Electrical Workers Fight Is Fight of All Mexican Workers

For decades we have been pointing out the way that the Mexican government, whether under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or the National Action Party (PAN), has violated the workers’ right to self-organization in defense of their interests, as protected under Article 123, Section XVI of the Constitution.

History itself has shown how leaders who submit to the government or to the employers are rewarded, giving up the defense of their union members in exchange for economic and political perks. At the same time, we know how the authentic struggle for workers to organize themselves in an independent and autonomous way is punished.

Movements against corruption, against employer domination and for the legitimate rights of wage earners led by railroad workers, doctors, electricians, nuclear workers, teachers, and numberless industrial workers have been mercilessly repressed under the pretext of “maintaining social peace.”

National organizations such as the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) have for almost 50 years been frustrated in their democratic and honest attempts to organize by the systematic opposition of the official union bureaucrat-government-boss triple alliance that proclaims that it “would rather die” than permit workers to organize themselves.

Since the 1980s, the neo-liberal economic policies of privatizing public enterprises and of converting them into private companies have lowered labor costs and favored what’s been called “modernization.” These policies are based on strategies that begin by dismantling workers’ organizations, beating them on the head, in order to get on to the real business which is handing over to the new owners companies which are “clean,” union free and without collective bargaining agreements.

This is the context of the war that Calderón and his henchmen have unleashed against the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). That’s why it is important to emphasize that their struggle involves all Mexican workers who are threatened by a government that doesn’t care one bit whether or not it complies with the law, but rather simply wants to get on with demonstrating “who is strong” and “who can govern.”