Nationwide Wildcat Miners’ Strike In Mexico

More than 250,000 miners and steelworkers from central to northern Mexico walked off the job March 1-3 in wildcat strikes at 70 companies that virtually paralyzed the mining industry. While the strike has ended, this may be the only first act in an unfolding drama that could challenge Mexican employers, the corrupt “official” unions, and the conservative Mexican government.

The strike was a response to a government attempt to remove the Mexican miners union’s top officer, general secretary Napleón Gómez Urrutia, and replace him with Elías Morales Hernández, a union member who is reportedly backed by the Grupo Mexico mining company. In many mining towns and cities, however, strikers not only demanded the restitution of their leader, but also safer working conditions. The wildcat strike erupted little more than a week after a mining accident on February 19 in San Juan de las Sabinas that left 65 dead.

The strike represents one of the largest industrial actions in recent Mexican history, an event with few precedents since the workers insurgency (la insurgencia obrera) of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While the strike has ended, at least temporarily, it has shaken the mining industry, the labor establishment, and the government.

THE PASTA DE CONCHOS ACCIDENT

The strike by members of the National Union of Mining and Metallurgical Workers of Mexico (SNTMMRM) resulted from both union and political causes. The explosion and cave-in at the Pasta de Conchos mine in San Juan de Las Sabinas, Coahuila in northern Mexico trapped 65 miners, all of whom are presumed dead (their bodies have not yet been recovered). SNTMMRM leader Gómez Urrutia blamed the employer, Grupo Mexico, calling the deaths “industrial homicide.”

The Pasta de Conchos cave-in set off a storm. Throughout Mexico politicians, academics, intellectuals, and the public criticized the mining company. Grupo Mexico stock fell. Copper and other commodity prices rose. The Mexican Catholic Bishops Conference criticized the employer’s negligence and called for an international investigation, expressing their lack of confidence in the Mexican government.

While miners throughout the country mourned the death of their brothers and complained of health and safety conditions in their own mines, there was no strike in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

OUSTING GÓMEZ URRUTIA

Then, on February 28, the Mexican Secretary of Labor announced that Gómez Urrutia was not actually the head of the union, but that the real general secretary was Elías Morales Hernández. The government’s action was based on part of Mexican labor law known as “taking note” (toma de nota), a process by which the government recognizes the legally elected officers of labor unions.

Six years earlier Morales Hernández had appealed to the Secretary of Labor, arguing that he had actually been elected and should be the new head of the union. The government had rejected the appeal by Morales Hernández and in 2002 Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal Carranza recognized Gómez Urrutia as the general secretary.

Why had the Mexican government suddenly opted to overturn its own earlier decision, Morales Hernández, and bring him out of retirement to assume union leadership? The answer has partly to do with the recent accident, but just as much to do with the Congress of Labor (CT), the umbrella organization that brings together most of the largest Mexican labor federations and industrial unions.

In February 2006, Gómez Urrutia joined Isaías González, head of the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), to challenge the election of Victor Flores Morales, head of the Mexican Railroad Workers Union (STFRM), for control of the CT. Gómez Urrutia was trying to position himself to become the top leader of a critically important Mexican labor organization.

His ambitions troubled many. The CT was historically connected to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party. The CT backed PRI candidates, supported PRI policies, and CT members served in the Mexican Congress as PRI senators and congressmen.

More recently the CT had worked out a modus viviendi with Mexican president Vicente Fox, collaborating with his National Action Party (PAN). Gómez Urrutia’s attempt to take over the CT not only threatened Railroad Workers Union leader Victor Florez--it also challenged the PRI and PAN.

RIVAL LEADERS

Victor Flores had been the ideal labor union leader for both PRI and PAN governments. He worked closely with the government to carry out the privatization of the Mexican railroads. When rank-and-file railroad workers protested, Flores cooperated with the government to have them fired—easy enough with some 100,000 railroad workers losing their jobs in the privatization—and if that did not work he sent his thugs to beat and threaten them. While somewhat volatile—as a PRI Congressman Flores once tried to strangle another representative—he was loyal to the government’s neoliberal program.

Gómez Urrutia, on the other hand, seemed to be a loose canon. In some ways this was odd. Gómez Urrutia had inherited the leadership of the mine from his father Napoleón Gómez Sada, and both had been typical charros--that is, union bureaucrats absolutely loyal to the PRI.

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They had turned out the vote for the party, collaborated with the employers, and had expelled union activists or leaders who opposed them or supported other political parties. Doing all of those things, they enjoyed the wealth, power and privilege to which their loyalty entitled them.

More recently, however, Gómez Urrutia had begun to challenge both the employers and the Congress of Labor/PRI leadership. In June 2005, Mexican miners joined their compañeros in Peru and the United States as more than 10,000 miners carried out a simultaneous protest against Grupo Mexico to demand that the company stop violating workers’ rights. The three unions accused Grupo Mexico of pursuing policies of repression, exploitation, and unwanted involvement in union affairs.

The protest was organized by the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) in the U.S., the Federation of Metal Workers of Peru (FETIMAP), and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMM) of Mexico. The international solidarity against the Mexican mining company was backed by the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF).

Then, in September 2005, the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union won a 46-day strike against two steel companies in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacan, in what may be one of the most important strikes in Mexico a decade. The local union and its 2,400 members succeeded in winning an eight percent wage gain, 34 percent in new benefits, and a 7,250 peso one-time only bonus.

The Miners Union also helped lead the union bloc that opposed the Fox administration's labor law reform package. All of these actions threatened to upset the Mexican system of labor control by which the governmental labor authorities, employers, and “official” unions of the CT collude to channel and suppress workers.

Then, in February, Gómez Urrutia made a bid to take over the CT, raising the prospect that he would lead labor struggles at a national level. At that point the Fox government was likely already seeking to get rid of him. His subsequent remarks on Grupo Mexico’s “industrial homicide” made him persona non grata not only with the PRI, but also with the employers.

MOVEMENT IN CRISIS

The struggle over the CT and now over the Miners Union takes place at a crucial time. Mexico is in the midst of a national election campaign, with the PAN and PRI candidates being challenged by Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution.

López Obrador is running on a populist platform calling for putting “the poor first.” He is leading in the polls, and while international bankers and Mexican industrialists have said they can live with him, some fear the poor may take his slogan seriously.

At the same time, Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), has left the Lacandon Forest in Chiapas to organize the “other campaign.” Marco’s “other campaign” is not an attempt to win election to the presidency, but rather an effort to organize the anti-capitalist forces of Mexico into a social movement with the power to overturn the government, call a constituent assembly, and write a new constitution for an egalitarian Mexico.

Marcos has recently gone out of his way to speak to Mexican workers and union members, blue collar laborers in private industry, and white collar workers in government agencies, suggesting that they have to turn against their union leaders, the bosses, and the politicians. Most of the people Marcos speaks too—the poor, Indian communities, the unemployed—don’t have much economic leverage. Now the miners’ strike has shown what real economic power and potential political power could be.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The drama is not yet over. The Miners Union’s nationwide wildcat strike showed Mexican industrial workers’ taking center stage for the first time in decades. There have been two other such strikes against the Mexican government: in 1959, when the Mexican Railroad Workers union called a nationwide strike; and again in 1976, when Electrical Workers and their allies in the Democratic Tendency carried out a national strike. Both of those strikes were crushed by the government—the PRI’s one-party-state—using the army, police, and employers.

The Mexican government of the PRI era had the power to put down a national labor walkout. The Fox government, as demonstrated by six-years of political failure, economic doldrums, and social disintegration, does not have the force to face down the labor movement should it act. A number of movements with different political leaderships and goals—López Obrador and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas, and Gómez Urrutia and the Miners Union—appear to be aligning in ways that could turn Mexico upside down.

Whether that happens depends on three things: 1) whether the government continues to make mistakes that inadvertently advantage and encourage its enemies; 2) whether the leaders of these movements are willing and able to set broader forces in motion; 3) whether workers, feeling and seeing their strength, move to build their own independent force.

Dan La Botz is the author of several books on Mexican labor unions, social movements and politics. He also edits Mexican Labor News and Analysis, a publication of the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT).