Wildcat Miners’ Strike In Mexico

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.