Mexico’s Workers Form New Independent Union

Breakaway union leaders on Friday inaugurated an independent labor federation claiming more than 1.5 million members, infusing yet another pillar of Mexican society with an unaccustomed spirit of democracy.

More than 10,000 delegates from across the country crowded into a sports auditorium in Mexico City for the emotion-charged founding congress of the National Workers Union, or UNT, which will compete with the long-established Congress of Mexican Labor, or CTM, for the hearts of Mexico’s unionized workers.

The CTM is widely regarded as an autocratic labor body and a pliant ally of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has dominated Mexican politics since 1929.

The CTM has struggled to maintain its power in recent years, however, and suffered a further blow in June with the death of its powerful 97-year-old patriarch, Fidel Velazquez.

The advent of a more progressive, independent labor federation adds a new challenge to the PRI, which lost its majority in the lower house of Congress in elections in July for the first time.

The new UNT may also prove less willing to compromise in collective wage bargaining than the CTM, raising a new measure of economic uncertainty at a time of rapid growth and increasing worker demands for higher pay after years of belt-tightening.

Improved working conditions and wages could reduce the urge for some Mexican workers to seek employment in the United States.

Analysts, however, doubted that the new federation will provide any immediate pressure for higher wages, and they added that foreign investors should not fear any dramatic upsurge in activism.

“The margin for maneuver for anyone, including the president, is very narrow,” said political science professor Denise Dresser of the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “The constraints on economic policymaking are so great that the outcome [of labor negotiations] is unlikely to be very different.”

The potential impact of the new union movement could grow, she said, as Mexico approaches the presidential election in 2000 and political parties seek alliances with labor unions and other socioeconomic players.

The new federation’s two dozen core unions include those of telephone workers, national social security workers, subway workers and national university workers.

Labor researcher Raul Trejo said the influence of the new federation will come more from the intellectual quality of its leaders and their innovative ideas than from the quantitative weight of its membership. Those ideas could lead to better management-labor relations, which could in turn improve the efficiency and productivity of Mexican companies, he said.

Trejo calculated that, compared to the CTM’s roughly 4 million members, the UNT membership claims are exaggerated and it could count only about 200,000 full-fledged union members. But they are better-paid and better-educated workers, he said.

Unions represent only about 10% of the Mexican labor force, but they have influence far beyond their numbers, Trejo said. For example, union wage settlements often set the tone for wage trends throughout the economy.

Trejo said Mexican workers have tended to be conservative and to accept their leaders’ orders to protect their jobs at any cost.

“But this may be starting to change,” he said. “There is a new consciousness among some workers who believe they can earn more by supporting leaders who are willing to stand up for their interests.”

Francisco Hernandez Suarez, general secretary of the 50,000-member telephone workers union and the main force behind the new federation, said in a keynote speech at the launch: “We are an expression of the great social changes that have taken place in our country in recent years.

“We are part of the reform of the nation, which is being demonstrated not only in the political process between the government and political parties, but in a vast process of social changes--of the transformation of power, of new relations between government and society and between the social actors themselves.”

Once a protege of Velazquez within the Congress of Labor, the charismatic Hernandez Suarez broke with the CTM and led a group of unions in a three-year negotiation, culminating in a showdown in July that produced a definitive split.

The delegates filled the hall with boisterous, rhythmic chants as the leaders of some of the 150 constituent unions were introduced from the podium.

The walls were papered with banners and posters proclaiming slogans such as: “Away With Official Control of Labor!”

A brass band clanged away between speeches, adding to a festive, rebellious mood that often felt closer to a political convention than a union meeting.

But several delegates insisted that the new union federation will not support an opposition political force but will stay independent of all parties--focusing on union members’ pocketbook interests.

Jorge Ulises Argote Gonzalez, from the aviation union, said: “The importance of this new union is that workers can now stop being used by their leaders, who were in complicity with the PRI and being manipulated for their political goals in return for privileges and power.”

The new CTM leader, Leonardo Rodriguez Alcaine, has dismissed the new federation as insignificant, saying its membership claims are inflated and its unions are small and unrepresentative.

Some prospective member unions decided not to join at this point, questioning whether the UNT had enough support to go it alone--and whether the new movement was itself sufficiently democratic.