Why Mexico is addicted to corrupt unions

They are tough to stamp out. The government also finds them very helpful.

This is part two of series on Mexican unionism. Click here to read part one.

Few remember that it was because of Jesús Díaz de León’s penchant for dressing like a charro—a formal and traditional Mexican cowboy attire—that an entire system of social control was christened. 

It was 1948 and the government born of the Mexican Revolution was running up against its own ideals. The brief truce that kept workers in line during the Second World War fell apart and independent organisers began to turn against the government-sponsored union under which all industrial workers were meant to fall under—the Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CTM). 

Unable to absorb the independents, the president opted to give them their union but with a poison pill. El Charro, as the leather-clad Díaz de León was nicknamed, was sent into the most intransigent of the unions—the railway workers’—and, with the help of plainclothes police and the presidential guard, was elected as its leader. Under his thumb railway workers would cease to agitate for better working conditions and charrismo—the practice of imposing pro-government cheerleaders at the head of unions—was born.

Charro unions today

Fast forward 76 years and things aren’t all that different from El Charro’s day. Even some of the same names remain. The CTM is still the biggest union with over 5 million members. The party that created charrismo—the PRI—is also around but it’s at its worst ever moment; defeated resoundingly by a new political force in Mexican politics; Morena, the new party in power.

Many workers rejoiced because the end of the PRI was meant to be the end of the corporatist system with charrismo at its core. Yet, as time under the new party has passed, the realisation that the old acronyms may have gone but the system remains began to sink in.

Since its founding, Morena has espoused the same demands workers have fought for since the 1950’s:

Genuine union democracy through direct and individual balloting and the removal of charros.

Now that Morena is in government, the temptation to slip into old-school corporatism has become almost irresistible. Pedro Hernández, secretary general of a radical teachers’ union (CNTE), told The Mexico Political Economist that “you can no longer say that this is a neo-liberal or repressive government, yet it is still obliged to certain commitments.”

After an initial wave of democracy, many unions have fallen back into their corrupt old ways and, in offering their muscle to a government keen to get things done, has seduced Morena into embracing them.

There has been substantial change in some areas. The arrival of Morena to government coincided with the renegotiation of North America’s main trade agreement. The resulting US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) compelled the Mexican government to reform its domestic labour laws to enforce union democracy. This is what Arturo Alcalde, a pro-government labour lawyer (who happens to be the former Labour Secretary’s father) calls “good globalisation”.

A central demand of the reform was for collective contracts to be “validated” as genuinely democratic, rather than imposed from above by corrupt union bosses more interested in keeping employers happy. By the government’s own reckoning, said Alcalde, out of all the collective contracts in Mexico, only 20% are valid. 

Initial enthusiasm for these changes pushed union membership up to 13% but it has since dropped back down 12.7%—not far from its 2018 historic low. “I see a lot of unions that are still being manipulated,” concluded Hernández. “Even those considered to be independent.”

How was it that corruption returned so swiftly after this initial wave of democratisation?

How to corrupt a Mexican union

What made the old PRI regime so resilient was its ability to evolve without changing its core structure. Today, the manipulation of unions in Mexico isn’t any one political party’s policy; it is more of a self-perpetuating system. It depends on the makeup of Mexican law, but also on cultural, social, and political norms that pull unions into a predictable vicious cycle:

1. Charro status quo

Begin with the status quo, which often consists in union being dominated by a longstanding charro leader. In the private sector, this was the experience of Israel Cervantes. He worked in the paint and bodyworks department of a General Motors (GM) factory in Silao, an industrial city in central Mexico. He told The Mexico Political Economist how the company imposed the famously pliant CTM to defend its interests. “If a worker got out of line, that worker was fired,” Cervantes said.

Similarly, in the public sector, the CNTE went through a tug of war to become the government’s officially recognised teachers’ union against the union it split off from, the SNTE. The last time CNTE had won in Mexico City, said Hernández, was in 1989. But the woman the CNTE elected was easily corrupted by the SNTE’s then leader, Elba Ester Gordillo, after being given “a post as federal deputy, a place in the SNTE national committee, as well as vans and money. It took us 10 years to get rid of her,” Hernández said.

2. Independent organisers rise up

Charro unions in the public sector are accused of favouring the government. Those in the private sector are said to favour the company’s interests. In neither case are workers’ rights cared for, so inevitably, resistance soon emerges. 

In GM it started in 2019 with eight workers, including Cervantes, started organising. They were discovered and fired. The other seven gave up, but Cervantes continued agitating from the outside. Over the course of three years Cervantes and other organisers lobbied against abuses within the company, including instances when those infected with Covid-19 were forced to come in sick and then locked in toilets when they showed symptoms. Cervantes says they also got the GM to reinstate a legally mandated lunch break into the working day. 

Even victories weren’t so clear cut for these independent unionists, though. A 10% salary increase announced in May this year was widely applauded by the charro leaders of the SNTE; it was only when the CNTE resisted that it went up to 13%, claimed Hernández. “And now the SNTE says that they achieved it.”

3. Showdown against union bosses

The real test comes when the collective contract—negotiated by union bosses with the company or the government—is purportedly voted on by the union membership. Under charrismo this rarely happens since, for a union, to lose a collective contract vote is to lose control of its workers. 

Corrupt union leaders will use every trick in the book to get their way and win the vote: Withholding ballots from opponents or physically stopping them from entering the venue or surreptitiously changing its location… This is the original roadmap used by the very first charro.

Therefore, the workers’ final showdown is not actually against employers, but rather against their own charro bosses. 

“It’s like a football match where the referee, the ball, the fans, and the stadium belong to one team,” said Hernández. “And yet, despite the odds, you can win.” The CNTE did win two years ago in a district in its southern stronghold of Chiapas—though the SNTE still controls most other districts.

“They wouldn’t let us in further than the lobby,” said Cervantes, describing the collective contract vote in 2021 controlled by the CTM. “They pushed us all out.” 

But Cervantes has a new tool to fight charros; the USMCA hotline which he used to connect directly to government institutions, including the Mexican and US Labour Departments. This mechanism allowed for a redo with observers from Mexico’s electoral body (INE) and the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Cervantes and his unionists had organised thousands into an auto workers’ union called SIINTIA—5,500 from GM and another 2,400 from other car parts factories—and “on August 18, the ‘No’ vote [against the collective contract] won and we kicked out the CTM,” he said. SIINTIA went to become the new union in charge; voted in to truly represent the interests of workers.

The infighting started immediately. 

4. The challenger takes power and is corrupted

Cervantes said it was his own fault that he hadn’t secured his position in SIINTIA. Since he had never been reinstated as a GM worker after getting fired, his fellow organisers quickly turned on him. He was expelled from the union. 

Cervantes now claims that “SIINTIA is back to defending the company’s interests and behaving like the CTM.” Ultimately, he believes that the issue comes down to the way the unions are set up, making it easy to corrupt leaders since the company is the one that extracts the worker fees from paychecks—2% in GM’s case—and hands them over, with minimal transparency, to the union bosses. “Where is all that money going? SIINTIA has been around for four years and it hasn’t got a strike fund”. By Cervantes’ reckoning this is $3 million pesos in yearly fees unaccounted for.

Not even a fiercely combative union like the CNTE is immune from charrismo—especially under the ruling party. Critics from the opposition have reported the use of CNTE protests to crowd out competing marches against the government. Even Hernández notes that “some teachers, including some of our own democratic contingent, have been influenced and there are lots of them that actively support the party in power.”

Tempting the Mexican government

There is much truth behind the idea that priismo, more than a political party, is a powerful system of political control. This in turn makes its allure almost too tempting to ignore for those in power.

Morena is an activist organisation born of social mobilisation. Before becoming a political party, it excelled at absorbing independent organisations that opposed the previous Mexican government. This was notability the case with YoSoy132, which arose in 2012 as a non-partisan mass student movement only for it to be co-opted into the Morena apparatus. YoSoy132’s most visible leader, Antonio Attolini, today sits as an unwaveringly loyal Morena local deputy. Meanwhile, the SNTE’s charro leader will become a federal senator. 

“Morena is a renewed PRI. It adopted the same practices of old priismo”, said Hernández, adding that fighting a purportedly progressive government complicated things further for a radical union like his. “Before, with a PRI government you knew what it represented.”

It is a perfect and tragic illustration of what happens when ideals clash with realpolitik. Unions by definition are meant to fight the powers that be. Government, meanwhile, requires the ability to take action and, in exchange for certain perks, charro unions are able to provide a lot of this leeway through sizable war chests and reliable voting blocs. It has made charro unions irresistible and indispensable, even for a political movement that pledged to end them. 

“In the end, the government will always opt for an ally,” concluded Hernández.