State of the Unions : Mexican Labor, Like Its Leader, Is Showing Signs of Age

He shuffles with an old man’s frailty, his face glistening with drool, his clothes dusted with a confetti of cigar ash. But don’t try telling Fidel Velazquez that he should give up his half-century-long reign over Mexican unions.

“Every part of me is working fine--including the one you’re thinking about,” the ribald 95-year-old declared to journalists recently.

“And don’t ask me about my heart,” he growled. “I don’t have one.”

Velazquez, a snowy-haired autocrat, is one of the secrets of Mexico’s political stability. Under 10 presidents, he has kept workers in his federation of 11,000 unions marching faithfully behind the government.

Don Fidel, as he is reverently known, is still a powerful fixture in Mexican life. Last month, the news that he was hospitalized for acute bronchitis helped to drive the stock market down a full percentage point.

But as Velazquez approaches his 96th birthday amid the nation’s worst economic crisis in decades, Mexico’s days of disciplined, monolithic unions are fading. Some wonder if labor peace could break down too.

If once Velazquez was a political kingmaker and a workers’ champion, he increasingly seems enfeebled. And some say the shuffling, mumbling leader is an apt metaphor for Mexico’s main labor movement--an increasingly ineffectual, old-fashioned organization that prizes government goodies over worker well-being.

“The health of the Mexican labor movement . . . seems as decrepit as that of its leader, Fidel Velazquez,” political analyst Miguel Angel Granados Chapa commented recently in the daily Reforma.

For a second year in a row, Mexican workers figure to see their paychecks shrink amid the devastating recession. Yet even as workers’ purchasing power last year dropped to half what it was 20 years ago, labor’s response was muted: The number of strikes actually declined.

As Velazquez lay in the hospital recently, several major unions did the once-unthinkable: They debated forming a labor movement independent of the government.

In the past, Velazquez’s Federation of Mexican Workers, known as the CTM, was “a kind of Frankenstein--it scared people,” said Raul Trejo, a political scientist. “Now it seems Frankenstein is losing its vitality. Nowadays, no one worries about it.”

Velazquez, a onetime milkman, took over as leader of the federation in 1941, before current President Ernesto Zedillo was born. Today, the umbrella organization covers 5.5 million workers who make up 40% of Mexico’s full-time, formal work force.

For decades, Velazquez and the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, engaged in a kind of mutual back-scratching that was a leitmotif of the Mexican system.

The unionists loyally voted en masse for the PRI. At “Don Fidel’s” command, they abstained from major strikes. When students launched big political demonstrations in 1968, CTM workers stayed on the sidelines.

“We have kept the social peace in moments of crisis,” Velazquez once boasted.

In exchange, the PRI-dominated government took care of the CTM workers. They got good salaries. They got unprecedented benefits such as health care and public housing.

And their leader got increasing political clout. Not only did Velazquez help choose the PRI’s presidential candidates, but his CTM activists received dozens of ruling-party congressional seats.

In striking testimony to Velazquez’s stature, the 44-year-old Zedillo paused while addressing a CTM assembly last month and threw an arm around the old man’s shoulder. “Don Fidel! Don Fidel!” the president chanted, along with thousands of union activists.

Velazquez is still assiduously courted by the government as it crafts its periodic pactos, or agreements with labor and business to hold down inflation. But two severe recessions since 1982 and the government’s embrace of free-trade, free-market policies have severely wounded the union movement.

Increasingly, the CTM has settled for wage increases below the rate of inflation. As Mexicans have grown disenchanted with the PRI, even union members have stopped voting for the ruling party.

Mechanisms that once ensured party loyalty--such as having workers fill out their ballots under the stern eye of union bosses--are prohibido in this era of greater democracy.

The turning point for the labor federation may have come in 1989 when reformist President Carlos Salinas de Gortari jailed a rebellious CTM boss, oil workers chief Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, on weapons charges.

“This was a warning to union leaders,” said Ilan Bizberg, a labor specialist at the Colegio de Mexico university. “Salinas said: ‘Don’t oppose me. Let’s make a truce. I won’t bother you if you won’t bother me.’ That’s this government’s attitude.”

Indeed, if Velazquez is unhappy with his puny gains under the successor Zedillo government, he doesn’t show it.

Last week, the aging leader was holding court as usual in his office, receiving union activists, businessmen and journalists. Slumped in a chair, a rivulet of drool streaking his creased face, he was asked whether impoverished workers might start voting for the opposition.

“One doesn’t have to answer the absurdity of this question,” he snapped in response.

Although Velazquez’s union federation has declined, it is still a force to be reckoned with. It lost half a million members last year as unemployment soared, but it remains by far the biggest organized voice for Mexico’s workers.

And its members still form a labor elite. Most Mexican workers have no representation at all.

Lupita Lopez, 50, a maquiladora worker from the northern city of Matamoros, speaks reverently of the labor boss who has brought her a better wage than nonunion workers, as well as of what she considers the ultimate benefit--an eight-hour reduction what had been a 48-hour work week.

“He is the maximum leader,” she said. “He has been fighting for us for 60 years, and he’ll keep fighting.”

While other unions have criticized what they see as Velazquez’s subservience to the government, none is about to steal his thunder. Earlier this month, younger leaders of several key unions met to discuss forming a new labor movement. But, said one leader, the government and CTM quietly sent a message: Don’t you dare.

“If we became a movement, the threats and pressures would be strong,” said the leader, Francisco Hernandez Juarez, of the independent telephone workers’ union.

For example, he said, workers from a small government credit bank were told the bank could be legislated out of existence if they joined the new front.

Still, change in the once-monolithic union movement is inevitable. Even Velazquez admits it will be time to retire when his current term is scheduled to end, in 1998.

The question is whether, if Velazquez suddenly dies, the union movement will splinter, provoking labor unrest. Many experts insist that the CTM, anxious to avoid being further crippled, would quickly pull together and choose a new boss.

But he has groomed no obvious successor. The five graying lieutenants most often identified as his successors have been around for a collective 386 years.

“The lack of his physical presence could provoke dispersion and confusion among the organizations of the CTM,” acknowledges Juan Millan, a senior CTM official who is also secretary-general of the ruling PRI.

For now, many Mexicans are just relieved that Velazquez has overcome his latest brush with mortality and is back presiding over his workers.

“It’s like the Los Angeles Lakers,” Millan said. “Magic Johnson returns and everything takes off again.”

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How Much Will a Daily Wage Buy?

Mexicans’ purchasing power sharply shrunk amid recessions and economic restructuring. This chart shows how much of each item could be purchased with the daily minimum wage in effect at the time. For example, in 1976 workers earning the minimum wage could buy almost 5 pounds of beans with a day’s pay. Twenty years later, they could buy less than half that. The figures are averages bases on surveys of various Mexican states by two prominent Mexican newspapers:

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1976 1983 1996 Tortillas (pounds) 12.4 14.7 6.1 Milk (quarts) 21.2 19.8 6.4 Beans (pounds) 4.8 5.9 2.2 Beef (pounds) 0.9 0.6 0.3 Sugar (pounds) 15.8 13.4 2.5 Gasoline (gallons) 11.0 4.4 2.3

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Sources: Reforma, Mexico City and El Norte, Monterrey