How Mexico strangled its unions

And why Donald Trump, of all people, moved to fix them.

This is part one of a two part series on Mexican unionism.

In the heart of historic downtown Mexico City sits a building occupied by dissident unionists. Inside, stray cats linger around the bowls of kibble laid out for them as people bustle through rundown hallways despite it being long past 9pm.

The walls are papered over by photos of massive rallies past and slogans, though bizarrely for those unacquainted with this particular organisation, the chants members are urged to learn are aimed chiefly at another union—Mexico’s biggest, at over 1.6 million members, the National Education Workers’ Union, known as SNTE.

It was back in 1979 that a radical sector of this teachers’ union splintered off to form the National Education Workers’ Coordinator, known as CNTE (due to their identical pronunciations, the two organisations are differentiated in conversation by their pronouns: el SNTE and la CNTE).

CNTE is no minnow. It has over half a million members and they have forged much of the country’s labour policy for decades by protesting the cosy and undemocratic relationship between the government and SNTE. 

It is a setup repeated across many sectors: One official union embraced by the government and another dissent equivalent agitating for its members from the outside. This is the result of a political system set up close to a century ago but which continues to underpin Mexico’s economic and power relationships; one based on the subjugation of organised labour and its incorporation into the State.

“In this country, the unions have been the pillars that hold up political regimes,” Pedro Hernández, secretary general of a Mexico City chapter of CNTE, told The Mexico Political Economist.

Unions corrupted

On paper, unionised workers pay between 1-3% of their salary towards their union. The employer retains this money and hands it over to democratically elected union bosses. The bosses in turn use that money to defend and expand their membership’s interests. 

For the most part, it does not work like that. Instead, union leadership is often corrupted by government and corporate actors to represent their interests instead—keeping workers in line and deploying them as low wage labourers or as large electoral blocs in exchange for perks, bribes, and political posts for the bosses. 

Perennially, some due-paying members have become sick of this corrupted arrangement and rebelled, creating Mexico’s system of dual unionship across sectors, from the autoworkers to the teachers. For this reason, they also tend to be rather more radical.

“The ideological independence [of CNTE] is based on class struggle; on Marxism,” said Hernández. “We’ve never agreed to become part of any party or part of any official structure.”

But most workers simply aren’t that gung ho. So, slowly but surely, unionisation petered out in Mexico. Dependent on these workers, union bosses have deployed a carrot-and-stick approach. But members like América García, a head nurse and member of Mexico’s public health workers’ union, aren’t even that impressed by the carrot. “They push for the enforcement of existing [labour] laws. But our rights have stagnated for decades,” she told The Mexico Political Economist. “They defend the membership’s dues, not the members themselves.”

The broken system has ticked along for years with promises of reform but with very little incentive for those in power to change anything. They have been, after all, the same politicians, union bosses, and companies that benefited from it.

By 2018 the proportion of unionised workers had fallen to historic lows—12% from 17% in 2005. Today, however, that number is slightly up. A turnaround triggered by an unexpected political duo.

The Trump and López Obrador presidencies

In 2017, president Donald Trump tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement. “The worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country,” said the US president about NAFTA back then. His intended audience were the industrial workers who blamed decades’ worth of laissez-faire trade policy, which saw much manufacturing go abroad. The US was entering a new protectionist phase and, with it, the creation of a US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that considered higher amounts of “Made in North America” content and higher wages for workers in Mexico.

Oddly, the free trade era wasn’t particularly bountiful for Mexican labour either. Despite the floods of foreign direct investment, Mexican wages stagnated. It wasn’t just the global race to the bottom that was depressed them; it was the unions. 

Mexico’s corporatist system attracted foreign investment through its pliant unionism long before free trade became the perceived wisdom. Before that the US government saw tightly controlled unions as less susceptible to left-wing agitation in its fight against international Communism, while US companies saw submissive unions as allies in the fight to keep wages low and workers’ rights to a minimum.

As a consequence, democratic collective bargaining was a specific stipulation that Mexico had to agree to in the USMCA negotiations. The country was also required to democratise by giving union members a “personal, free, and secret vote” on bosses and contracts. 

In USMCA’s wake came another big shift in Mexican labour policy: the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party, Morena. 

Morena—which is still the ruling party—kicked the PRI out of office in 2018 and promised to do right by the workers that had helped sweep them into power. 

Hernández was initially impressed. “In the first two years of this government, president López Obrador saw the CNTE 18 times at the National Palace [his official residence]. In all our years, no president had even even met with us before,” he said.

Yet, Hernández today says his union is at odds with the government. He claims, along with other union members and leaders that The Mexico Political Economist spoke to, that Morena has slipped back into the old habits of the PRI.

Deep within the ruling party’s political DNA can be traced to a common ancestor with the PRI in those heady syndicalist days. The result is that though Morena pledged that it would get rid of the PRI’s worst practices regarding the undemocratic manipulation of unions, the benefits offered to the Mexican government by maintaining them have been too great to resist. 

It is a vicious cycle in which the government is incentivised to keep unions under its thumb, since collaborative unions make for great political power blocs, whereas independent unions agitate and cause trouble. 

So today, many of the big official unions—rich in social and political capital—are still beholden to the party in control of the State. “They’re servile towards whoever’s in power,” said García, the nurse from the public health worker’s union. 

What went wrong and how are the independent unions fighting back? Read all about it in the second part of this two part series on Mexican unionism.