Alliance With Government Crumbling : Labor Bosses’ Power Declining in Mexico

According to an old joke here, a gang of road workers offered Mexico’s 88-year-old labor chief a baby tortoise, a pet that can live for a century. But the invincible Fidel Velazquez declined the gift. “Thanks,” he said, “but I just get attached to them and they die.”

For nearly half a century, Velazquez has ruled the 4-million-member Mexican Workers Confederation and ensured its loyalty to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Under Velazquez, the nation’s largest trade union federation has been a pillar that has sustained the PRI in power for 60 years.

But now the alliance between state and labor is crumbling. Labor’s power is eroding, as was illustrated this month by the arrest of Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, the once-untouchable leader of the oil workers’ union.

Oddly enough, the PRI is carving away at this pillar, and Velazquez, a party man, seems to be allowing it do so. His critics charge that this is because he is too old.

“Having such an old man at the front of the labor sector objectively helps to dismantle it,” political scientist Lorenzo Meyer said. “He does not have the energy to oppose the government.”

Traditionally, Velazquez and the leaders of organized labor have helped to control the work force in exchange for a measure of power for themselves and benefits for their members. Their excesses have been overlooked in the name of stability. Now that this arrangement is ending, the government’s challenge is to keep labor in line.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is banking on a series of factors in his favor, according to political analysts. High unemployment makes salaried workers afraid to risk their jobs. Union leaders are resigned to the system. “We’re bad off with the government but would be worse off without it,” they say. Most important, Velazquez has ensured that there is no viable independent union movement in Mexico.

“If there were an alternative, an independent union movement,” a labor observer said, “the workers wouldn’t be with the government.”

Helped Found Confederation

Fidel Velazquez, white-haired and bespectacled, is known as “Don Fidel,” giving him a title of respect reserved for the elderly and powerful in Mexico. Velazquez helped found the Mexican Workers Confederation in 1936 under President Lazaro Cardenas, whose revolutionary government encouraged the development of the federation, called CTM.

Since Velazquez took over the federation in 1941, the Mexican government has not had a national strike. In the 1940s and 1950s, the CTM helped sabotage strikes by teachers, oil workers and miners. There has been no major industry strike since railroad workers walked off the job in 1958. Their strike was broken, and their leaders were jailed.

When students rose up against the government in 1968, Velazquez made sure that labor did not join them.

The CTM embraces, among others, workers in the oil, electricity, sugar, transportation and construction industries. Velazquez was able to deliver stability by negotiating wage increases and benefits. Unionized workers acquired state health care, subsidized housing, food, furniture and appliance stores in exchange for their support at government rallies and votes at election time.

Received Political Posts

Union leaders, meanwhile, received political posts, from mayoralties to governorships. Several leaders, among them Hernandez Galicia, were allowed to build business and political empires.

“It was not in the CTM’s interest to act against the state because its power, in large part, emanated from the state,” said Ilan Bizberg, a labor specialist at the Colegio de Mexico.

Dissident labor leaders were transferred or squelched by a union justice commission that could discipline a member and prohibit him from working in a union shop.

If things got out of hand, the government maintained legal controls over unions through a federal arbitration board, the body responsible for legally registering unions and authorizing strikes. In the event of a strike, the government reserved the right to bring in the army to run state-owned services, such as the telephone company.

The system worked well as long as real wages increased, and they did through 1976. But then Mexico’s economic crisis began. An oil boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s offered a few years of 8% annual growth, but the economy crashed in 1982.

Since then, labor has had to swallow economic austerity, wage and price freezes and a general erosion of the standard of living. Still, Velazquez managed to keep labor peace throughout the six-year term of President Miguel de la Madrid despite a 50% decline in buying power for the Mexican worker.

As De la Madrid’s secretary of budget and planning, Salinas was the architect of much of that economic policy, and labor opposed his selection as the PRI’s presidential candidate. But President De la Madrid picked him anyway, and the ruling party paid for the decision at the polls last July.

Salinas was elected with 50.7% of the vote, the lowest percentage ever for a PRI candidate. In Mexico City, where 2 million to 3 million federal bureaucrats live, opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won. In oil-producing areas run by Hernandez Galicia, the opposition vote was also high. Several PRI labor candidates suffered unprecedented losses.

Lost Support of Workers

The vote showed that not only had the PRI lost support of the workers but that the union leadership had lost control of its base. The latter development again was evident at the end of the year, when federal bureaucrats took to the streets to protest a pay increase. They had sought 100% but were given 10%.

Salinas, a Harvard-trained technocrat, has determined that the economy can no longer sustain the old relationship between the unions and government, according to political observers. PEMEX, the national petroleum company, is an example of this often-corrupt and inefficient relationship. Many union workers were allowed to remain on the PEMEX payroll even though they never showed up for work. Industry experts estimate that the PEMEX work force could be reduced by as much as 30%.

Hernandez Galicia, known as La Quina, a nickname derived from his first name, was the strongest union boss after Velazquez. His arrest last week is seen as a message to other union bosses, most notably the leader of the national teachers union, that they must ask for little, reduce expensive corruption and submit to the government’s economic program. The new leader of the oil workers is expected to be someone the government considers more manageable.

“The economic project no longer foresees a privileged relationship for organized workers,” Meyer, the political scientist, said.

Seeking Support Abroad

He noted that Salinas is seeking support from foreign governments, the financial and business communities, the middle class and even the Roman Catholic Church.

“With that,” Meyer said, “he has the luxury of losing the support of the labor movement . . . while, he hopes, the economy begins to grow again.”

Should workers rebel, political observers say they believe the government is willing to use repression to put down an uprising, as it has in the past. They point to hard-line police and security officials and to the use of force to put down a jailhouse riot in the state of Nayarit at Christmas that left 25 dead.

But without young and independent labor leaders, the workers are likely to accept the erosion of their political power along with the erosion of their salaries.

“For the Mexican worker in 1989, the simple fact of having a job is a gain,” Meyer said. “He will prefer to take the blows and hold on to the minimum that allows him to survive.”