Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 22:21:53 -0400
Subject: AUT: Part 2, Mex Labor News, Sept 2, 1998


PART II, MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS, SEPTEMBER 2, 1998
BE SURE YOU HAVE PART I.
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                  UNITED ELECTRICAL WORKERS HOST
               CANADIAN AND MEXICAN POLITICAL LEADERS

      The 63rd convention of the United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers of America (UE), was held in Pittsburgh from
August 23 through August 27. The theme of the convention was
building a labor party; the Labor Party's convention will be held
in Pittsburgh this November, and the UE was one of the founding
unions and continues to be a strong supporter. In order to gain
from the experience of other countries the UE invited Libby
Davies, a social worker from British Columbia who is a newly
elected Member of Parliament with the Canadian NDP, and Manuel
Fuentes, the Director of Labor for Mexico City under the new
Cardenas (PRD) government. Manuel Fuentes' presentation is
reproduced below.

     As reported in the last issue of MLNA, the Echlin Workers'
Alliance (recently converted into the Dana Workers' Alliance due
to the purchase of Echlin, Inc. by the Dana Corporation) recently
received an excellent decision from the U.S. Department of
Labor's National Administrative Office (NAO). The UE Convention
also included a tri-national panel which addressed the importance
of the tri-national alliance which has grown to include the
Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT) from Mexico, the IBT, UE,
UNITE!, UAW, Paperworkers, USWA, Machinists, IUE, and Canadian
auto and steelworkers. Robert Kingsley, Organizing Director of
the UE was joined by Benedicto Martinez of the FAT, Dan Kovalik,
an attorney with the USWA and Gerry Barr, Director of the
Steelworkers Humanity Fund in Canada. The panel also spoke of the
importance of the US decision and of the up-coming hearing on
September 14th in Ottawa - the first hearing to be held on a
Canadian complaint.  

     Two organizers from the FAT's Workers' Center in Juarez (the
Centro de Estudios y Taller Laboral, A.C.) also attended the
convention and made brief presentations. They found themselves
among old friends when they met up with some of the of the UE
delegates they had worked with in Milwaukee last Spring as
participants in a training program for rank and file UE workers.
The Convention held a special reception honoring the rank and
file organizers who were graduates of the five regional schools. 

                              ###

                 MANUEL FUENTES, DIRECTOR OF LABOR
               FOR CARDENAS GOVERNMENT IN MEXICO CITY
                  ADDRESSES UE NATIONAL CONVENTION

[Manuel Fuentes, the Director of Labor for Mexico City addressed
the 63rd Convention of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine
Workers of America (UE) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 26,
1998. The following is a translation of his speech.]

     First of all I would like to thank you for the invitation by
this important union to attend your convention. I appreciate the
chance to talk to you about the new political reality which we
are living in the capital of Mexico, which represents an enormous
challenge and opportunity for workers to be able to achieve real
change.  

     I would like to point out first of all what the victory of
Cardenas means in Mexico City. It was the first election where
the citizens of Mexico City were able to elect their own mayor,
because previously the mayor was named by the President of the
Republic. Cardenas won overwhelmingly, beating the party that for
more than sixty years had governed the capital. The official
party lost all of the electoral districts, and lost control of
the legislative assembly for the city.                           

     The PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] is a party
which we could call center-left: A party which promised the
citizens a struggle for greater democracy, a fight against
corruption and improved conditions for all citizens. But I want
to point out that this victory in Mexico City was due probably
more to the fame of the candidate Cardenas than to the party
itself. This victory created great expectations and hope among
the citizens of the city. When Cardenas began his term, the
citizens hoped that the next day there would be change. One of
the main problems in Mexico City is violence. There's an average
of 700 crimes every day in Mexico City, violent crimes. There's
huge unemployment, a lot of corruption in the government
institutions, and also a tremendous amount of government
incompetence.  

     Cardenas was criticized because the new team that he brought
in was a team of people who were not experts. Because the left in
Mexico had never been in power many of us had always been against
the government. And now we are the government and this is a great
challenge to overcome. One of the main problems which was
discussed was that we preferred people who were inexperienced to
people who were corrupt. But the problem is that people want
change, and they want to see the changes not just hear about
them.  

     Regarding labor issues, one of the changes that Cardenas
instituted was to increase the influence and the power of the
Department of Labor in Mexico City. An Undersecretary of Labor
was created and the office which I represent was given greater
powers. An office was created for the first time to deal with
women's problems on the job; a department was also created to
deal with the problem of underage workers who work in stores
between he ages of 15-16. There are about 20,000 young people who
work under those conditions. There was also an attempt to try and
improve conditions in the office which deals with workers'
problems.

     I want to point out that the actions which we are carrying
out have three major aspects. The first one has to do with the
Office of Legal Defense. Workers have the right to have free
legal assistance before the labor courts. But when we took power
we found the office filled with corruption, with very low wages
for the officials, and instead of being an office in favor of
workers' rights it was an office which served the interests of
the bosses. It was an office which permitted employers to pay low
wages and do away altogether with the rights of workers. We have
begun a policy of fundamental change, where we rely on young
students whom we have been training as attorneys to work in favor
of workers' rights.  

     One of the serious problems we have is that the lawyers in
this department are unionized workers. They earn about $360 a
month. But even so, they have big cars, big houses, they live
well and when we've tried to take action against these corrupt
attorneys the official government union defends them. The
government union, the official union, has threatened us with
engaging in work stoppages to try to block our efforts towards
change.  

     We realize that it is important to increase our activity and
to raise the confidence of the workers, so that they may defend
themselves. But the actions have got to come from the workers
themselves. We have begun training workers so that they learn how
to defend their rights, to defend themselves from corrupt
attorneys. We have conducted courses on how to form unions, to
teach workers their rights in the case of discharges, and how
legal cases proceed. We have opened an Office of Complaints so
that when the old attorneys are committing fraud we can file
charges against them, and so that if we find them engaging in
acts of corruption we can fine or fire them.

     We are, right now, in a war with the corrupt attorneys
because they hide their acts of corruption. To give you an idea,
there are 25 of these attorneys and they have about 160 cases per
attorney, and it is very difficult for three or four officials to
monitor all of these cases. There are students who are
participating in our government who are working as volunteers
while they are waiting for job openings. We believe that if we
want to make change we have to sweep out all the old officials. 
But the problem is that we can't fire everybody we'd like to if
we don't have good proof, good evidence.

     We have another office which is in charge of workplace
inspections, to ensure that labor law is complied with in
workplaces. When we brought the government to the workplace, we
found that for the last 12 years there had been no workplace
inspections in Mexico City. There had been a complete surrender
to the employers. They did whatever they wanted. We hired young
university students, we began to train them and we sent them out
to the workplaces to make sure that the laws were being
respected.  

     The first problem that we found was that there was a lot of
resistance on the part of the bosses, when for the first time the
encountered young officials who wanted to speak directly to the
workers in order to find out what the conditions of work were
like in their workplaces. We've had cases where the inspectors
have been kidnaped by employers and have had others thrown out on
the street to make sure that they don't carry out their
inspections of the workplace. We've had to call bosses and tell
them that this is a crime, and try to persuade the employers that
they have to respect the law. Pursuing a policy of persuasion has
been difficult because the employers are scared that the policies
of Cardenas will mean that possibly the workplaces will be shut
down or employers persecuted. We have tried to reach agreements
with them that if they will respect the law we will not fine them
or take action against them.  

     In Mexico City there are about 110,000 businesses and we
only have 25 inspectors. So, practically,  we inherited an
infrastructure which is inefficient and it won't be until the end
of this year that we will be able to have a new budget and we can
increase the level of activity of the government.

     We also found that although there was an office which dealt
with health and safety, there were empty file cabinets, no
computers, no office personnel and only three people in charge of
health and safety with nobody to assist them. What we will try to
do is to reach agreements with the universities, and through
their social service requirements be able to get personnel for
these posts.  The problem with these social services assignments
is that students work for six months and then they are gone.  We
need people who are really convinced and who are willing to work
as volunteers. They are trying to help us in inspections having
to do with workplace safety.

     I'd like to point out that in our country there are about
500,000 accidents a year. This is one of the highest rates of
accidents in the world. This is due to the tremendous pressures
that the bosses impose in the workplaces. They don't train
workers and, therefore, people are hurt on the job. There's also
a big problem regarding women workers. There are only two people
in charge of the office on women's issues. They are trying to set
up conferences with women and with unions, and also participate
in workplace inspections to ensure that the bosses are not taking
advantage of pregnant women. But this is also a legislative
problem because the law does not adequately protect the women. 
Even when the Cardenas government would like to make
improvements, the laws would have to be changed at the federal
level.

     Another problem that we have, a difficult problem that we're
trying to deal with, is a fight against so-called  "protection
contracts". In Mexico there are 86,000 union contracts
registered, and only 20 percent of those contracts are active or
real contracts. Nonetheless, if you had invited a Mexican federal
official to this convention, he would say that 95 percent of the
workers in Mexico have a union. But the problem is that the so
called union is a paper union. In our country it is legal for a
union leader, without talking to the workers, to sign a union
contract which stays in the desks of the union leader and the
bosses, and when the workers go to the Labor Board they're not
allowed a copy of this contract. We're trying to carry out
actions so that in the next few months the workers can have
access to their contracts.

     One of the biggest problems workers face is that of thugs or
goons in workplaces, especially because union elections are not
held by secret ballot vote. When workers want to obtain
recognition for their union or change unions, the workers have to
declare openly before the representatives of the government, the
union and the boss which union they prefer. One of the actions of
Cardenas' government was to try to move towards secret ballot
elections. And we're trying to work on some agreements with the
Labor Board so that unions that request secret ballot elections
can do so in Mexico City. The problem that we encounter is that
the local Labor Board, which is the office where jurisdictional
questions are settled and which decides representational
questions, is an autonomous office. It is controlled by the
Chamber of Commerce and the representatives, so-called
representatives, of the workers, which are official government
organizations. So a lot of the problem of breaking with this kind
of corruption is to try to open new spaces for workers.  

     One of the recent actions we have taken as a government is
to try to let the workers know what we are up to. We've had
forums with workers, and tried to let workers know that if we
take action in favor of their rights, they also have to take
action to support our efforts. One of the fundamental problems is
the lack of secret ballot elections, which has to do with the
control of the unions, and the control of the unions has meant
low wages. Our country is one of the countries with the lowest
wages in the world. The key to this is that workers do not have
real unions. I'd like to explain that whenever some workers, for
example, go on strike, in those places where people have paper
unions what happens is that they cannot legally strike and they
cannot achieve a union contract because there is already
supposedly a union in place. In many cases changing a union takes
one to two years. During this process there are always a lot of
discharges of workers. We believe that it is important for
workers to have access to their contracts and their union bylaws. 
(Applause)

      Finally, I'd like to explain that right now a big problem
that we have is that there is no response from the trade unions. 
When we conduct workplace inspections, for example, workers are
scared when we show up. They are scared to demand that laws be
complied with, and they think that if they do that they will be
fired. The law allows us to conduct inspections without the boss
accompanying us. One of the things the inspectors have done is to
go into the bathrooms and try and talk to workers to be able to
find out what the working conditions are really like.  

     Recently, at one of the inspections we found that in a
Chinese food restaurant they paid less than minimum wage. The
owner threatened to fire all the workers and our inspectors told
him that we would put him in jail if he didn't pay the minimum
wage. (Applause) He finally agreed to pay the workers the minimum
wage and to pay their back pay, but he complained to us that
other restaurant owners also were not paying the minimum wage and
protested that we went after him. The problem is that there are
maybe 800 Chinese restaurants and we have 25 inspectors and even
if we give them a lot of assignments everyday they can't get to
all the workplaces. We think it is important is to bring these
kinds of questions before the public so that unions and workers
can demand higher budgets for us to carry out these kinds of
actions.  

     Regarding the free trade agreement, NAFTA has meant plant
closings and low wages. The fundamental problem is that the
transnational companies are stepping all over Mexican labor law. 
Obviously, one of our big problems, one of our big worries is
that when inspectors go to the plant or when companies are
subpoenaed, the companies prefer to go to the Labor Board which
is still dominated by corrupt officials, to be able to do as they
please at the expense of the workers. We think that we face a
huge challenge, but that we've moved a few millimeters ahead, a
few inches ahead towards the goals that we have set.  

     I've been a union attorney and now that I am a government
official it's clear to me that if the public and the unions, if
they do not participate together with the government, the actions
that we take will wind up only being paper actions. That's why we
need active unions where workers know their rights. In our
country, out of every 800 workers only one of them knows their
rights under the labor law. We believe that one of the best ways
to protect workers is for workers to know their rights, because
if workers do not know their rights they can't defend them. 
(Applause) Rights that are not defended are rights that
disappear.   

     Thank you very much.  (Applause)

                              ###
SOCIAL STATISTICS

Manufacturing Employment Up

     The number of workers employed in manufacturing rose 3.9
percent in June over the previous year. Blue collar workers
increased 4.4 percent while white collar employees rose 3.2
percent. The metal-machine sector grew by 9.7 percent, basic
metal by 5.9 percent, chemicals by 3 percent and paper by 2.6
percent, according to a survey by the Mexican Institute of
Statistics (INEGI). ("Incremento de 3.9% del empleo en las
manufactureras," EL FINANCIERO, August 28, 1998.)

Maquiladora Employment Up

     The number of persons employed in the maquiladoras grew in
the first half of 1998 13.8 percent according to the Mexican
Institute of Statistics (INEGI). The total number of maquiladora
workers rose from 862,013 to 981,302. The increases for different
classes of workers were as follows: 16.7 percent increase in
technical workers; 15.6 percent increase in male factory workers;
a 14 percent increase in administrative workers; and a 11.9
percent increase in female factory workers. ("Incremento de 13.8%
del empleo de maquiladoras de exportacion," EL FINANCIERO, August
31, 1998.)

Labor Costs

     Mexican industry's labor costs have been reduced 40 percent
in the last five years, according to the Mexican Institute of
Statistics (INEGI). At the same time, labor productivity has
increase significantly in the last five years. (Cesareo Gamez,
"Obreros Mexicanos Hacen Mas con Menos," EL NACIONAL August 10,
1998.)

Loss of Purchasing Power

     Some 31.5 percent of the Mexican population earns a minimum
wage of 30.20 pesos per day, according to the Mexican Institute
of Statistics (INEGI). With the pesos now at 10.20 to the dollar,
that is less than US$3.00 per day. (Arturo Gomez Salgado,
"Acumula un rezago de 82% el poder de compra en 22 anos: CTM," EL
FINANCIERO, August 24, 1998.)

     The minimum wage has lost 80 percent of its purchasing power
since 1976, so that today it would require a 300 percent increase
from 30 to 120 pesos per day in order to recuperate. But the
Commission on Distribution and management of Consumer Goods and
Basic Services of the Senate of Mexico sees an even darker future
looming. (Elizabeth Velasco C., "Preve el Senado un mayor
deterioro del salario," LA JORNADA August 24, 1998.)

Women Workers

     Women represent 35 percent of the economically active
population in Mexico, though their wages remain 40 percent below
those of men, according to Jose Antonio Gonzalez Fernandez, the
Secretary of Labor (STPS). Of the total number of jobs generated
in Mexico between 1996 and 1997, more than half were taken by
women. (Arturo Gomez Salgado, "Creciente participacion de la
mujer en el mercado laboral; ocupan 35% de la PEA," LA JORNADA
August 21, 1998.)

University Graduates

     While Mexico has produced 2.5 million university graduates
in the last 10 years, 70 percent of them have been unable to find
jobs in their fields, according to Elba Esther Gordillo, a former
leader of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE). (Jaime Balderas
Alarcon, "Sin empleo, 70% de egresados de universidades en 10
anos," EL NACIONAL, August 25, 1998.)

Farm Workers' Children Malnourished

     A recent study by the Secretary of Social Development
(SEDESOL) found that 60 percent of farmworkers' children in the
San Quintin Valley south of Ensenada in Baja California suffer
from malnutrition. (Jorge Alberto Cornejo, "Con desnutricion, 60%
de los hijos de jornaleros," LA JORNADA, August 25, 1998.)

Pension Fund Losses

     Nine out of fourteen of Mexico's pensions funds (Afores),
privatized just a couple of years ago, report a loss. Only five
reported a profit. Altogether, the pensions funds lost 69.8
million pesos. (Lenor Flores, "Reportan las Afores perdidas por
60.8 mdp," EL FINANCIERO, August 24, 1998.)

END MEXICAN LABOR NEWS AND ANALYSIS, VOL. 3, NO. 15, SEPT 2, 1998


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