From: Rupture or Continuity?
by Peter RachleffNew Politics, vol. 7, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 28, Winter 2000
full review: http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue28/rachle28.htm
"....On February 15, 1998, 3,200 railroad workers in Empalme, in the province of Sonora, launched a paro or work stoppage, paralyzing the Pacific North Line, which runs through seventeen states in western and northern Mexico. They were challenging the latest phase in the Mexican government's plan to privatize their state- owned railroad, FERRONALES. Almost a year earlier, the government had sold the Pacific North, a 6,521 kilometer route that services one of the country's major industrial areas -- including key factories owned by Ford, General Motors, and General Electric -- to a new private company called Mexican Railways, or FERROMEX, which includes the U.S.-based Union Pacific as a major investor. These moves on the economic chessboard reflect multiple items on the corporate agenda -- the worldwide privatization of state-owned enterprises; the international expansion of U.S.-based businesses; the integration of transportation systems on a north-south basis so as to facilitate free trade and the outsourcing of manufacturing work to Mexico; increased U.S. access to Mexican markets and labor; the reduction of the social wage earned by workers and the job security and workrule protections that they have struggled for since World War II.
FERROMEX had already informed its workers that it would terminate their labor agreement and only rehire some of them. The workers had good reason to fear the consequences. In 1988, Mexico employed 100,000 railroad workers, but by 1996 that number had fallen to 43,000. In one well-known case, when a consortium including the Kansas City Southern Railroad, bought Mexico's Northeast Railway, it retained only 4,500 out of 8,700 workers, cut crew size from six workers to three, extended the maximum continuous service time from twelve hours to forty [yes, forty), and reduced the union contract from 3,045 clauses to 38. In the wake of the FERROMEX buyout of Pacific North, union sources reported instances of extortion -- workers being told that they could retain their jobs in exchange for payoffs of five to ten thousand pesos ($625 to $1250) -- and the signing of individual personal-service contracts. It was rumored that the new owners intended to rehire only 2,500 out of the railroad's 13,500 workers.
For nearly a year, local unions representing Pacific North workers had fruitlessly tried to negotiate the terms of the transition from state management to private ownership. They received no support from their national union, the Mexican Railroad Workers Union (STFRM), which has long been a creature of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Mexican state. The state, the PRI, and the STFRM have all supported the privatization process. The protections guaranteed workers by Mexican labor laws have been ignored with impunity, while the bottom has dropped out of real wages, benefits have been cut, and job security has been undermined.
Even before the sale of Pacific North, a group of rank-and-file workers and local union leaders had created the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement. At the Committee's head was Salvador Zarco, a skilled shopworker and veteran of the militant student movement of the late 1960s. Zarco had been imprisoned for his role in the 1968 student strike at the University of Mexico, and, when he was released in the early 1970s, had become a railroad shopworker in his native Empalme. His workplace and community roots proved valuable when he and other workers began to organize against the pending privatization of the Pacific North. They launched an aggressive movement, reaching into the community and beyond it. They organized public meetings and protests against the privatization process, and they established relationships with the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), an independent labor federation, the Jesuit Committee for Labor Reflection and Action (CEREAL), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which recently elected Cuahtemoc Cardenas mayor of Mexico City. They had also become part of a local community coalition in Empalme, the Broad Front of Social Organizations (FAOS). In November 1997, the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement and its allies organized a caravan of 2,000 workers; the group traveled throughout the northern and western states, discussing the privatization issue and distributing literature. These activities fostered popular understanding of the issues, but neither they nor the negotiations brought the Pacific North workers any protections.
In mid-February, the Empalme local voted to launch its work stoppage, which was illegal because it had not been called by the official national union or sanctioned by the national labor board. For three weeks, Empalme, the location of the line's repair shops, was the center of a popular movement that united railroad workers from a variety of crafts with telephone workers, miners, teachers, students, Yaqui Indians, community organizations, clergy, and even small-town mayors. The strikers and their supporters moved repair buggies onto the tracks in Empalme, threw switches, and set up a human blockade -- a planton -- on the main track. They also maintained a vigil at the shrine of Santo Judas Tadeo, the saint of miracles, along the main highway. So many participated in prayers at this site that truck traffic in the province was also blocked. All this activity was linked together by the Marcha de la Cazuelas -- the march of the pots and pans -- in which thousands of children marched through Empalme, banging on pots and pans, the "symbols of hunger and unemployment," according to the sixty-six-year-old widow who led them.
Strike leaders also held press conferences and organized demonstrations in Mexico City. They published a newsletter called El Petardo -- The Firecracker -- and distributed it nationally. When the national government responded by handing down felony indictments of the strike's rank-and-file leaders, the strike grew and spread. Other locals in Sonora stopped work, and the state legislature and the governor issued statements supporting the strikers. Workers in the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco held meetings and engaged in sit-ins, demonstrations, and other forms of protest. In Ciudad Juarez, workers met in "permanent assembly," announcing their intent to do so (i.e., to withhold their labor) until FERROMEX promised to rehire all the Pacific North workers. In another community, machinists threatened to "fix" their machines so they wouldn't work unless all the strikers got their jobs back. In the national legislature, congressmen from the opposition parties demanded an investigation into the privatization of the railroads. Executives of U.S. multinationals urged the government to end the strike one way or another so they could get their shipments moving.
The Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement also reached out to U.S. rail workers. Fearing government repression, they thought that intercession by the U.S. labor movement might bring them some protection. They invited U.S. rail unions and activists to bring a delegation to Empalme, and they explored the possibilities of a U.S. speaking tour by Salvador Zarco and other grassroots leaders. Given projects organized in the past decade by other U.S. unions, such as the United Autoworkers (whose St. Paul local has linked up with its counterpart at the Ford plant outside Mexico City), the United Electrical Workers (who have provided valuable support for the FAT, the Authentic Workers Federation and some of its local affiliates), and the Teamsters (who have supported efforts by Mexican Honeywell workers to unionize), and by trans- union organizations, such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, this was not an unrealistic expectation. Some of these projects had even taken root during the Kirkland years, and there were many reasons (well-detailed by Buhle) to expect even more under Sweeney's leadership.
Indeed, the appeal from the Committee to Defend the Collective Bargaining Agreement was well-received in the U.S. Several rail unions and the AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department assembled a team of delegates, including officials, staffers, and rank-and-file rail workers. They invited Dan LaBotz, a veteran activist and editor of the Mexican Labor News, to accompany them as interpreter. They flew to Mexico City, planning to go on to Empalme where they would meet with the strikers and their local leaders. Contacts began to be made across the U.S. for a tour by strike leaders which would follow the U.S. delegation's Mexican trip.
But the trip and its solidaristic goals began to come apart as soon as the delegation landed in Mexico City. There, they were met by none other than Jack Otero, the former director of AIFLD, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, a man who had been named as a CIA operative in James Agee's Inside the Company. Otero had been replaced as director of AIFLD by the Sweeney leadership, which had received much acclaim by progressives -- including Buhle -- for "dismantling" the structures through which the U.S. labor movement had interfered with grassroots union activism outside the U.S. and had funded, trained, and fostered anti-communist (and generally pro-U.S. corporate) union leadership. The new director of international affairs for the AFL-CIO, Barbara Shaillor, and her supporters in progressive organizations and the progressive media, claimed that the likes of Jack Otero had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Clearly, someone had neglected to tell Otero, who now described himself as an "independent contractor" working for the Transportation Trades Department and individual unions to "promote solidarity" with the Mexican labor movement! Otero warned the delegation that the strike leaders were communists who should be avoided and that international labor protocol required that they meet with the national STFRM leadership (who, I should remind readers, had opposed the strike and counselled rail workers to go along with the privatization agenda). Otero also dismissed as propaganda the claims by local activists in Empalme that Victor Morales, the leader of STFRM, was reputed to have had his opponents murdered and disappeared.
Otero's intervention paralyzed the U.S. delegation. After much discussion they opted to visit both the national leadership in Mexico City and the strike leadership in Empalme. The national leadership did announce its official sanction for the strike, and the Mexican government held back from military intervention. FERROMEX offered the strikers some concessions in job security and agreed to sign a formal contract, although it continued to contain the original wage, benefit, and workrule changes. The rank-and-file membership voted to accept the compromise and the strike ended. The AFL-CIO offered to organize a "tour" of the U.S. which would pair Victor Morales and Salvador Zarco (!) and which would be restricted to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. (there are few rail workers based in either city) and Chicago, where they would be taken to a baseball game. Despite requests from activists in the Twin Cities that Minneapolis-St. Paul (a major center for rail worker activism and U.S.-Mexican labor solidarity) be included on the tour, the AFL-CIO refused, expressing concern that activists here would intentionally "embarrass" STFRM President Morales. The tour never took place at all.
Months later, a regional gathering of the United Transportation Union in Houston invited Salvador Zarco to attend and address them. His speech brought the 500 delegates present to their feet time and again, and he spent several late nights sharing experiences with veteran rail labor activists. Unfortunately, this experience has not been repeated by other unions at other gatherings, or by the AFL-CIO or its Transportation Trades Department. The privatization of the Mexican railroads has continued, and Jack Otero continues to broker relationships between U.S. rail unions and their counterparts south of the border......"
full review: http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue28/rachle28.htm
Mexican Labor News and Analysis 1998 Story of the Strike
http://www.ueinternational.org/vol3no5.html