Mexican Labor News & Analysis

Mexican Labor Year In Review

While wrestling with economic crisis and political gridlock, the Mexican working class ended the year 2003 by constructing the broadest and most independent coalition of labor unions peasant organizations, and social movements in the country’s recent history. The founding of the Frente Sindical, Campesino y Social (Labor, Peasant and Social Front) and the “mega-march” of November 27, 2003 represent the high point of solidarity for Mexican unions over the past thirty years. We address each of these subjects below.

Economic Crisis Continues

During the year 2003, the third year of the six-year term of president Vicente Fox, the Mexican economy continued to stagnate. During the first half of his presidency, Mexico produced only 300,000 jobs, not the three million it needed to absorb its growing population. The maquiladora industry, which had been at the cutting edge of the Mexican economy, has lost approximately 200,000 jobs as the total number of maquiladora workers fell from 1.3 to 1.1 million.. Many see the Mexican government’s maquiladora strategy for development as dead, because multinational corporations prefer the even lower wages of China.

Throughout this economic crisis real wages have remained stationary, with no improvements in working class standards of living. More than one-third of all Mexican workers now make their living in the informal economy, working alone or for illegal companies that have no unions, and have no social security (health care) benefits. With their country’s economy stuck in the mud, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans continued to migrate to the United States. Mexican emigrant workers’ remittances now total over $9 billion, in roughly the same league with the country’s petroleum, manufacturing, and tourism income.

Political Paralysis

The Fox administration has proven unable in its first three years to create the political alliances in the Federal legislature to pass its political reform program. Fox’s program of privatizing the electrical power industry, passing a labor law reform, and putting more taxes on working people is not popular to say the least. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the former ruling party, has the majority of votes in the parliament, and without those votes Fox’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) is helpless. The left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) does not have enough votes to have a decisive influence.

While the legislative deadlock stands out as a particular defeat, many feel that the Fox administration has simply failed. The economy has not grown. He has not resolved the problem of the Indians in Chiapas. For three years he was unable to improve the situation of Mexican migrants, and not many have a high opinion of the new immigration law proposed by U.S. president George W. Bush. Fox seems to have failed on all the questions of principle and all the matters of policy that he initially promised. Media in the United States and Mexico have declared him a lame duck.

Meanwhile the PRI has split between the faction of Elba Esther Gordillo, former head of the Mexican teachers’ union, who had been cooperating with Fox and the PAN, and the faction led by Roberto Madrazo, who led the faction known as the “dinosaurs” who hopes to rebuild the old ruling party and take power in 2007. At the moment, however, the most popular political figure in Mexico may be Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the PRD mayor of Mexico City. While it is difficult to measure improvement in Mexico City quantitatively, the populist López Obrador has built up a reservoir of good will among the city’s population. Unfortunately for him, the PRD does not exist as a party with a broad and even national base, its support being confined to Mexico City and a few Western and southern states. With all three parties weak and divided, politics has tended to be reduced to the common denominator of particular interests and personal advancement.

The Labor Movement

With the economy sluggish and unemployment high, and with the sense that they have no friend in Los Pinos, the presidential residence, Mexican workers have been reluctant to strike. Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal reported that Mexico had a total of 123 strikes during the first half of the Fox administration, compared 573 during the government of Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88); 407 during the six year term of Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), and 192 during the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2002). While the number of strikes continued to decline, Mexico’s more militant unions and federations—the Mexican Telephone Workers (STRM), the Mexican Electrical Workers (SME), the Coordinating Committee of the Mexican Teachers Union (la CNTE)—continued to mobilize tens of thousands of workers in protest demonstrations and marches.

The most important and remarkable development has been the creation of a broad new coalition, the Union, Peasant and Social Front (FSCS) that brings together unions from many of the major federations, the most important peasant organizations, and many social movement. The Front’s most important constituents are:

· National Union of Workers (UNT), founded in 1997, a confederation composed of federations and unions, most important among them the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM), the Mexican Social Security Workers Union (SNTSS), the Union of Workers of the National Autonomous University (STUNAM), and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT).
· Mexican Union Front (FSM), in existence as a coalition for several years, but organized as a federation for the first time in 2003, the FSM’s most important constituent organizations are the Mexican Electrical Workers union (SME) and the Independent Union of workers of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (SITUAM). SME also remains a member of the “official” Congress of Labor (CT)
· A peasant and farmers coalition that includes The Countryside Can Stand No More; the Permanent Agrarian Congress (CAP), and the official National Peasant Confederation (CNC) which remains affiliated with the PRI.
· The social coalition that includes organizations such as El Barzón, the militant national debtors’ organization, representative from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and many groups which form the urban poor people’s movement.

“The UNT and the FSM have worked together for two years,” says Antonio Villalba, one of the three co-chairs of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), “and now they have succeeded in creating an alliance with peasants and social movements that represents a new and very significant development.” These groups came together on November 27, 2003 in the so-called mega-march, estimated by the coalition (using aerial photography) at 300,000 participants, in spite of a hail storm, rain and cold that strangely struck only the national plaza.

The coalition lobbied all the parties in parliament, and succeeded in stopping Fox from passing his new tax on food, books and medicine. While there is a growing coincidence on many issues between the UNT and the PRD, labor in Mexico still has no party of its own. “We have a very complex and difficult political mosaic in Mexico, and we have to work with legislators from all three parties,” says Villalba.

Mexican unions and workers turn to the new year with hope in a reviving economy and with pride in their newly constructed coalition.

Women Of Juárez

For Mexican women in Juarez and other northern cities, 2003 was a particularly frustrating year. While the Federal government finally began to intervene in the investigation of the deaths of almost 400 women who have been murdered there, similar serial or mass murders began to appear in other cities of northern Mexico. Most of the victims of these killings have been young working class women from the maquiladora city of Juárez, many of them ritually mutilated. Yet after years of investigation, and many false leads, the crimes remain unsolved. What had been an isolated if horrible phenomenon has now begun to appear as a kind of psychotic epidemic in several cities in the northern and border states.

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The Chiapas Rebellion And The Zapatistas – Ten Years Later

Ten years ago, on January 1, 1994 a group of a couple of hundred mostly Mayan Indians rose up in armed rebellion in Mexico’s most southern state of Chiapas, shocking Mexico and astounding the world. The Indian uprising gave the lie to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s claim that Mexico had left the third world and entered the first. Many of the Indian rebels came from villages where people lived in houses without electricity or running water, and went shoeless to work in the milpa or the coffee harvest, taking their unschooled children to work beside them. And such conditions were common among Indians in Chiapas and other southern and central Mexican states.

On the very day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) which led the rebellion, published a declaration in the name of the Indians and of the Mexican people calling upon the Mexican people to rise up, end the dictatorship of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), and withdraw from the new trade agreement. All of the fundamental themes of the Chiapas Rebellion and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation were there at the beginning: the Indians’ demand for respect, the rebels’ call for democracy, and, in the name of all the people, opposition to the economic order imposed by the Mexican government and the United States.

The EZLN had been founded ten years earlier, in 1984, by a group of leftist, nationalist guerrilla revolutionaries from other parts of Mexico who went to Chiapas to build a social and political base there among the Indians. Subcomandate Marcos, a college educated Mexican revolutionary who emerged as the leader of the group, has argued that in the tens years in the mountains and jungles of Chiapas, both the revolutionaries and the Indians were transformed by the experience. Marcos has suggested that the revolutionaries fell under the democratic control of the Indian communities and gave up the old left notion of taking state power. At the same time, the Indian communities learned from the revolutionaries that they might organize socially and militarily to fight for their rights as Indians and as Mexicans, against their immediate economic and political oppressors, and against the system that held them in poverty and powerlessness.

Perhaps, though, the development of the Zapatista ideology and practice have more to do with what happened during and immediately after the rebellion. The Zapatistas appear to have operated upon a naïve theory of the propaganda of the deed, that is, they believed that their armed uprising would inspire other Mexicans to rise up and join them in driving president Salinas from office and the PRI from power. Or perhaps they were just taking an audacious action that would challenge the system, and hopefully find a broader response in Mexican society. But there were no other uprisings. Nor were there any mass political strikes. Nothing happened until the government attacked the Indians. Salinas responded with a military attack on villages in Chiapas, and for twelve days there was something like a small civil war in Chiapas. Almost from the beginning Mexicans by the hundreds of thousands came out in Mexico City and other cities throughout the country to call upon the government to halt its attack, but also to call upon the Zapatistas to stop their armed rebellion.

Why did the Mexican people fail to rise up in revolution? Perhaps because early in the twentieth century when their nation had fifteen million inhabitants, it lost one million lives during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. Maybe because Mexicans had seen the defeat of revolutions in Central America in the 1970s, and the loss of 200,000 lives in neighboring Guatemala. Or perhaps simply because Mexico’s working people in 1994 did not have the experience of social and political struggle which would have made revolution seem like a viable option for dealing with their problems. For many, the alternative to Mexico’s political oppression and lack of economic opportunity was not revolution but emigration to the United States. So perhaps the Zapatistas gave up the struggle for state power for purely practical reasons—they did not have the power to achieve it. The state stopped them, and the Mexican people rejected their call to rebellion. Subsequently, they decided they would not seek state power, but instead work for reform, focusing on the situation of the Indians.

Yet the Rebellion, even if it did not serve as a prelude to revolution, had an enormous impact on Indians, on Mexico, and particularly the Mexican left, and on social movements around the world.

First, this was an armed rebellion of Mayan Indians, and it put the indigenous people and their concerns at the center of Mexican politics. The Mayan Indians, through the Zapatistas, called for an end to the poverty, social exclusion, and political powerlessness which they had experienced as they said “for five hundred years.” The Indians’ struggle for social justice had gone on long before the Zapatistas, but the uprising brought it to national and international attention, inspiring Indians throughout Mexico and all of the Americas. The Zapatista rebellion revealed the bankruptcy of the government’s National Indigenous Insitute (INI) and of the policy of indigenismo, a paternalistic philosophy aimed at uplifting integrating Indians into Mexican society. The Indians didn’t want government tutelage and political manipulation, they wanted autonomy, the right to run their own lives in their own villages and regions. The Zapatistas convened a National Indigenous Congress (CNI) so that Indians could put forward their own agenda. Indians in Mexico make up something like 10 to 14 percent of the nation’s population, so we are talking about a movement comparable in its size, scope and goals to the civil rights movement of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The CNI shifted the locus of power in the indigenous movement. Yet The Zapatistas, bottled up in Chiapas, proved incapable of create a unified Indian movement throughout Mexico.

Second, the Zapatista movement changed the Mexico of the majority, urban Mexico. The Zapatista demand for Indian autonomy resonated with other sectors of Mexican society who also wanted to be free from the control and corruption of the PRI. The uprising inspired Mexican civil society, that is all of those in Mexico who sought to end the dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and to bring democracy to the country. All of civil society—political reformers, feminists, environmentalists, independent labor unions and peasant leagues—took courage from the Chiapas Rebellion.

The term “civil society” used in modern times as a theory to describe and to guide the struggles of the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe against Stalinist Communism, and by the peoples of Latin America in their fight against the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone between 1964 and 1985 has been interpreted in many ways, some radical and some reactionary. In Mexico ten years ago, the term meant principally the organizations and movements of the broad social layers who sought an end to the PRI rule and to bring democracy to their country. By definition, then, this excluded all of those associated with the PRI in the government bureaucracy and politics, but it also tended to exclude those in the leadership of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) whom most everyone understood to have no sincere interest in anything but the most narrow political democracy. Civil society meant “the people” construed in a classless way, Mexico’s ordinary folk.

Many of these civil society organizations, mostly non-governmental organizations and social movements of the popular classes, came together in the mid-1990s in the Alianza Cívica, the civic alliance. For a moment in 1994, it seemed as if the Zapatistas, Alianza Cívica and the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution might represent a force that could push aside the PRI and bring about the victory of civil society. But Marcos and the Zapatistas would not make a political alliance with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the PRD, and Cárdenas lost his second run for the Mexican presidency in August 1994.

The third point to be made about the impact of the Zapatistas is that they revitalized the broad currents of the Mexican left, though this did not mean that they could reconstruct it and make it a meaningful force in Mexican politics. In 1989 the Mexican Socialist Party (the name of the Mexican Communist Party, the most important party of the old left) had dissolved itself to enter the new Party of the Democratic Revolution, made up of former PRI members and led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The Communists were joined there by some breakaway Trotskyists – the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) -- and leftists from other traditions. So, oddly, the birth of the PRD had also been the death of the old Mexican left, leading to significant narrowing of the political spectrum.

Within this context of a left that had been disappeared, the Zapatistas, armed guerrillas with a nationalist program erupted on the scene in 1994 and immediately became Mexico’s new left, and, moreover, a left without the baggage of Stalinism and without the legacy of corruption attached to virtually all the electoral parties. After the collapse of Communism, the political suicide of the Mexican left, and the failure of the PRD, here was something people could put hope in. The Zapatistas, however, made it clear that they would not become a political party (despite the results of a referendum conducted among their supporters), pledged they would not become involved in electoral politics or support other parties or candidates, and repudiated the leftist goal of seizing state power. Nor did they put forward a leftist program calling for democratic socialism. Their demands remained what they had been at the beginning, a call for “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace.” So the Zapatistas appeared as a new left, but on the basis of their guerrilla struggle, and their role as the voice of the most oppressed sector of Mexican society, not on the basis of a socialist program or an effective political strategy.

Finally, the Zapatistas’ other very significant contribution has been the role they played in inspiring the new anti-globalization or altermundista movement. A whole new generation of activists found their heroes in Indian men and women who had had the courage to challenge the Mexican state and NAFTA. The Zapatistas Intergalactic conference held in 1996 brought together many of the social movement activists from around the world who would be instrumental in organizing the anti-globalization movement. The Zapatistas energized others around the world, leading them to take direct action against the governments, international institutions, and corporations behind neo-liberal globalization. The Zapatistas’ uprising against NAFTA became the inspiration for rebellions against the World Trade Organization (WTO), and more recently the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The very vagueness of the Zapatistas ideology and the flexibility of their tactics provided the space where radical youth, environmentalists, labor unionists, religiously inspired activists, guerrilla revolutionaries and others could join together around a program that called for an end to the corporate neoliberal globalization policies, even if it offered no coherent alternative programs or strategy. The Zapatistas cynicism about politics in Mexico jived with the youthful activists cynicism about the possibility of politics in electoral systems dominated by Republicans or Democrats in the United States or Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in Europe or Latin America. The cynicism about politics, combined with the faith in direct action laid the basis for a world-wide revival of anarchist political currents.

The Zapatistas inspired Indians, Mexican reformers, the Mexican left, and international anti-globalization activists—but at the same time they did not develop the political program, organizational model and practical experience of movement leadership to which many of us hoped they would contribute. The Zapatistas made various attempts to break out of their isolation, the National Democratic Convention of August 1996, another convention shortly thereafter, consultas (or referenda) inviting the Mexican people to advise them on a future course, and then the founding of the Frente Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (FZLN) as a kind of national civilian political organization. All of these attempts failed to bring the EZLN into a dynamic relationship with other organizations fighting for social change.

Ten years later, the Zapatistas remain a symbol of resistance to economic exploitation, political oppression, and imperialism, but they also remain caged in Chiapas. In large part, this is because government repression and political betrayal at every step (from the San Andres Accords to the New Indigenous Law) have kept the Zapatistas isolated both geographically and socially. They remain an indigenous, rural, provincial movement, for both logistical and political reasons unable to engage in national political movements. Most important they have never been able to extend their political movement to the Mexican working class. This has meant that those workers who seek social change in Mexico now turn to the National Union of Workers (UNT), the Mexican Union Movement (MSN), or even to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the populist PRD mayor of Mexico city. The Zapatistas seem to have become a permanent part of the Mexican landscape in this era when the country lurches from crisis to crisis, though they do not seem to have the ability to lead the movement to a new stage of struggle.

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The Failure Of NAFTA

Ten years since it went into effect, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has failed. The agreement has not brought the economic benefits we were promised, nor has it proved a useful model for the world. In particular and most serious, it has failed the working people of Canada, Mexico and the United States. The failure results not only from its inability to create jobs and raise wages, but also from its inability to protect workers rights, enhance the environment, and create the sort of society we would want to live in.

NAFTA has always been more than simply a trade agreement. In the early 1990s NAFTA’s proponents argued that it would create an economy that would benefit Canada, Mexico and the United States, creating jobs, raising wages, and making our lives better. NAFTA represented the center-piece of economic policy on the continent, and the model for other economic agreements, and that is why it’s economic failure is also a political failure. NAFTA has been the center of an economic policy—what has come to be called neoliberal globalization—that has contributed to undermining standards of living, wages, benefits, and social security in all three nations.

No study can trace the impact of NAFTA on the Canadian, Mexican and U.S. economies and show the specific and direct impact, because there are so many other complicating economic factors. So if jobs are lost or wages fall, it may not be directly attributable to NAFTA, but those things are certainly attributable to the economic policy of which NAFTA is not only part and parcel, but also the model and the centerpiece.

Our focus in this publication is on Mexico, and for Mexico NAFTA and the other neoliberal policies associated with it have been a disaster. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently published a study “NAFTA’S Promise and Reality: Lessons From Mexico for the hemisphere” by John J. Audley et al, that in restrained language makes a devastating critique of the tri-national agreement. (The report can be found and downloaded at: http://www.ceip.org/). We paraphrase some of their findings and conclusions here:

· NAFTA failed in terms of jobs creation. Mexico created only 500,000 jobs in manufacturing between 1994 and 2002—when in that period the country needed to create nine million jobs in all areas to provide work for its growing population.
· NAFTA has not created better jobs for workers. NAFTA has not created higher-paying skilled jobs for Mexican workers. A study found that in 2000 the proportion of skilled labor in manufacturing was only 9.9 percent. That is 90 percent of manufacturing jobs were unskilled.
· NAFTA failed in terms of agricultural employment. Mexico’s agricultural sector lost l.3 million jobs since 1994, largely as a result of U.S. agricultural imports often sold below cost.
· NAFTA failed to strengthen the legal economy. Mexico’s informal sector shrank some, but still accounts for about 46 percent of all jobs. The informal sector is made up of individuals who work alone and illegal companies that do not pay social security (health and pensions) and do not have labor unions.
· NAFTA has not improved wages and incomes. Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than they were when NAFTA took effect. Even college graduates and those with post-graduate degrees earned less in 2000 than they did in 1993.
· NAFTA led to growth in income inequality. Since 1994, inequality has been on the rise. Compared to the period before NAFTA, the top 10 percent of Mexican households have increased their share of national income, while the other 90 percent have lost income share or seen no change.
· NAFTA has not reduced the number of Mexicans living in poverty. Some 31 percent of Mexicans live in extreme poverty, slightly higher than the number in the late 1970s.
· NAFTA has not stopped the massive migration of poor Mexicans into the United States in search of jobs; in fact there has been a dramatic rise in immigration. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions rose from700,000 in 1994 to 1.3 million in the peak year of 2001. The INS estimates an increase from 2 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants present in the U.S. in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2000.
· NAFTA has not made Mexicans more self-sufficient. Mexico is more than ever dependent upon workers remittances from the United States which mounted to US$9.8 billion in 2002 and are expected to reach US$12 billion in 2003.
· NAFTA and its labor side agreements have failed to protect Mexican workers rights. Mexican maquiladoras still have “protection contracts” where employers pay for corrupt or nonexistent labor unions.

We can add to this list the fact that the board that administers the Agreement for Labor Cooperation of North America (also known informally as the “labor side agreements” of NAFTA), has heard many complaints of labor law violations—29 against Mexico, 14 against the United States, and 11 against Canada—and has never penalized any government for its failure to enforce the law. In the case of Mexico, the state’s failure to protect workers’ right to independent self-organization of unions of their own choosing is widely documented.

NAFTA’s Other Problems

The Carnegie study makes a strong case about the economic failures of NAFTA, but there are other equally serious problems that a purely economic study doesn’t address. The economic model of neoliberal globalization of which NAFTA forms the center piece has been predicated upon government’s adopting a number of policies, the most important being:

· Harmonizing the laws of less developed countries (such as Mexico) with the laws of more developed countries (such as the United States).
· Privatizing the state industries, that is selling them off to private, often foreign investors.
· Opening the country to foreign imports and investment.
· Reducing the Federal budget by cutting social programs such as health care as well as economic subsidies to workers and the poor.
· Reducing the power of labor unions.

Taken together, these measures resulted in a dramatic redistribution of power and wealth in Mexico, from peasants and farmers, from private sector workers and public employees, from the middle and professional classes to the wealthy in Mexico, and to the wealthy in the United States. The harmonization of Mexican and U.S. laws led Carlos Salinas to push for the reform Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution and permit the sale of the land of Indian and peasant ejidos (state lands previously held in perpetuity and owned collectively by communities). During the presidencies of Miguel de la Madrid, Salinas and Zedillo, Mexico sold off nearly 1,000 state-owned corporations, including the state telephone company and railroads, many of which passed into the hands of U.S. and European corporations. U.S. products, including U.S. government-subsidized agricultural products flooded into Mexico, often undercutting the prices of Mexican farmers, and driving many out of business. The Federal budget was cut by ending state subsidies for corn and fuel oil and other basic commodities used by workers. Finally there was an attack on the labor unions that took many forms. We should remember that Carlos Salinas paved the way for NAFTA with his attacks on the Petroleum Workers Union (STPRM) and the Miners and Metallurgical Workers Union (SNTMMRM). The privatization of state companies often led to changes in the union contract, almost always to the detriment of workers. Federal budget cuts led to layoffs of public employees. All of these measures taken together lowered the standard of living of workers, and reduced their power. NAFTA has at the same time increased the power of U.S.-based multinational corporations and the largest Mexican corporations.

NAFTA Rejected

Today many of NAFTA’s provisions are rejected by many of the governments of Latin America. President Lula (Ignacio da Silva) of Brazil created a coalition of Latin American states, including Venezuela and Argentina, that refuses to let the NAFTA model be the basis of future trade agreements. Brazil has joined with China to challenge the United States in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and with its Latin American allies to challenge the United States push for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Latin Americans today work for a model that will allow their countries to grow and prosper, while labor unions and social movements fight to insure that when the countries do prosper that workers have a share in the wealth.

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Book Review: Work, Protest And Identity In Latin America

Reviewed by Dan La Botz

Work, Protest, and Identity in Twentieth-Century Latin America. By Vincent C. Peloso. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2003. Pp. xx, 348. Bibliography. Notes. $65 cloth; $23.95 paper.

Vincent C. Peloso has put together an excellent collection of 16 essays (including the introduction) dealing with labor and social movements in eleven Latin American countries. Written by thirteen historians and two political scientists from universities in Canada, Puerto Rico and the United States (surprisingly there are no Latin America-based scholars represented), these essays examine Latin America’s labor history in the twentieth-century through the triangular prism of what has become the Holy Trinity of all contemporary studies in the humanities and social sciences: class, race, and gender. If the old labor history focused on trade unions and leftist parties, and the new labor history looks at how race and gender complicated issues of class, party and politics, then these essays represent the best tendencies toward synthesis of the old and new.

These essays or chapters from recently published books represent some of the finest scholarship in the field. Most of these essays focus on labor unions while placing them in broader social contexts. Jeffrey D. Needell’s “Rebellion against Vaccination in Rio de Janeiro” and Anton Rosenthal’s “General Strike in Montevideo” discuss two important events in the early twentieth-century history of Brazil and Uruguay. Needell broadens his focus to show the way in which workers, labor unions and political parties became involved in middle class and elite struggles for power, while Rosenthal narrows the focus to show how the streetcar workers’ jobs put them at the center of urban social networks. Catherine LeGrand’s fine essay “Colombian Bananas, Peasants and Wage Workers” show how in the mid-twentieth-century peasants could sometimes become proletarianized, but how under other conditions, workers could be come transformed into peasants. This essay is a real contribution to the debate about the roles of workers and peasants in social change. Norman Caulfield’s “Labor Control in the Declining Mexican Revolution” shows how Mexican elites, the state, and the United States worked to create the corporate system dominated by the “charros,” and how those charros were challenged by the railroad workers strike of 1959.

Thomas Miller Klubock’s “Copper Workers and Popular Protest in Chile” argues that workers’ leftist traditions and organizational networks led the movement for democracy in Pinochet’s Chile. He shows how a strong labor and left movement, joining with students, the urban poor and women, was key to the democratization movement. Klubock’s essay suggests that workers, unions and left political parties belong at the center of labor history.

Some of the essays approach the working class through studies of demography, ethnicity, law or religion. Two fine essays, Alejandro de la Fuente’s “Immigration and Race in Cuba” and Miguel Tinker-Salas’s “Races and Cultures in the Venezuelan Oil Fields” both look at the ways in which ethnic and cultural diversity complicated, but did not thwart, working class organizing, the rise of class consciousness, and political struggle in those two countries in the early twentieth century. David S. Parker’s “Laws Against a ‘Working’ Middle Class in Peru,” examines the ways in which law was used to define social class and weaken broader class solidarity in the 1920s and 1930s. Michael F. Jiménez’s “Looking Ahead: Workers and Radical Christianity” really looks back at the relationship between political economy, social struggle, theology and the social practice of Catholic religious and lay activists between 1950s and 1980s.

A couple of these essays were more problematic or less successful. Anthony W. Pereira’s “Brazilian Workers and Democracy” discusses the possibilities of the Brazilian labor unions and left parties bringing social democracy to Brazil. He suggests that Lula will not run for president, that the Workers Party probably would not win, and that real social democracy doesn’t have much of a chance at the moment. An interesting essay in 1995, it seems quite out of date now that Lula is president.

María del Carmen Baerga’s “Women and the Right to (Needle)Work in Puerto Rico” looks at divisions between factory workers and home workers. She attempts to give voice to unheard women workers engaged in homework. Yet, though employers had paid to bring homeworkers to testify at government hearings in favor of this worst sort of exploitation, she takes the women who spoke there as authentic voices of working women. Marc Becker’s essay “Race, Gender and Protest in Ecuador” reads more like hagiography than history. He praises four Ecuador women, two from the Indian communities and two women from the privileged classes who worked together for women’s and Indians’ rights. All were Communist Party members, but unfortunately the party and its politics during the years of the 1930s and 1940s (a period of zig-zagging party lines) remain unexamined.

One essay stands out for the originality of its approach. Rachel May’s “The Human Details and Argentine Militancy” is a short, engaging personal essay that muses about the relationship between repression, leftist ideology, and everyday human life and its little details. The book concludes with a review essay by Kenneth M. Roberts about several books on Latin American labor published in 1996.

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Resources

Alan Howard, "The Women of Monclova," Z Magazine, February 2004.

Sallie Hughes and Juliet Gil, "The Civic Transformation of Mexican
Newspapers," in NACLA, http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=2296

Timothy Wise, "Mexico’s Small Farmers in a Global Economy," in Dollars and
Sense, http://www.dollarsandsense.org/1103wise.html

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