Mexican government on full-blast offensive against workers
http://www.peoplesworld.org/mexican-government-on-full-blast-offensive-against-workers/
by: Emile Schepers
March 17 2010
Last week, Mexico's Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare Javier
Lozano Alarcon announced a series of legislative proposals which, if
approved, would constitute a major blow against Mexican workers and
especially embattled independent unions.
The measures presented to a meeting of the Business Coordinating
Council will be included in a major legislative vehicle shortly. The
government proposes to:
• Give employers the right to government arbitration in strike
situations, which only unions have at present. Lozano claims that this
will put an end to "eternal strikes".
• Allow more leeway for employers to hire people part time, for short
term periods and in other irregular ways. Lozano says this is merely
recognizing the fact that Mexican workers are already being employed
in these ways.
• Other measures intended to increase "labor flexibility" and worker
productivity, and thus reassure both Mexico's business elite and
foreign investors that the country's efforts to recover from the heavy
blow it received from the world financial meltdown will be carried out
at the expense of workers and the poor, and not the rich or foreign
corporations.
The announcement comes after one of the worst years in recent Mexican
economic history. During 2009, Mexico lost about 7 percent of its
Gross Domestic Product. Both prices of food staples and the
unemployment rate have been rising, 28 percent of the working
population is in the informal sector, and the amount of money sent to
Mexico by its citizens working in the United States has dropped
drastically due to the recession here. A vicious drug war is
frightening both tourists and business away, while oil production has
been dropping due to the failure of the state owned petroleum company,
PEMEX, to modernize its infrastructure.
Oil, tourism and remittances are Mexico's major sources of foreign exchange.
This disastrous situation is in part caused by the degree to which the
Mexican and U.S. economies are intertwined. For example, the crisis
in the U.S. auto industry hit workers in "big three" plants in Mexico
especially hard. The integration of the two economies has been
greatly intensified by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the
right wing, free trade policies of the current government of President
Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN). The attack on
workers needs to be seen in this context.
The connection between the Mexican government's attack on workers and
the drug-related violence is strong though indirect. NAFTA and the
overall neo-liberal environment is widely seen as having stimulated
the drug trade. For example, farmers who can't sell their crops
anymore because of NAFTA are tempted to grow cannabis or poppies, or
to allow their empty lands to be used by drug gangs. Unemployment for
urban people increases crime. Calderon's plan to try to fight the drug
trade with the army is also related to his and his officials'
quasi-fascist mindset; to a man whose only tool is a hammer,
everything begins to look like a nail. Drugs, human trafficking and
forced migration are closely related too. When all the SME workers
were fired in October, among the retraining classes the government
provided to those electrical workers willing to renounce their union
were English classes. Many saw this more than a gentle hint.
After the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, much of organized labor was
incorporated into an arrangement comparable to the "corporate state"
model of Mussolini's fascist Italy. Unions, employers, farmers and
professionals were grouped into national federations whose interests
were to be mediated by the government and the governing Revolutionary
Institutional Party (PRI). Union demands were tamped down in the name
of stability and balanced growth: Theoretically, neither union
members' wages nor employers' profits could so outstrip each other as
to destabilize development.
But the corporativist unions soon expelled the left and degenerated
into partners with employers and the government in suppressing the
workers. Both rank and file dissidence and attempts to form unions
outside the corporativist setup were countered by harsh government
repression and sometimes gangster violence. In 1959 a strike by the
militant railway workers union was crushed by troops and police, and a
number of top left wing leaders of the union and of the Mexican
Communist Party were given long jail sentences. More recently,
attempts to form independent unions in the "maquiladora" operations
have been met with violence from goons brought in by the corporativist
labor leadership and the employers. First the PRI and now the PAN
governments have abetted these practices, which violate the labor
clause of the constitution.
Under the Calderon administration, intensified repression has been
directed against a number of independent unions:
• The National Mine and Metal Workers Union (SNTMMRM) has been on
strike against the operations the multinational corporation Grupo
Mexico in Cananea, Sonora since July 2007. The government, which has
strong ties to the Grupo Mexico management, has thrown everything it
can at the union, and on February 11 the courts ruled that the union
contract no longer exists and that Grupo Mexico can fire all 1,200
remaining union members. The SNTMMRM says it will not evacuate the
Cananea mine, and a military confrontation may loom.
• Last October, the government seized by force power stations which
belonged to the publicly owned Luz y Fuerza del Centro (Central Light
and Power), ousting 44,000 members of the renowned independent Mexican
Electrical Workers' Union (SME). The SME is one of the oldest unions
in Mexico, having worked with the forces of Emiliano Zapata when that
insurgent leader took over Mexico City briefly during the 1910-1920
Revolution. But the government has declared the union as well as Luz y
Fuerza to be dissolved, in spite of continuing mass protests by the
electrical workers and their allies.
• The latest is an attempt to crush the independent National Union of
Petroleum Technicians and Profesionals (UNyTPP). This union was formed
for employees of the national oil company, PEMEX, who were not
included in the bargaining unit of the regular petroleum workers'
union, under tight government control since the 1980s. No sooner did
the 3,000 member UNyTPP get official recognition, than the PEMEX
management began to call its members in one by one to force them to
sign letters resigning from, and calling for the cancellation of the
union's recognition. Those who will not sign are fired and removed by
force.
Corporativist union leaders, instead of joining a united front against
the PAN government's anti-worker policies, have hastened to attach
themselves to it in the same way they were formerly attached to the
PRI. This is why Secretary Lozano Alarcon calls them "serious,
responsible and sensitive workers' organizations which have maintained
labor peace" ("Acabar con huelgas eternas" La Jornada, March 15 2010;
my translation).
Independent unions represent a danger because they make demands that
threaten to destabilize the pacts on which the neo-liberal government
is maintained. They are also organizing centers of political
opposition to the right wing government, and to imperialism. The SME
is central to coalitions which are fighting for changes in
agricultural and trade policies that have led to the impoverishment of
millions of Mexican grain farmers and others. One of their major
demands is for a renegotiation of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade
Agreement). The future of the Mexican left is linked to the survival
and growth of the independent unions and their allies. Surviving
independent unions, many grouped in progressive federations like the
National Workers Union (UNT) and the Authentic Workers Front (FAT),
assume that they are on the short list for extermination, and are
girding for battle.
Secretary Lozano Alarcon's new proposals show that the attacks against
the miners, electrical workers, oil workers and others are not just a
reaction, as he claims, to "irregularities" within those individual
unions, but part of a concerted plan to force all Mexican workers back
into corporativist unions, whose leaders will continue to work hand in
glove with the big business and that of international monopoly
capital.
U.S. labor has been expressing strong solidarity with the Mexican
independent unions. The U.S. Steelworkers, United Electrical and
Machine Workers (UE) and others have organized solidarity campaigns.
UE updates the situation on its International Solidarity website.
Fortunately, much as Calderon and Lozano may wish, the class struggle
can't be abolished with the stroke of a pen.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmanuelrodriguez/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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