Labor, Too, Flirts With Pluralism

The death last month of Fidel Velazquez, who controlled the labor movement in Mexico for six decades, was widely interpreted as an omen for change, in a political climate where symbols have a highly persuasive value. The absence of the 97-year-old union leader won’t bring about drastic changes but will reveal that the labor movement in Mexico is at a standstill.

Unions had long been one of the pillars of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the old political system. In the old days, union leaders who ran for public office got the largest number of votes. The rank and file was convinced it was better for them and their families to cast their vote for the ruling party. That is no longer the case.

Starting with the 1988 federal elections, of all the PRI candidates, those who came from the labor sector got the least votes. But in voting for other parties, workers showed their displeasure with the economic crisis more than their resentment against unions.

A relevant study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico on the political culture of Mexicans found that on a scale of 3, unions held a positive recognition of 1.4 among citizens. This was almost double the grade given to the government. Mexicans trusting unions more than they trust the government shows that unions are not automatically identified with the old leadership.

The old leadership had become so deteriorated, so disreputable that the death of Velazquez caused no fear of disruption.

For many years, Mexicans loved to speculate what would happen when the biggest union leader ceased to exist. Many thought it would deal a terrible blow to the government and to the system of mutual convenience that has kept the unions subordinated to the traditional political powers.

Yet nothing happened when Velasquez finally died.

There were hundreds of government officials at Velazquez’s funeral and dozens of union leaders but hardly any laborers.

The Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM) and its now departed leader did exercise a tremendous influence on politics, but that began to diminish in the 1980s. Nowadays there is neither a leader nor a union organization that can fill the vacuum of power.

A new secretary general of the CTM will be elected next February. For now, an authoritarian 78-year-old, Leonardo Rodriguez Alcaine, is in charge. He has been head of the electrical workers union for a quarter of a century, during which time he took it upon himself to rid the union of all dissident voices.

Before his death, Velazquez was obsessed with one idea: blocking the creation of a new labor federation by the telephone workers to express their rejection of the CTM and the Labor Congress. The latter organization unites the majority of Mexico’s 10,000 unions, which represent 8 million workers. The CTM forms the largest bloc, representing perhaps as many as one-quarter of the affiliates; the telefonistas constitute a distinctive bloc outside the CTM.

The new organization had been characterized by Velazquez as an attempt to undermine the unity of the workers movement. Yet as soon as Rodriguez Alcaine took over, he expressed his interest in the telephone workers’ project, called Forum of Unionism. Although numerically smaller than the traditional unions affiliated with the CTM, the forum already has a strong public presence.

Some years back, it was customary that on May Day, both the CTM and the Labor Congress would organize an enormous demonstration in Mexico City’s main square, the Zocalo. They would parade around while the president of the republic, accompanied by the union’s old guard, was cheered. That practice stopped in 1995. Now the only unions that parade on May 1 are the dissidents, those that are not affiliated with Labor Congress. The telefonistas enrolled part of the dissidents to form the new forum.

This recomposition in the unions underlines the diversity that exists in today’s Mexico. The big surprise is that the new CTM leadership is not as fiercely opposed to the new organization as was Velazquez. It is through small changes like this that the modernization of the unions will finally take place.

Rodriguez Alcaine and a few other old-timers have come to realize that to stay in power in the current environment, traditional leaders have to undertake a few changes. The question is, how much capacity do they really have, and how much can they be trusted to promote a true modernization of a union movement in which they are the most dramatic example of the pre-modernist generation.