Mexico - National Union of Workers (UNT)
A promise unfulfilled
The National Union of Workers (UNT), the independent labor federation, celebrated its first regular national convention, and the first anniversary of its founding one year ago on November 27, with a call for demonstrations and work stoppages across the country to oppose the Mexican government’s economic program and current budget.
Yet, despite its militant posture, many feel that the new labor federation has yet to realize the expectations and fulfill the promises of its founding convention.
The 2,000 voting and fraternal delegates gathered in Mexico City for the four-hour meeting declared their opposition to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government’s neoliberal economic program, to President Zedillo’s administration’s economic package for the coming year, and to the government’s minimum wage proposal.
By a hand vote, the delegates also unanimously reelected the federation’s three top leaders and vice-presidents. The union’s top officers remain: Francisco Hernandez Juarez, head of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM); Augustin Rodriguez, leader of the Union of Workers of the National Autonomous University (STUNAM); and Fernando Rocha, chief of the National Union of Workers of Social Security (SNTSS), workers of Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) the public health and retirement system. (Fernando Rocha had already replaced Antonio Rosado, the former head of the SNTSS, as one of the three UNT top leaders.)
The UNT today claims to represent 150 unions with a total of approximately 1.5 million workers, more or less the same unions and members it had a year ago.
The UNT itself recognized that it has so far failed to lead the broad reorganization of the working class which it proposed a year ago to inspire. The UNT Convention’s basic document noted, "A year since its birth, the UNT is now an obligatory reference within the national panorama,...nevertheless, the federation still needs internal consolidation, momentum in the growth of its membership, material and human resources, as well as a forward motion in its political profile."
Various pundits noted that the UNT has yet to establish a national headquarters, has not yet won inclusion in the government’s tripartite boards, and has not succeeded in getting the congress to establish either the new salary board or the national registry of unions and contracts that it has advocated. But those are the least of its problems. Or rather that is the wrong checklist.
Augustin Rodriguez, one of the three top leaders of the UNT, told the press, "With regard to the objectives that we have proposed, we should be self-critical, we have not succeeded in make the UNT into the great fighting front for the most general demands of the Mexican workers."
That remark comes closer to the heart of the matter. Asked how he would evaluate the UNT, Rodriguez said, "on a scale of 10, I give it an 8." Some would say that is a little high.
The founding of the UNT represented an important and progressive development in Mexico. At its founding, the UNT brought together both formerly "official" or state-controlled unions and independent unions in a new formation that challenged the hegemony of the Congress of Labor (CT) and the whole "corporative" union structure dominated by the Confederation of
Mexican Workers (CTM). Subsequently the UNT organized two massive labor demonstrations, one on March 25 against government cut-backs and privatization, and another on May Day, the international labor day.
But so far, the UNT has failed to take the lead in turning organized labor into the leader of a broad social and political movement to solve Mexico’s deep economic and social problems.
The UNT leadership’s own economic analysis points to the disastrous economic situation in Mexico. In the last decade the number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty rose from 20 million to 30 million. Unemployment has rise to 25 percent of the economically active population (PEA) or 9 million. Wages have lost 76 per cent of their purchasing power since the end of the 1970s. Half of all workers do not participate in the public health system.
These are the conditions that the UNT was supposedly created to address, and which it must address if it is to fulfill the hopes and promises of the unions and members who belong to it.
But the UNT has not yet succeeded in galvanizing new organizing, leading significant strikes, or pushing forward a broad movement of the working class, peasants, and the poor. The UNT has not made itself the spearhead of a movement to organize the fastest growing sector of the economy, the maquiladoras. Nor has it been able to stop the growth of the new company unions with their "protection contracts."
At times the UNT seems to move toward the right, back toward the government-controlled Congress of Labor (CT) and Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). For example, it joined with the PRI-government federations in creating a so-called "Workers Bloc" to negotiate changes in the Federal Labor Law (LFT) with the government and the employers.
More recently in the state of San Luis Potosi there have been efforts to form a "Union Bloc" of the CTM, the CROM (Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers), and the UNT. These bureaucratic alliances so far do little to advance worker self-organization.
What is needed is not bureaucratic blocs, but the transformation of unions into a social movement.
The UNT’s call for a broad mobilization against the government’s economic package could represent the first step in taking a leading role in building a labor-social movement. The UNT has raised the idea of work stoppages in all of its workplaces. The SNTSS, the largest union of the UNT with some 350,000 members, says that it cannot cut off services to the IMSS cardholders who depend upon it for health care.
But the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM) and the streetcar workers (who operate trolley-buses, light trains and articulated buses) say that they will suspend labor for two hours on as part of a national protest in December. This will be the first serious attempt at national work stoppages since the early 1980s. But it is not yet clear if the UNT’s call represents the beginning of building the new labor movement which it promised to create one year ago.
n Mexican Labor News and Analysis is produced in collaboration with the Authentic Labor Front (Frente Autentico del Trabajo - FAT) of Mexico and the USA’s United Electrical Workers (UE) and is published the 2nd and 16th of every month.
MLNA can be viewed at the UE’s international web site: HTTP://www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect/. For information about direct subscriptions, submission of articles, and all queries contact editor Dan La Botz at [email protected] or write to Dan La Botz, Mexican Labor News and Analysis, 3436 Morrison Place, Cincinnati, OH 45220.
The UE Home Page which displays Mexican Labor News and Analysis has an INDEX of back issues and an URGENT ACTION ALERT section.