increased production in the factory, and social skills learned in the struggle against management; both the technical and social skill could be transferred to other productive and social areas. Pena suggests that after the decline of the workers strikes of the early 1980s, for example, some of the workers' skills were put to use in the development of the scavengers' cooperative. This is an interesting idea, but Pena did not convince me that it actually happened on any important scale.

Pena's original study of the maquiladora workers in Juarez in the early 1980s makes up most of the book. The author has appended a chapter on Mexico under de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He discusses all the contemporary organizations engaged in the struggle against NAFTA, neo-liberalism, and the transnational corporations (COMO does not figure among them) providing a useful if somewhat superficial overview. The final chapters of the book also discuss environmental matters and models of sustainable development.

What really bothers me about this book is that Pena doesn't want to ask the hard questions about the relationship between the workers' movement in the plants, the cooperatives, the COMO organization, and Guillermina Valdes. As an advocate of a kind of workers' control model myself, I feel that Pena has an obligation to ask how workers can control or might control their own organizations. His failure to do so makes this book ultimately frustrating and disappointing.

María Xelhuantizi-López. Democracy on Hold: The Freedom of Union Association and Protection Contracts in Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Communications Workers of America/CWA, 2002), 128 (8x11) pages, end notes.

Maria Xelhuantizi-López’s Democracy on Hold represents one of the most important contributions to the study of the Mexican labor movement in the last several years. While the book would be important in any case, it takes on additional significance because it represents the view of Francisco Hernandez-Juarez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and one of the three co-chairs of the independent National Union of Workers (UNT). As Xelhuantizi-López writes in her introduction, he is “the intellectual author of this project.”

What makes Xelhuantizi-López’s book so important, is that she puts the “protection contract” at its center. Such contracts, which protect employers from genuine labor union organization in Mexico, may represent as much as 90% of the 600,000 registered union contracts in Mexico. Moreover, Xelhuantizi-López argues that it was the Mexican “corporatist” system, a system of state-control over the labor unions that gave rise to the “protection contract.” Her book traces some of the history of the Mexican state, the ruling party, and their relationship to the labor unions, explaining how the state created the corrupt, violent system of corporatism and employer protection.

Without a doubt, “corporatist labor unions” and “protection contracts” stand at the center of any discussion of Mexican labor unions, as I argued in my own study about 10 years ago. (Dan La Botz, Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today [Boston: South End Press, 1992].) Xelhuantizi-López directs our attention to the central fact of labor relations in Mexico, and makes some suggestions for solving the problem. Yet, while this book represents an important contribution to the current debate, I would disagree with its underlying argument and its prescriptions for the labor and political movement.

Diagnosis and Prescription

Xelhuantizi-López’s argument—that is to say Francisco Hernandez-Juarez’s argument—is that the rise of “corporatism” and “protection contracts” produced both bad labor unions and bad corporations or bad capitalism. Mexico is not as efficient, productive, wealthy and prosperous as it might be because the state and its corporatist labor structure with its protection contracts distorted Mexican development. Unions became state-run, corrupt, violent and worthless for workers. Companies became inefficient, unproductive, uncompetitive and therefore unable to globalize.

As she writes:

“Corporative labor was the alternative to unionism and entrepreneurism that the belligerent groups of the political and economic oligarchy found to insure their permanence and continuity, but also to articulate themselves with a global capitalist movement that was aggressive and challenging them to them and against which such factors as nationalist, revolutionary and patriotic demagogy served to protect and legitimize them. Today the result of all this is a backward bourgeoisie, incapable of globalization and having long-range vision, always ready to submit to multinational capital interests.” (122)

The Problem of Partnership

What is to be done? The answer, she suggests, is to create healthy labor unions that can work with the corporations to produce good contracts that represent a miniature version of a social pact. As she writes, “The collective bargaining agreement is, in essence, a micro social pact.” (2) This argument suggests that the labor movement and its political allies might also enter into a social pact with capital at the national level. The fundamental basis of Hernandez-Juarez’s argument (as expressed through his amanuensis Xelhuantizi-López) is that labor and capital can and should enter into partnership. The goal of this partnership is to raise productivity so that capital can compete more effectively and really be successful at globalization.

The argument raises a number of questions. Can and should labor and capital be partners? Will capital be willing at this moment in history to enter into social pacts? Should the goal of the labor movement be to help corporations be more competitive in the world struggle between corporations and national capitals that is called globalization? Or do unions have another mission?

Pacts and Partnership Today?

In certain ways the proposal for bilateral contracts and national social pacts may be attractive, especially at a moment when in general the labor movement and the working class at home anywhere and abroad everywhere is going to hell in a handbasket. Many would like to return to the world of the thirty-year period from 1945 to 1975 when the big industrial labor unions and the Democratic Party in the United States, the Social Democrats in Europe, and the Communist Parties in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern block were able to provide a system of social welfare which offered workers some protection from the storm—even as they all three opposed a democratic social transformation to create a more equitable society. With labor unions and the left in retreat everywhere—except Brazil perhaps—we can understand the desire to return to a (somewhat mythical) past of social pacts. But capital seems little inclined to enter into them, when it can produce a profit from the new flexible, non-union, political eviscerated working class that it has created in the last 25 years.

Even if healthy bilateral contracts and social pacts were possible at this moment, should unions help to make their corporations and countries more competitive, when that really means that they work to defeat other corporations and other countries in the world market? Rather than being a partner with capital, shouldn’t labor propose its own project for the reorganization of society not to make corporations successful, but to create an economy, a society, and a polity that benefits all working people, and ultimately all of the world’s people? Shouldn’t workers develop their own program to save the world from the mess its in? Doesn’t that mean that workers have to develop their own program to resist the corporation and the governments they control that now run the world? Doesn’t that mean not partnership but a class struggle by workers against capital?

Hernandez-Juarez: Looking for a New Partner

No one will find it surprising that Francisco Hernandez Juarez wants partnership. He began as the militant, leftist leader of mostly women telephone workers in the early 1970s, and rose to become the general secretary, top officer of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union. But by the late 1980s he had joined in partnership with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Mexican president who carried out the opening of Mexico to the world markets and the privatization of Mexico’s national industries. When Carlos Salinas wanted to privatize TELMEX, the Mexican Telephone Company, Hernandez Juarez supported him in exchange for protection for telephone workers jobs. But the privatization of TELMEX was a key moved in the general privatization of mines, railroads and other industries that cost the jobs of tens of thousands of other workers, destroyed unions, and weakened labor contracts.

In those years, a friend of the president, and a member of the executive committee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Hernandez Juarez argued for a new model of unions, working with the new private employers to create more productive enterprises. But then came the invasion of new telecommunications competitors, most of them owned by foreign capital, and Hernandez Juarez and his union found themselves being ground down by the competition. (We might mention that unfortunately this is a story that Xelhuantizi-López, since she is Hernandez Juarez’s pen cannot and does not tell in this book.)

Hernandez Juarez and the UNT: Which Way Forward?

Chastened by those exeriences, Hernandez Juarez took his allies in the labor movement—mostly employees in modern high tech industries, such as the flight attendants—and their little labor federation FESEBES, and moved to ally with Mexico’s more independent and democratic unions. Joining with the Union of Workers at the National Autonomous University (STUNAM) and the Social Security Workers Union (SNTSS), and the small but significant federation of Authentic Labor Front (FAT), he helped to create the National Union of Workers (UNT). The UNT has proven to be a genuinely independent labor federation, sure that it must build unions separate from and different than those of the Congress of Labor (CT) and the Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM) long controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and now beholden to president Fox of the National Action Party (PAN).

But the question is on what basis will the UNT create a new union movement? Will it try work in partnership with corporations? Or will it attempt to organize workers in the long and difficult task of building a working class alternative to the savage capitalism Mexican workers have faced? Will the UNT embrace Hernandez Juarez’s project of parntership? Or will the FAT once again raise its old 1970s banner of workers control of the factory? Will some sector of the Mexican labor movement put forward the notion the project should not be partnership with capital—but a labor project of democratic socialism?

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