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July 2006

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Wildcat Miners’ Strike In Mexico

By Dan La Botz
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July 2006
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M ore than a quarter of a million miners and steelworkers walked off the job between March 1-3 in wildcat strikes at 70 companies in at least 8 states from central to northern Mexico, virtually paralyzing the mining industry. While the strike has ended, there are reasons to believe that this could be the first act in an unfolding drama to challenge Mexican employers, corrupt “official” unions, and the conservative Mexican government.  

The strike resulted from an attempt by the government to remove the union’s General Secretary Napleón Gómez Urrutia and replace him with Elías Morales Hernández, who was reportedly backed by the Grupo Mexico mining company. This coup d’état led miners to strike, insisting that the government recognize Gómez Urrutia. In many mining towns and cities they also marched and rallied, demanding not only the restitution of their leader but also safer 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 miners’ wildcat strike represents one of the largest industrial actions in recent Mexican history. 

The strike by members of the National Union of Mining and Metallurgical Workers of Mexico resulted from both labor union issues 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  died. Miners’ Union 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 citizens 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 deaths and complained of health and safety conditions, there was no official or wildcat strike in the immediate aftermath of the accident. 

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,” 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 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, recognize the dissident, and bring him out of retirement to assume leadership of the Miners Union? The answer has partly to do with the Miners Union and 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 mid-February 2006 Miners Union leader Gómez Urrutia joined together with Isaías González, head of the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, to challenge the election of Victor Flores Morales, head of the Mexican Railroad Workers Union, for control of the Congress of Labor. Gómez Urrutia was trying to position himself to become the top leader of the numerically most important Mex- ican labor organization. 

His ambitions troubled many. The Congress of Labor, which brings together most of the “official” unions of Mexico, historically formed part of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the ruling party of Mexico. The CT had historically backed PRI’s candidates and policies. More recently the CT had worked out a modus viviendi with Mexican president Vicente Fox, collaborating with his National Action Party (PAN). Napoleón Gómez Urrutia’s attempt to take over the CT not only challenged Railroad Workers Union leader Victor Florez, but it also worried the PRI and PAN. 

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

Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, on the other hand, seemed, from the government’s point of view, to be a loose cannon. In some ways this was odd as 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 loyal to the PRI. They had turned out the vote for the party, collaborated with the employers, and 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. 

Lately, 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 having a policy of repression, exploitation and unwanted involvement in union affairs. The protest was organized by the United Steel Workers of America, the Federation of Metal Workers of Peru, and the National union of Miners and Metal Workers of Mexico. The international solidarity against the Mexican mining company was backed by the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF). 

In September 2005 the Mexican Miners and Metal Workers Union won a 46-day strike against 2 steel companies, in what may be one of the most important strikes in Mexico in a decade. The local union and its 2,400 members succeeded in winning an 8 percent wage gain, a 34 percent gain in new benefits, and a 7,250 peso one-time-only bonus. 

T he Mexican Miners Union played a critical role in 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 government’s labor authorities, the employers and the “official” unions of the CT collude to channel and suppress workers. When 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, the Fox government must have already been looking for a way to get rid of him. Then his remarks on Grupo Mexico’s “industrial homicide” made him persona non grata not only with the PRI, but also with the employers. 

The struggle over the Congress of Labor and now over the Miners Union takes place at a crucial time. Mexico is in the midst of a national election campaign in which the conservative National Action Party’s candidate Felipe Calderón and the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s candidate Roberto Madrazo are 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 make take his slogan seriously. 

At the same time, Subcomandante Marcos, of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), has left the Lacandon Forest in Chiapas to organize the “other campaign”—an effort to organize anti-capitalist forces into a social movement with the power to overturn the government, call a constituent assembly, and write a new constitution for an egalitarian and (though Marcos hardly ever uses the word)  a socialist 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 turn against their union leaders, bosses, and politicians. Most of the people Marcos speaks to—the poor, Indian communities, the unemployed— don’t have much economic leverage. Now the miners’ strike has shown what real economic power and political power could be. 

The drama is not yet over. The Miners Union’s wildcat strike showed Mexican industrial workers taking center stage. Twice in the past there have been such strikes against the Mexican government: first in 1959 when the Mexican Railroad Workers Union called a nationwide strike and again in 1976 when Electrical Workers and their allies carried out a national strike. Both of those strikes were crushed by the Mexican government—the PRI’s previous one- party-state —using the army, police, and massive firings. 

The Mexican government of that era had the power to carry out such military and police actions to put down a national labor walkout. The current 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—are aligning in ways that could turn Mexico upside down. 

Whether that happens depends on three things: (1) whether or not the government continues to make mistakes that inadvertently advantage and encourage its enemies; (2) whether or not the leaders of these movements prove willing to and capable of setting broader forces in motion; and (3) whether or not workers, feeling and seeing their strength, move to build their own independent force.  

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