MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS
January, 2002
Vol. VII, No. 1
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Mexican Labor News and Analysis
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Dear Readers,
With this issue we begin the seventh year of publication of Mexican Labor News and Analysis, continuing to make available in English many of the most important developments in the Mexican working class.
We know that you—workers and union members, human rights advocates, feminists and Latino activists, and committed scholars and students—use this publication to keep yourself informed and to make your work in international solidarity more effective.
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Sincerely,
Dan La Botz, editor
Robin Alexander, Director of International Affairs, UE
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Mexico’s Labor Year in Review 2001: The Return to Struggle by Dan La Botz
Mexican Workers Fight Electricity Privatization by David Bacon
Ex-employees of Euzkadi March in Guadalajara by Rebeca and Ignacio Perez Vega
Book Review: Defining Global Justice and the ILO reviewed by Dan La Botz
by Dan La Botz
Many of Mexico’s people began the year 2001
optimistically, hoping that the new president Vicente Fox of the National Action
Party (PAN) would open an era of democracy, prosperity and greater justice.
After more than 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),
Mexicans hoped to move from an authoritarian and corrupt state party to a more
democratic political system with greater fairness and decency. If some had their
doubt about Fox, still the nation was prepared to give him the benefit of the
doubt. But for Mexico, 2001 proved to be another one of those years of crisis: a
year of frustration, which, if it has not entirely extinguished the Mexican
working people’s hope for change, forces them to recognize that Fox and the
PAN were not the change for which they hoped.
The situation of Mexican labor in 2001 has been affected by
three enormous political and economic events that have shaped the context of all
workers’ struggles: 1) the election of Vicente Fox of the PAN as president,
and the establishment of the first non-PRI government since the revolution; 2)
the economic recession in the United States, and its impact on Mexico; and 3)
the terrorist attack of September 11 on the World Trade Center in New York and
all that has come in the aftermath of that attack.
While all of these events have had negative impacts on the political, social and economic situation in Mexico, a fourth colossal event, the Argentine peoples’ rebellion against president de la Rua and against neo-liberalism and corporate globalization has been an inspiration to Latin America, and holds up the hope of the creation of an alternative to the existing economic and political order. Taking place in December, the impact of that event has yet to register in Mexico’s social movements and political developments.
Vicente Fox: A Disappointment
Vicente Fox has proven to be a great disappointment to the
Mexican people, and especially to the working people of Mexico.
Many had hoped that Fox’s election would mean the end of the old-state
party and its corrupt “corporativist regime,” the name Mexicans give to the
state-control of organizations such as labor unions, peasant leagues, student
groups, women’s organizations and other popular movements. Many of those
organizations were already sick and dying in the 1990s, and Fox, simply by
withdrawing state support, might have let those old institutions crumble, to be
replaced by genuinely democratic organizations, constructed from below by
workers. Instead, Fox offered political support to the Congress of Labor (CT)
and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), helping to shore up the old
system, rather than letting a new democratic system appear in its place. While
it is still too soon to analyze and characterize the Fox regime, it appears to
be emerging as a kind of hybrid: a monstrous combination of the old bureaucratic
state and the new pro-business party.
Early on, Fox reached out a hand to save Leonardo Rodríguez Alcaine, head of the CT and the CTM, the lynch pins of the old corporative regime. Fox not only praised Rodríguez Alcaine for his leadership, but kept the CTM as the official representative of workers on government boards, while excluding the independent National Union of Workers (UNT).
Not only has Fox formed an alliance with the old labor bureaucracy, but he has done nothing to clean it up. Fox might have used his political influence to push for an investigation and indictment of Victor Flores Morales, the notorious head of the Mexican Railroad Workers Union (STFRM), believed to have stolen millions from the workers’ pension funds, and to have accepted bribes from government officials and foreign investors to promote privatization of Mexican railroads. But Fox ignored the pleas of fired, laid-off and retired railroad workers.
Or consider the case of the Miners and Metal Workers union (SNTMM) which had been headed for decades by Napoleón Gómez Sada, a typical, corrupt labor official. Sick and dying, Gómez Sada turned over leadership of the union to his son, Napoleón Gómez Urrútia. But union members took their case to the labor authorities and the courts, arguing that Gómez Urrútia had never been a worker in the industry nor a member of the union. The courts found in favor of the workers, and ruled that Gomez Urrutia could not take control of the union in violation of union’s constitution and procedures. But now, Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal has ruled in Gómez Urrútia’s favor, presumably in return for his support for the Fox administration.
Fox has supported these corrupt union officials both
because it gives him a measure of political support, but also because it means
labor peace, that is, protection for Mexican and multinational corporations
against the demands of workers. In case after case, since he has been in office,
Fox has supported the corporations and corrupt state-unions against independent
unions, even when workers’ rights were violated. When the Duro Bag workers in
Río Bravo, Tamaulipas asked the government to oversee free and fair secret
ballot union representation elections as promised by the former Mexican
Secretary of Labor in a Ministerial Agreement reached with the United States
under the labor Side Agreement of NAFTA, the Fox administration refused to
intervene. The company fired, and gangsters beat up workers, and in those
circumstances, one of the government unions won the election. So it has been
everywhere.
When workers at Euzkadi Tires, a subsidiary of German-based
Continental Tire, recently found themselves in a confrontation with their
employer who threatened to close the plant unless they accepted changes in the
collective bargaining agreement, the Fox administration came down on the side of
the tire company. When Celanese Corporation, a multinational textile company,
fired 425 workers, and then rehired them, imposing an inferior collective
bargaining agreement, the government labor authorities ignored the matter.
Everywhere, since Fox came to power, the government favors the old, corrupt unions and employers, and nowhere does it defend workers’ rights. Before Fox came to power, he signed a statement, vowing to support workers’ rights and the rights of independent unions, but since his election, he has completely ignored his early promises. The independent unions and many workers have drawn the conclusion that the election of Fox changed nothing, and that the system continues as before under the PRI.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the corporations on the
right and the independent labor unions on the left proposed that Mexico revise
its Federal Labor Law (LFT), first adopted in 1931 and later revised in 1970.
While the corporations argued that the LFT had to be “modernized” and made
more “flexible,” independent unions argued that it should respect workers’
right to unions of their own choosing and allow them to negotiate collective
bargaining agreements free from employer intimidation and government
intervention.
In the mid-1990s attorney Nestor de Buen wrote a draft reform of the LFT that incorporated some aspects of both employer and independent union positions and was put forward by the PAN. The PRD in turn developed its own labor law reform proposal, reflecting de Buen’s draft, but emphasizing the position of the independent unions. After his election, president Fox and Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal convened a working group of government officials, employers and both “official” and independent unions to amend the old LFT or draft a new federal labor law. Fox and Abascal have asserted that the new law must represent a consensus between employers and unions, and have promised that they will not foist a new law upon any of the parties. So far no draft has been produced, but the very meeting of the parties to discuss the issues has been seen as something of a breakthrough. Nevertheless, some in the independent union movement remain skeptical that the arch-conservative Abascal can be trusted to produce a labor law that would defend workers rights and allow workers to improve their economic and social situation.
Fox has not only failed industrial workers, but also other working class and poor people, particularly public employees, indigenous people, and migrants. The Fox government has carried out government cutbacks in public spending (as demanded by the World Bank) that have resulted in the retirement or layoff of thousands of public employees, meaning a loss of service to the public, especially to the poor. With the current recession, and a decline in government revenues, even more cutbacks can be expected under this administration.
Before he came to office, Fox had promised to work
for a new indigenous rights law, but after the law was gutted by the Mexican
Congress, and then rejected by indigenous organizations, Fox abandoned the
cause. The indigenous issues which gave rise to the Chiapas Rebellion of 1994
remain unresolved, and much of Mexico’s Indian population feels that Fox has
either failed or betrayed them.
While many Mexicans also hoped for an improved human rights
situation with the election of Fox, they too were disappointed. The
assassination of prominent human rights attorney Digna Ochoa who had defended
environmental activists and accused guerrillas indicated that things in that
area had not improved either.
During his presidential campaign and after his
election Fox had also raised the profile of Mexican migrants to the United
States, alluding to the injustice and violence that they endured under U.S. laws
and agencies such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the
Border Patrol. While this may have been an attempt to win votes in the election
and to enhance his reputation once in office, in any case he highlighted real
injustices and won broad support for the idea of a migration reform that would
protect human rights.
Soon after he took office, Fox met with U.S. President
George W. Bush and insisted on a new plan for Mexican migrants, and Bush seemed
to welcome the overture and to assent to the need for a new policy. However,
after the events of September 11, and the call for tighter controls over the
U.S. border and immigrants, any progressive reform in that area seems to be off
the agenda for the moment, and perhaps for the foreseeable future. So, while Fox
raised hopes for Mexico’s indigenous people and for its migrant workers, he
has proven unable to fulfill them. Overall, for working people and the poor, in
almost every area Fox has been a disappointment.
While President Fox and the National Action Party (PAN) proved to be a disappointment in national politics, the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has been more successful in the administration of Mexico City. Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador has succeeded both in making the city government more democratic and more responsive to its citizens, and more successful in dealing with some of the economic, social and environmental problems in one of the world’s largest cities (about 10 million in the city limits and about 18 million in the metropolitan area).
In the labor arena, the PRD has succeeded in reducing the tensions (and what were the hostilities) between the Federal District Workers Union (SUTGDF) and the city government. The combination of new leadership in both the union and the city permitted a new relationship to emerge. It has also worked to promote worker and labor union rights and women’s rights. For example, the PRD administration has worked to create a transparent system of union and collective bargaining records so that workers will know who represents them and the terms of the contracts. While the PRD nationally remains in disarray, the López Obrador administration has won a reputation for civic and labor reform.
The Economic Crisis
The election of Fox held out hopes not only for a more democratic country, but also for a more prosperous Mexico. But the U.S. recession dashed these dreams. The U.S. economy has dragged Mexico into its worst economic crisis since 1994-96, leading to plant closing, layoffs, and an increase in poverty and related social problems. Perhaps most shocking to Mexico’s political and economic elite, the maquiladoras which grew even during the 1994-96 recession, have suffered a dramatic decline, with scores closed, and tens of thousands of workers laid off. Overall, in all sectors, over one million Mexican workers have lost their jobs since the recession began (out of a workforce of 40 million.) The private firm Economic Analysis Planning for Companies (Ecanal) predicts that Mexico will loose 600,000 jobs in the first half of 2002. According to the Mexican Regional Information System (SIREM) the accumulated unemployment since 1994 will reach six million by 2002.
As always in Mexico because there is no unemployment
insurance system, when a recession hits, workers move out of the formal or legal
economy into the informal or illegal economy. Because a job in the formal sector brings with it mandatory
health care coverage and other benefits which are required by law, this shift is
especially significant. The informal sector is currently estimated to make up
28.5 percent of the economically active population (PEA), or some 9,680,570
persons, and to produce 12.7 percent of Mexico’s gross national product,
according to the leading Mexican financial newspaper, EL FINANCIERO. And now the
informal economy is growing rapidly.
The Mexico City government reports an “alarming increase” in “ambulantes” or wandering street vendors. The Center of Economic Analysis and Projections for Mexico (CAPEM), which has somewhat more conservative figures, reports that informal sector employment increased from 6.8 million in 2000 to 7.8 million in 2001. Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal estimates that 30 percent of the economically active population (PEA) is employed in the informal sector. If things go on at this rate by the end of the term of Vicente Fox, some 4 million Mexicans will have joined a current 10 million in the informal sector or as emigrants from Mexico, according to Marcos Chavez, a researcher at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico.
The economic recession has also meant that there is little recovery in real terms in Mexican wages. The government’s most recent increase in the minimum wage to which most other wages are tied, for the first time in years surpassed the rate of inflation, but because of the recession and cutbacks in hours-worked-per-week, most workers will not receive any wage increase. Today most of the economically active population still earns between US$4.00 and US$8.00 dollars per day. (13.5 percent earn nothing; 16.0 percent earn less than one minimum wage, about US$4.00 per day; 28.6 percent earn between one and two minimum wages or US$4.00 to US$8.00 per day; 31.6 earn between two and five minimum wages or between US$8.00 and US $20.00 per day.) Secretary of Labor Abascal, speaking to the press in late December, said that if the current tendencies continued Mexicans would not recover the wages lost in the recent period for another 25 years.
As already mentioned, what has most shocked Mexico’s
political and economic elite has been the decline of the maquiladora sector.
After growing consistently from 1975 to 2000 when it reached a total of 4,000
plants employing 1.3 million workers, suddenly in 2001 the maquiladora sector
went into crisis: dozens of plants closed and an estimated 213,000 workers lost
their jobs. At the end of 2001 production had fallen 3 percent, employment, 11
percent, and 132 plants had closed. (Of the closed plants, 68 were in textiles
and garments; 26 in other manufacturing, 17 in services, seven in autoparts and
five in chemicals, four in shoes, three in food and drink and two in toys.)
The causes of the maquiladora crisis were many: a) the recession in the U.S. economy into which the maquiladoras are completely integrated; b) the new security measures following September 11 which have led to bottlenecks and backups in cross-border transportation; c) the newly imposed taxes on maquiladoras (based on NAFTA article 303) which cut into their profitability; and, finally, d) increased competition from Asian plants, particularly Chinese factories that pay even lower wages, have even tighter controls on unions and workers, and even fewer environmental regulations. After a quarter of a century of regarding the maquiladoras as the deus ex machina that would save Mexico and carry it forward into the first world, the Mexican business elite has suddenly stepped back and begun to doubt. In a statement in early December, Javier Prieto de la Fuente, president of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers (CONCAMIN), said that the maquiladora industrialization model was “used up” and, that if the country continued to bet on that model, it would never succeed in lifting itself out of its backwardness, and never create the 1.2 million jobs a year necessary to create full employment. Whether or not Mexico’s maquiladora problems are the result of a peculiar coincidence of circumstance or a fundamental change in the situation remains to be seen. But which ever it may be, for the moment it means tremendous problems for 213,000 workers and their families, something like one million people, and for the larger economy and population.
The September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
in New York City, followed by increased state security measures, and the U.S.
war against Afghanistan, have all had a powerful impact on Mexico and on the
possibilities for U.S.-Mexico labor solidarity. Shocking many Mexicans, almost
immediately after U.S. President Bush announced that the U.S. would launch an
attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan, President Vicente Fox went on
television to offer Mexico’s full support. The position of support for the
U.S. taken by Fox and his foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda represented a
radical departure from Mexico’s more independent foreign policy, a policy that
rejected foreign intervention in other nations. For example, based on its own
experience of U.S. wars of aggression and scores of invasions of its territory,
Mexico has maintained relations with and supported Cuba, despite the U.S.
embargo. Many Mexicans tend to be skeptical about U.S. claims that it is
fighting “evil” and promoting “good,” suspecting that the U.S. has used
the tragedy to promote its own political and economic interests. Consequently,
Fox’s new foreign policy shocked many in Mexico who saw him as kowtowing to
Bush and the U.S.
Following the attack on the WTC, the United States imposed
new, stricter controls on the U.S.-Mexico border and on foreign immigrants. The
immediate result was much slower movement of cross-border traffic, long waiting
times at the border, and consequently bottlenecks and back-ups that caused
delays in the movement of people and goods across the border. I recently visited
the San Diego California area where the return trip from Tijuana
now means a four-hour wait in line, while at Otay Mesa, the principal
truck crossing for the maquiladora plants the wait may be two to three hours,
even at the little Tecate crossing the wait is at least an hour. The result of
these new measures has been slow downs in production in the maquiladora plants,
and greater inconvenience for managers and workers crossing the border. Because
these changes have taken place during a recession when there was less demand and
less urgency, the full impact has not been felt yet.
However, these immediate economic impacts are perhaps the
least of it. The emphasis on state security poses dangers not only to the civil
rights of U.S. citizens, but also to workers on both sides of the border. The
new cabinet level position of Secretary of Home Security, the new security laws
and regulations, and the increase in police and other security forces, public
and private, can and probably will be used against labor unions and other social
movements. Already the threat of repression has inhibited the anti-globalization
movement and brought a higher level of repression against the civil rights
movement (for example at the recent protests in Philadelphia over the case of
Mumia Abu Jamal). The U.S. emphasis on national security may threaten attempts
to build international solidarity, such as working toward cooperation between
Mexican and U.S. labor unions and social movements.
Mexico may use the new climate of anti-terrorism and repression to attempt to crack down on militant movements such as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the El Barzón debtors’ movements or the National Coordinating Committee of the Teachers Union (la CNTE), all of which have a reputation for militant confrontations with authority. Even before September 11, Mexican employer associations and government agencies had begun to target social movements and independent labor unions as radical or even terrorist groups. The Center of Investigation and National Security (CISEN), Mexico's most powerful intelligence agency warned that guerrilla groups had infiltrated labor unions, leftist organizations and political parties, and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) responded that such statements represented a threat to labor unions and workers.
If September, with the killing of 3,500 people in the World
Trade Center, followed by war and the killing of thousands of Afghanis and some
few U.S. soldiers brought sadness and a sense of political and psychological
depression, the events in December in Argentina have given many people in
Argentina and throughout Latin America a new sense of hope.
While it is still too early to say exactly what the impact of the Argentine events will be on Mexico, clearly the Argentine popular rebellion that drove President de la Rua from power has made it clear that many in Latin America are absolutely fed up with neo-liberal globalization and its disastrous affects on their countries. While the Argentinepeople succeeded in driving the president from office, at least at the moment no political force has emerged to put forward a working class political program to resolve the crisis. Still, Argentina at one end of the continent and Venezuela at the other, together with Cuba in the Caribbean, now stand opposed to neoliberalism. Argentina and Venezuela can be expected to back Brazil which, for its own reasons opposes elements of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty. While the United States attempts to extend its sway over Central Asia, it has proven unable to prevent economic disaster and political opposition in the hemisphere it claims to control. Mexico’s left-wing daily newspaper LA JORNADA immediately drew the conclusion that the Argentine explosion showed the limits of neo-liberalism, and the power of resistance. Mexico’s intellectuals, political dissidents, independent labor unions, peasants organizations, feminists and environmentalist will no doubt draw the same conclusion, and begin to transform that into a new more optimistic program of action. If September and its aftermath showed the new world order dominated by the United States, December and what will come in its wake, show the power of the world’s people, above all of its working people and the poor.
In any case, with or without the example of Argentina, by
the end of 2001, disenchanted with president Fox, Mexican working people were
returning to struggle. Of course the workers’ struggle for justice in Mexico
had never stopped. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) continued its
struggle against the privatization of the electrical industry, doctors and other
public health care workers struck both over their own low wages and poor working
conditions and the lack of services and supplies for their public patients.
Workers occupied maquiladoras abandoned by their employers to recoup lost wages,
and peasants protested against abuse in places like San Quintin, Baja
California.
But towards the end of the year all sorts of social
protests increased. In mid-December, for example, thousands of
protestors—retired people, debtors from El Barzón, poor people from the
Movement of the 400 Towns, and peasants from pineapple plantations—set up a
blockade of the Mexican Congress. For over three months, scores of Mexican
school teachers have carried out a “plantón” or sit-in at their Congress to
protest cuts in the nation’s education budget. Mexico is next to last among 32
nations of Latin America in the percentage of funds it dedicates to education.
In Texcoco, site of the proposed new Mexico City airport,
thousands of peasants an teachers, carrying torches and wielding machetes,
marched to protest the construction of the airport, to object to President
Fox’s new regressive taxes, and to demand that education make up 12 percent of
the gross national product. The university workers’ unions around the country
have threatened to strike in mid-February for higher wages, and for a larger
budget for higher education. El Barzon, the Mexican debtors’ union, has called
out its members to throw eggs at banks such as Banamex and Bancomer and at the
National Banking and Stock Exchange Commission. El Barzon argues that Fox and
the government support the financial sector against the interests of Mexican
farmers, businesses and working people.
In Guadalajara, rubber workers at the Euzkadi plant have
decided to strike to defend their contract in the face of the Continental Rubber
company’s threat to close the plant. In Las Truchas/Lázaro Cárdenas Michoacán,
workers of the Miners and Metal Workers Union at the SICARTSA steel mill have
occupied the plant for weeks now over local issues, but also because of a
conflict with the new general secretary, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia imposed on
them by the Fox government. While the Zapatistas remain ensconced in Chiapas,
the struggle against Mexico’s new indigenous law has spread throughout the
country. Mexico’s indigenous people, supported by human rights organizations,
labor unions, and many other groups from civil society, have filed petitions
with the International Labor Organization (ILO) of the United Nations to protest
the treatment of Mexico’s Indians in violation of ILO Convention 169 which
Mexico has signed to protects their rights.
Mexico’s people gave president Fox the benefit of the doubt; they gave him a honeymoon, but now they seem to have moved quickly from honeymoon, skipping over domestic bliss to go directly to separation and divorce. Argentina has shown that an angry people have the power to drive a neo-liberal president from power; perhaps the Mexicans will take up the example.
In response to the frustrations of the new regime, once again we see the emergence of those mass movements that challenged the old regime: independent labor unionists and the debtors movement, the opposition parties of the left and the Zapatistas have begun once again to raise the old slogan: “Zapata vive! La Lucha sigue.”
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MEXICAN
WORKERS FIGHT ELECTRICITY PRIVATIZATION
by David Bacon
MEXICO CITY (1/6/02) - In the 1930s and 40s, General Lázaro Cárdenas made
nationalization of economic resources and land reform symbols of Mexican
national sovereignty. Independence from the colossus of the north, Cardenas
said, meant prying the hands of US owners from the main levers of the country's
economic life. Just a few decades after the cataclysmic revolution of 1910-20,
public ownership of the two keys to its economic future - oil and electricity
– was written into the constitution itself.
Nationalist economic development, however, was overthrown as the bedrock of the country's economic strategy when technocrats took power in the former ruling Party of the Institutionalized Revolution in the 1970s. Today, the Mexican economy looks nothing like it did 20 years ago. Well before passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the disparity between U.S. and Mexican wages was growing. Mexican salaries were a third of those in the U.S. up to the 1970s. They are now less than an eighth, according to Mexican economist and former Senator Rosa Albina Garabito. In some industries they've dropped to a 12th or 15th - even during a period of relative decline in US wages.
In two decades the income of Mexican workers lost 76% of its purchasing power, while the Mexican government ended subsidies on the prices of basic necessities, including gasoline, bus fares, tortillas and milk. The government estimates that 40 million people live in poverty, and 25 million in extreme poverty. These results are the product of the imposition of neoliberal economic reforms. In the last two decades Mexico has become their proving ground, as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank used the leverage of foreign debt to require massive changes in economic priorities designed to encourage foreign investment. The heart of those changes has been privatization of Mexican state enterprises. Those put on the auction block include the airlines, ports, railroads, banks, phone system and whole sections of formerly state-owned industries.
The impact on workers has been devastating. A majority of Mexican industrial workers worked for the government until the transformations started in the 1970s. Its organized labor movement had its greatest strength in the state sector. While three-quarters of the work force in Mexico belonged to unions three decades ago, less than 30% do so today. In the state-owned oil company, PEMEX, union membership still hovers at 72%. But when the collateral petrochemical industry was privatized over the last decade, the unionization rate fell to 7%. New private owners reduced the membership of the railway workers union from 90,000 workers to 36,000 in the same period.
Resistance to privatization has often been fierce. Soldiers had to occupy the port of Veracruz at gunpoint in order to privatize it and fire its work force. Mexico City's bus drivers fought the selloff of the Route-100 company for three years, including one in which their union leaders were imprisoned. Wildcat strikes hit the railroads when they were sold to Grupo Mexico, and copper miners fought a valiant battle against job reductions when the Cananea mine was bought by the same owners in the late 1990s.
While these resistance efforts were defeated, one of the government's most important privatization schemes has consistently been held at bay - the selloff of the electrical system. Mexico's grid for generating and distributing power has two parts. The Power and Light Company handles distribution for Mexico City and central Mexico. Electricity is generated and distributed in the rest of the country by the Federal Electricity Commission. Each entity has a separate union as well. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) at the Power and Light Company is one of the country's oldest and most democratic labor organizations. Under then-general secretary Rafael Galván, the union for workers at the FEC, the Sole Union for Electrical Workers of the Mexican Republic (SUTERM), led the movement to democratize the country's unions two decades ago. The government seized control of it, however, and its latest leader now also heads the main government-affiliated labor federation, the Congreso del Trabajo.
The labor landscape began to change, however, when former President Ernesto Zedillo announced plans to put the electrical system up for sale after his election seven years ago. Those plans have outlived his administration. Current President Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive who became the first candidate to defeat the ruling PRI in seventy years, announced during his campaign that he would continue the privatization plan.
The government argues that it has no money to invest in modernizing the apparatus, especially the generation stations that would be the first object of privatization. In addition, it argues that private owners could provide service at cheaper prices (defying the experience of previous Mexican privatization schemes.)
George Bush's assumption of the US presidency has given those plans further impetus. Bush seeks to expand NAFTA by subordinating all Latin American economies to the US in the Free Trade Area of the Americas. In a key step, Bush won fast-track negotiating authority from Congress in December. His energy plan also envisions much more integration, tying Mexican generation to the power grid and market in the US southwest. Deregulation of US utilities - the key political direction of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission even under former President Bill Clinton - has acquired yet greater emphasis under Bush. Integrating the electrical systems of the US and Mexico is not only a technical goal, but a political one, designed to create greater profit-making opportunities for the newly-deregulated subsidiaries of US utilities.
In 1998, however, Zedillo's privatization scheme was met with a wave of popular resistance, led by the SME. Under the banner of stopping the selloff of both electricity and oil, over a million people demonstrated in Mexico City's central plaza, the Zocalo, on the traditional May Day holiday.
Meanwhile, the slow disintegration of the old union structure, which refused to mount any defense against neoliberal government policies, created a political opening for currents of resistance. As an alternative to the old structure, a new union federation, the National Union of Workers, has declared open opposition to the economic reforms. One of the most important structural and political changes implemented by the new federation was scrapping the old requirement that workers belong to the governing party in order to hold their jobs and maintain their union membership. While the SME, which never had such a rule, didn't join this new federation, the formation of the UNT helped to create an atmosphere in which opposition gained strength and legitimacy.
In 1999, splits began to develop in the other electrical union, SUTERM. On May 22, 3000 of its members defied their national leaders and marched in the capitol, openly allying themselves with the SME. Another demonstration on August 28 brought out 5,000, and a national coordinating committee was set up, representing 15,000 workers. Meanwhile, the SME set up the National Front of Resistance Against the Privatization of the Electrical Industry (FNRCPIE), and collected over a million signatures on petitions in just three weeks.
The battle over privatization was internationalized when it
hosted a conference in Mexico City which featured delegations from many Latin
American countries. Further conferences brought together the Worker's University
of Mexico (UOM), the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (ANAD), the
leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution, along with union representatives,
academics, NGO's, and other political parties.
The union argues that the government subsidizes large users, even though Mexican power prices are already very low. In addition, government budget cuts continue to undermine any modernization of equipment or facilities. The SME accuses the government of draining the resources of the Power and Light Company, by forcing it to buy power from the Federal Electricity Commission, whose prices have increased 298%, while the company's rates to consumers have only gone up by 176%.
Confrontation with Fox was narrowly averted when a new collective bargaining agreement was reached between the SME and the Power and Light Company last March. It was widely rumored that police and soldiers had been prepared to occupy electrical installations in the event of a strike.
A bill to modify Articles 27 and 28 of the Constitution
(which mandates public ownership of the power industry) has already been
written, however. Last May, the World Bank added to the controversy surrounding
Mexico's low-wage development policy in a series of recommendations it made to
the new Fox administration, “An Integral Agenda of Development for the New
Era.” The bank recommended rewriting Mexico's Constitution and Federal Labor
Law, eliminating many protections in place since the 1920s. Those include giving
up requirements that companies pay severance pay when they lay off workers, that
they negotiate over the closure of factories, that they give workers permanent
status after 90 days and that they limit part time work and abide by the 40-hour
week. The bank recommended other changes which would weaken the ability of
unions to represent workers and bargain, including eliminating the historical
ban on strikebreaking. And Mexico's guarantees of job training, health care and
housing, paid by employers, would be scrapped as well.
The recommendations were so extreme that even a leading employers' association condemned it. Claudio X. Gonzáles, head of the Managerial Coordinating Council, called the report “over the top,” noting the bank didn't dare to make such proposals in developed countries. “Why are they then being recommended for the emerging countries?" he asked. But Fox embraced the report, calling it “very much in line with what we have contemplated,” and necessary to “really enter into a process of sustainable development.”
Among those who disagreed was Jesús Campos Linas, the new PRD-appointed head of the labor board. He saw the World Bank proposal as a stalking horse for Mexico's largest employers, and their allies among foreign corporations and financial institutions. They were too drastic for the government to make itself, he said, but they provided an extreme pole against which its own neoliberal proposals might seem more acceptable.
Campos Linas rejected Fox's argument that gutting legal protections would make the economy more competitive, attract greater investment, and create more jobs. “Mexico already has one of the lowest wage levels in the world,” he said, “yet there's still this cry for more flexibility. The minimum wage in Mexico City is 40.35 pesos a day--no one can live on this. And now we've lost 400,000 jobs since January alone.”
Two separate and very different ideas about economic development and workers rights have emerged in Mexico. The differences are deep, over whose priorities will prevail--those of workers or those of investors with a stake in the free-trade based economy. According to Harley Shaiken, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, “the Mexican government has created an investment climate which depends on a vast number of low wage-earners. This climate gets all the government's attention, while the consumer climate - the ability of people to buy what they produce - is sacrificed.”
Rosendo Flores, SME secretary general, emphasizes that privatization can't be defeated without seeing its integral connection with the rest of the neoliberal economic development program, and without proposing an alternative. He believes that genuine national economic development requires strong internal markets, with well-paid workers capable of consuming the goods they produce.
“We have seen the consequences of deregulation in the electrical sector in the state of California which has been detrimental to the interests of the electrical workers and of the population,” says a statement signed by leaders of both Mexican electrical unions. “In Mexico, the people rightly think that the electrical industry and the petroleum industry should be public property and that such public property is the fundamental basis for their nation's existence and of their national sovereignty.”
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EX-EMPLOYEES
OF EUZKADI MARCH IN GUADALAJARA
by Rebeca and Ignacio Perez Vega
[Guadalajara,
Jan. 15, 2001] More than 1,000 workers who remained without employment following
the shutdown on December 16 of the Euzkadi tire plant located in El Salto,
Jalisco (near Guadalajara) carried out a march to protest “the unilateral
closing of the plant,” according to union leader Jesús Torres Nuño.
Torres
Nuño, the general secretary of the Revolutionary National Union of Workers of
Euzkadi (SNTRE) warned that the protest was just the beginning of a series of
mobilizations that the union would carry out at a national level to reopen the
plant.
The
demonstration took place in two waves. The first left at six in the morning from
Guadalajara headed for the Euzkadi plant, while the other caravan left from El
Salto with the same objective.
At
the same time, the SNRTE met yesterday with leaders of the National Union of
Workers (UNT) to ask for their support of the march that would be carried out on
January 30, with demonstrations in intermediate cities such as Auguascalientes,
San Luis Potosí, Morelia, Querétaro, and Puebla among others, with its final
destination the City of Mexico where it plans to arrive next February 5.
In
addition, the union plans to join workers from the Atenquique [paper plant] on
the 26 or 27 of January in Tuxpán, Jalisco so that they can join together in a
common movement, said the SNTRE general secretary.
In
a related development, union representatives from Euzkadi arrived around 11:00
a.m. at the program “Municipal Monday.”
Governor Francisco Ramírez Acuña was present at the side of the
Municipal President of Tlaquepaque, where, accompanied by the local deputy of
the National Action Party (PAN), Martín González Jíminez, and the secretary
of Economic Development, Abraham González, they spoke with representatives of
the union. One of the officials
advised the union reporesentatives that the union should not block the payment
of severance to workers who decided to cash their checks.
The
Euzkadi Rubber Company announced that, together with other firms, they could
make criminal charges against exworkers of the company who yesterday attempted
to stop the removal from the plant of machinery and supplies that belonged to
third parties. Last Sunday Jesús Torres announced that this Monday the company
would begin removing raw materials and tires belonging to clients, to which he
gave his backing.
“It
is unforunate that the union leaders are persuading their members to carry out
illegal activities, such as blocking the plant and impeding the removal of
machinery and supplies belong to third parties who are outside of this
conflict,” said Paul Koder, legal director of Euzkadi, who reiterated that the
plant in El Salto will not reopen.
[The
above article is taken from MURAL, January 15, 2002, translation by Dan La Botz.]
-###-
by David Bacon
ENSENADA, BAJA CALIFORNIA (12/28/01) -- In Baja California, trying to find a
place to live was never easy. Today it's in danger of becoming a crime,
especially for the state's growing communities of indigenous migrants from
central and southern Mexico. In the last six months, leaders of Baja's housing
movement have been jailed by the
state government as criminals and threats to the social order. Two of the
state's best-known organizers of migrant farmworkers are already in prison.
Arrest warrants have been issued for as many as 18 others. Almost all are
Mixtecs, Zapotecs and Triquis - indigenous communities of Oaxaca whose members
make up Baja California's agricultural workforce.
On May 31, Beatriz Chávez, who's led the Independent Confederation of Farmworkers and Peasants (CIOAC) in the agricultural valley of San Quintin for the last two decades, was picked up by the state Judicial Police, and brought under guard to the Cereso state prison in Ensenada. She's been jailed ever since. On December 12, another leading organizer and Triqui community leader, Julio Sandoval, was picked up in Maneadero, a farm town just south of Ensenada, and taken to the same prison.
Both Chávez and Sandoval are accused of leading illegal land occupations by homeless migrant workers. But the real problem, they say, is that racism against indigenous migrants has become official government policy. "There's a crisis of justice in Baja California," says Julio César Alonso, another CIOAC leader, "in which the leaders of social movements in this state are being systematically jailed. Our community has endured three year s of racism and persecution." Alonso's name is on the arrest list as well.
Reaction to the jailings has spread to Oaxacan communities in California, provoking outraged letters and telegrams to Baja California Governor Eugenio Elorduy. "The policies followed in Baja are being dictated by big ranchers, who don't want to see any kind of organization among indigenous communities," says Rufino Domíinguez, coordinator of the Oaxacan Indigenous Binational Front. "They remember the strikes and unions of the 1980s, and they're afraid that any kind of organizing effort is eventually going to lead to the same thing. Fighting for a decent wage and for the rights of migrant workers is still not a crime in Mexico, but they're trying to make it one."
Chávez, the state says, led migrant farmworkers from the Ejido Graciano Sánchez onto land owned by the government. Sandoval, an activist in the migrant settlement of Cañon Buenavista, is accused of seeking to expand its present 50 hectares to another 60 hectares surrounding it.
Title to the land in question in both cases is murky. In Vicente Guerrero (a colonia in the San Quintin Valley), Chávez and CIOAC have tried to buy vacant land from the army, which they say would like to sell it. The state of Baja California, however, is legally required to act as an intermediary, which it refuses to do. The land surrounding Cañon Buenavista is federal land as well, according to Sandoval's organization, the Independent Indigenous Movement for Unification and Struggle (MIULI). Small landholders have made claims to it, which MIULI says are just a legal pretext for the state's effort to arrest the organization's leaders.
It has been an established principle in Mexican law, since
the land reform won by the Revolution of 1910-20, that vacant land belonging to
the federal government can and should be used to house those who have none. But
the government has implemented a series of economic reforms since the1970s,
pushed by the World Bank and international lenders, designed to make the
country's economy more attractive to foreign investors. The Constitutional
provision for land reform was modified substantially in the mid-1990s, and
traditional protections for land occupations weakened as a result.
Baja California, since the National Action Party won the governorship in the mid-1980s, has often led the rest of Mexico in pursuing these economic reforms. In 1987 it passed legislation removing the old protections for land occupations, and established, a new agency, Immobiliaria Estatal, to buy up vacant land and make it available to poor barrio residents for housing.
The system has never functioned, and community activists say it was never intended to work. "It doesn't offer much, and when it does, it levies high prices and high interest rates," Alonso charges. The rates aren't fixed, and each year, when the minimum wage is raised, the amount of the loan principle is increased by the same amount. Poor residents who have tried to use the program say their debts grow larger every year as a consequence.
Land hunger on the Baja peninsula, however, is intense. Until the 1960s, Baja California Norte was a desert state with a small population. But in the wake of the end of the bracero program in 1964, maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories) began to proliferate in Tijuana, eventually drawing hundreds of thousands of workers up to the border. Tijuana now has over 2 million inhabitants, and Mexicali isn't far behind. But while the jobs attracted people to the border from all over Mexico, hardly any housing was built to accommodate them.
Further south down the peninsula, in the San Quintin Valley, a tiny handful of large growers developed an agro-industrial empire, supplying tomatoes and strawberries for the U.S. market. To bring in their crops, thousands of workers were brought every year from poor Mixtec, Zapotec and Triqui villages in Oaxaca. Wages in San Quintin were kept low to make the valley's strawberries and tomatoes cheap, while ensuring high profits for ranchers. "Today the minimum wage here is 37.4 pesos a day (about $4)," says Domiciano López, a local community organizer. "While some workers can earn twice that much in the fields, a kilo of meat costs 38 pesos in the local market - half a day to a day's wages. That means families here eat meat once a month."
At first, migrant families lived in labor camps, and returned to their homes at the end of each harvest season. But as the years went by, many decided to stay in the valley. As the permanent population grew, so did discontent. In 1988, over a thousand tomato and strawberry pickers struck to win better wages. Their efforts to form an independent union were broken, however, and the strike's leaders fled to the U.S.
In Tijuana CIOAC organized maquiladora workers to take over vacant land and form the neighborhood of Maclovio Rojas a decade ago. Residents have since faced hostility from both the government and Hyundai Corporation, which seeks the land for an industrial park. Barrio leader Hortensia Hernández was jailed twice, the last time for over 2 months in 1997. The government still refuses to supply electricity and sewer service to residents.
As workers migrate from Oaxaca to San Quintin and Maneadero, and families try to escape the miserable conditions in the camps, the pressure for housing in the small rural towns has escalated. Over 20,000 landless families live in San Quintin, but in the eyes of state and local authorities, they are still strangers. "We've always had to live in the camps. They just want us to work to make the ranchers wealthy, and then go back to Oaxaca," Alonso says.
In Maneadero and San Quintin, MIULI and CIOAC began pressing harder for more land. In December of 1999, Olvaldo Medina y Olvera, a state government official, led the violent expulsion of families in the Graciano Sánchez Ejido. Chávez was arrested with other organizers and beaten in jail by Medina y Olvera, who has since been cited by the National Human Rights Commission for torture and repression. He was recently appointed director of the Cereso prison where Chávez and Sandoval are currently encarcerated.
In 2000, another Mixtec activist, Celerino García, ran for election as a federal deputy on the ticket of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution. García was the candidate of a network of grassroots organizations like CIOAC and MIULI, which sought to use the election to highlight the need for housing. "We came together to oppose the policies of the PAN state government," explained Ensenada activist Ramiro Orea. "For poor people - workers, people in the barrios – the state has refused to budget money for social services. We have terrible problems of lack of housing in Baja. In the colonias for workers, dirt streets turn to mud when it rains, and in many neighborhoods there are no sewers, running water or electricity. Getting any of these services requires a big fight. So that's what we do. We fight."
García didn't win, but the thousands of votes he received were a warning of growing anger among workers and the homeless. When the government still wouldn't respond, this spring activists sat in at municipal and state offices, and even blocked the main highway going south down the peninsula. The climate of intimidation increased when the staff member of the state's human rights commission in San Quintin, Oscar Montaño, was accused in the press of belonging to the Zapatistas and another guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Army of the People. The current wave of arrests soon followed.
"The struggle for housing has a long history in Baja California," Domínguez says. "It includes land occupations, because the government has never been willing to make land available in a legal way." But when the legal avenues are shut off, barrio residents say, they have no alternative other than direct action.
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Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S.
International Labor Standards Policy. By Edward C. Lorenz. (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.
Reviewed by Dan La Botz, Visiting Assistant Professor of
History and Latin American Stuides, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. La Botz is
the author of Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today and
most recently Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto.
END OF MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS, JANUARY, 2002, VOL VII, NO 1