MEXICO'S LABOR LAW REFORM SPARKS MASSIVE PROTESTS
A plan to gut labor protections has spurred unrest in Mexico's streets.
By David Bacon
In These Times, web edition, 10/16/12
Economics students at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico march from the Plaza of
Three Cultures to the Zocalo to protest a
proposed labor law reform and to mark the
anniversary of the October 2, 1968 massacre.
MEXICO CITY-As the Mexican Senate tried
to convene last week, unionists, youth protesters
from the #YoSoy132 movement and social activists
of every stripe blocked the chamber's doors,
trying to prevent legislators from meeting to
consider the reforma laboral. On October 2, tens
of thousands marched from the Tlatelolco (Plaza
of Three Cultures), where hundreds of students
were shot down by Mexican Army troops on the same
date in 1968, to the Zocalo at the city center.
Reverberating chants signaled an equally massive
rejection of this deeply unpopular proposal.
The Mexican Senate has begun its 30-day
consideration of a proposed reform of the
country's labor laws. Its provisions will have a
profound effect on Mexico's workers, changing the
way they are hired, their rights at work, and
their wages. Benedicto Martinez Orozco,
co-president of one of the country's most
democratic unions, the Authentic Labor Front
(FAT), calls it "a monstrous law."
The basic thrust of the reforma laboral
is greater flexibility for employers. It would
replace pay per day with pay by the hour. At
Mexico's current minimum wage of about 60 pesos
per day, this would produce an hourly wage of 7.5
pesos, less than 60 cents. Employers would gain
the legal right to hire workers indirectly
through labor contractors. If workers are fired
for protesting or organizing against the new
regime, or for any other illegitimate reason,
employers' liability for back pay would end after
a year.
In the ears of U.S. workers, the wages
may sound low, but the kind of flexibility the
reform envisions has been the norm in workplaces
north of the border for decades. Not so in
Mexico, however. In the wake of the Mexican
Revolution, and then in the radical upsurge that
followed in the '30s and '40s, Mexican workers
won a broad set of rights and protections. On
paper, the rights of Mexican workers are far more
extensive than those of their U.S. counterparts.
In the Federal Labor Law, which the
reform would amend, the workday was officially
set at 8 hours, and workers could only be hired
by the day, not by the hour. Minimum wages were
set as well. Employers had to give workers
permanent employment status quickly, and hiring
through contractors was prohibited. If workers
were fired unjustly, they could collect back pay
for the time they were out of work. If they were
laid off, their employer had to pay severance
based on their length of service. Companies had
to declare their profits, and share them
according to a set schedule.
Employers have never liked these laws,
but the political offensive to change them grew
much stronger as Mexico opened its economy to
foreign investors. Over time those rights were
eroded in fact, if not yet in law. As the
maquiladora factories on the U.S./Mexico border
grew to employ 2 million workers (before the
current recession), the actual conditions of
employment changed, despite what the law said.
Workdays extended well past eight hours. Workers
were routinely cheated out of profit sharing.
When they tried to organize independent unions,
their legal right to bargain and strike was
violated with impunity by employers, the
government and unions connected to Mexico's old
ruling party, the PRI (Institutional
Revolutionary Party).
Using labor contractors was illegal in
theory, but it became the employers' weapon of
choice in the fierce labor battles of the past
decade. The five-year strike by copper miners in
Cananea, just south of the Arizona border, was
declared illegal a year ago. Then Grupo, Mexico,
the huge corporation that owns mines on both
sides of the border, brought in strikebreakers
using contractors.
Humberto Montes de Oca, international
secretary of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union
(SME), notes bitterly that Cananea was the
birthplace in Mexico of the fight for the
eight-hour day, in the famous uprising of 1906
that heralded the beginning of the Mexican
Revolution. "Now if you go to Cananea," he says,
"you find subcontracted workers in the mine
putting in 12-hour days with no overtime pay. In
the heart of the town where the eight-hour-day
struggle started, workers now have a 12-hour day."
Montes de Oca's own union suffered a
similar fate. In 2009 Mexican President Felipe
Calderón dissolved the state-owned Power and
Light Company of central Mexico and declared that
the union no longer existed. The SME, one of the
country's oldest and most democratic unions, has
been fighting ever since for the right of workers
to return to their jobs, and to regain its legal
status.
"Our members were also replaced by
subcontracted workers with no union," Montes de
Oca says. "These new replacements had no training
or experience, and as a result, there were
countless accidents. Some of these workers died.
This is the employment model promoted by the
labor law reform. What happened to us anticipated
the changes the reform will bring everywhere."
Martinez adds, "For workers who don't
accept this, and are fired when they try to
protest or organize, the employer isn't liable
for more than a year of back pay. No one will
bring a case against his or her boss because the
employer will have such a strong motivation to
delay endlessly. Given the Mexican legal system,
that will be very easy."
When the PRI lost the presidency in 2000,
proposals for changing labor law were made by the
incoming National Action Party. Some, promoted by
the World Bank, were so extreme in restricting
the rights of workers and unions that even more
liberal-minded employers objected. Independent
and progressive unions mobilized opposition,
defeated them, and then proposed their own
alternatives.
One centered on guaranteeing the right of
workers to elect union officials by secret
ballot. PRI-affiliated unions have a long history
of violence and corruption in the election of
their leaders. Another would have ended
"protection contracts," the secret agreements
signed by corrupt unions to protect employers
when workers organize independently. Those
proposals had support from Mexico's left-leaning
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), but not
from the PRI.
In last July's national election,
however, the PRI regained the presidency. Then in
September a reforma laboral proposal passed
through the Chamber of Deputies at breakneck
speed, pushed by an alliance between the PAN and
the PRI. The Senate, which must ratify it, has
yet to take a vote. But it's likely that the
PAN/PRI alliance will pass it there too. Calderón
would presumably sign it before he leaves office.
Using the same arguments heard from
employers and Republicans in the U.S.
presidential campaign, reform supporters argue
that removing restrictions on employers will
encourage them to hire more workers, producing
more jobs. Rosalinda Vélez Juárez, Secretary of
Labor and Social Welfare, asserted that the
reforms constituted "a watershed" that would
generate an additional 400,000 jobs per year.
"Even the opposition will eventually see the
benefit," she declared.
Critics point out, however, that 900,000
young people enter the Mexican job market every
year. Since the Calderón administration took
office in 2006, however, only 1.54 million people
have gained formal employment, according to the
Social Security Institute-about 250,000 per
year, or less than a third of those needing work.
That is just one element of the economic pressure
producing waves of migration to the United
States. Evaluating the reforma laboral, the UN's
Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean found that it would not create any new
jobs, but merely encourage contractors to hire
workers already in the informal sector. "We may
see an increase in jobs, but they will be very
precarious ones at very low pay," Montes de Oca
argues.
What the reform will also do, however,
according to unions and other critics, is
increase the productivity of the workforce by
making workers more vulnerable to pressure by
employers. A rise in productivity actually
diminishes the need for new workers.
"The ultimate effect will be to
impoverish workers even further," says Martinez.
"On the one hand, it makes it much easier to fire
workers. On the other, the ability to subcontract
workers paid by the hour gives employers a reason
to fire permanent employees. This opens the doors
of paradise for them." Unions will certainly find
it more difficult to organize workers who
increasingly need better wages and conditions,
but are even more frightened of losing the
precarious jobs they have.
In response to the unions' earlier
proposals, one provision added to the reform as
it was debated would have given workers the right
to elect the officers of their unions in direct,
secret-ballot elections. That provision, however,
was removed by those deputies who are also
leaders of unions affiliated to the PRI or to
minor parties backing the reform. One deputy,
Lucila Garfias Gutiérrez, speaking for the
conservative leadership of the Mexican Teachers
Union, asserted, "We say yes to union democracy,
but also to respecting the principle of autonomy
only the workers should have the right to
decide how to organize [the internal election
process in their own unions.]"
She was challenged, however, by the
progressive Coordinadora movement in her own
union. Francisco Bravo Herrerra, leader of Mexico
City's Seccion Local 9, told the Mexican daily La
Jornada that support for the reform was a
criminal act-"the biggest blow against workers of
the past hundred years."
Once the provision was removed, the PRI
deputies who are union leaders voted for the
reforma laboral. "The supposed worker
representatives in the Chamber of Deputies who
approved this law betrayed their principles and
their own members, and the whole Mexican people,"
Martinez fumed. "They handed workers over to the
bosses on a silver platter."
Both Martinez and Montes de Oca predict
that the fight against the reform won't end even
if the Senate approves it. In just one indication
of the depth of that resistance, workers from the
huge Nissan auto plant in Morelos stopped work
and blocked the main highway from Mexico City to
the coast, to demand rejection of the reforma
laboral. Orozco and others believe that the
reform is unconstitutional, and plan to challenge
it legally.
On October 11 a huge rally of unions
outside the Senate brought together both
independent unions like the FAT and the SME, and
even sections of the PRI unions, to protest the
reforms. Fissures are appearing inside the PRI
itself, and one PRI senator, Armando Neyra
Chavez, who also heads the old-guard union, the
Confederation of Mexican Workers in Mexico state,
called on the newly elected PRI administration to
restore the jobs and legal status of the fired
electrical workers, instead of passing the reform
bill.
The cost of the reforma laboral will be
felt, however, not just in Mexico, but also in
the United States. The purpose of increased
flexibility is to encourage investment, including
from U.S. corporations like Ford, Walmart,
Kimberly Clark and others, who already play a
central role in the Mexican economy. More U.S.
investment also means, though, that more jobs
move south. The movement of production
facilitated by the North American Free Trade
Agreement has already cost at least 800,000 U.S.
jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Further job outsourcing to Mexico,
spurred by lowered wages, subcontracted work and
diminished rights for workers, will create more
unemployment and displacement of workers north of
the border. But the cost of low wages and
increasingly precarious work is displacement in
Mexico too. Workers who can't live on 7.5 pesos
an hour, or find permanent work in a new world of
labor contractors, will have little alternative
to migration across that border.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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