Wildcat Strikes in Mexico

Workers in 48 factories in the Mexican city of Matamoros walked out over the past month. Numbering between 25,000 and 40,000, they demanded, and won, a twenty-percent raise plus a lump sum of 32,000 pesos ($1,650 dollars). Their example inspired other workers in the city to stage wildcat strikes for similar benefits, which are ongoing.

The strike hits at the center of the Mexican export manufacturing sector. In cities like Matamoros (across the border from Brownsville, Texas), Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, Texas), and Mexicali (across from Calexico, California), factories known as maquiladoras churn out parts and products for export to the United States. They are owned by firms in the United States, which take advantage of low wages while keeping production close to the market. Matamoros is known for manufacturing car components, which are sent across the border for final assembly in the United States.

The maquiladoras are the largest section of Mexico’s manufacturing. There are 6,200 maquiladoras plants employing 3 million workers. In Tamaulipas, there are 411 registered maquiladoras.

The collapse and replacement of the NAFTA (now USMCA) free trade agreements between Canada, Mexico and the USA has increased the pressure on Mexican working class. Mexico has accepted liberalizing its labor laws allowing for its current labor union structure, which has been tied to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), to weaken the old union structures in unforeseen ways.

The conditions in these maquiladoras and the surrounding communities are infamous, particularly for women. Employment is almost universally precarious, much of it informal. Workers are prevented from organizing by the presence of “ghost unions”, fake labor organizations established by the very foreign firms that own the factories. Workers are forced to join these non-unions, which then use their fraudulent numbers to present themselves as the main representative of factory workers. As many as 90 percent of union contracts in maquiladoras are this sort of “protection contracts”.

This is the sort of corporatism and free-trade imperialism that maquiladora workers in Matamoros fought against in the past month. Their success, and the wildcat strikes they inspired in other industries, shocked employers’ associations and free trade advocates. The strikes came as the right in the United States, led by Donald Trump, is engaging in its own corporatist campaign against NAFTA, supposedly for the protection of American workers. The Mexican example demonstrates that these promises of protection are hollow, whether coming from pro- or anti-free trade factions.

As of mid-February the strike wave is spreading throughout the country.
• Workers in 45 factories in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, have threatening strike action if not given parity with Matamoros workers.
• 680 workers in the General-Mills plant in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato went on a four-day wildcat strike.
• Teachers in Michoacán state have struck and have blockaded railways, which stopped shippments of auto parts exports to Asia.
• Monday, February 11, 2019 CNTE-affiliated teachers in Oaxaca struck closing 800 schools.
• The 5 campuses of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UAM) have been on strike for a 20 percent wage increase.

Self organization, confronting the “Unions” and a new union confederation

Using social media, workers organized and started public meetings outside their union offices to discuss the offers the various companies were making. Out of these meetings a unified demand of “20/32” was created, 20% wage increase and a 32,000 Peso (€1472 / $1672/ £1279) yearly bonus. The average manufacturing wage is Peso 5390/month. The strike movement has become known as the “Movimiento 20/32”.

Dissatisfied with the union “representing” them, the workers called for union officials to come out of their offices in Matamoros. “Amid booing, whistles, and cries of “Villafuerte (a union leader) out!, Sell-out! and Cacique! The leader opened the doors of the building and asked the workers to come in, but (the strikers) refused and told (the leaders) to come out onto the street to face them all directly”.

Stepping into this dissatisfaction are the Miners and Electrician’s unions, who have united 150 existing unions into a new labor confederation, the International Labor Confederation. At this point, the confederation seems to be allied with Mexico’s current social democratic ruling party, Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA). This union is being heavily supported by the AFL-CIO US labor Federation, which should give us an understanding of the new confederation’s perspectives.