Mexican Labor Confederations

Mexico 1912-1950

Synopsis

Three powerful trade union confederations dominated Mexican labor history in the twentieth century. The Casa del Obrero Mundial helped organize industrial workers from its founding in 1912 to its defeat in a general strike in 1916. The Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM) ruled Mexican labor affairs from 1918 until its decline in the 1930s. The Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) became part of Mexico's ruling political party from its inception in 1936, supplanting the CROM in the state-labor alliance. Within these organizations, three powerful leaders—Luis N. Morones, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and Fidel Velázquez—shaped the history of the state-labor alliance in modern Mexico.

Timeline

• 1910: Vassily Kandinsky pioneers non-representational painting.
• 1912: Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage, from Southampton to New York, on 14 April. More than 1,500 people are killed.
• 1914: On 28 June in the town of Sarajevo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinates Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and wife Sophie. In the weeks that follow, Austria declares war on Serbia, and Germany on Russia and France, while Great Britain responds by declaring war on Germany. By the beginning of August, the lines are drawn, with the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, and Japan) against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey).
• 1918: The Second Battle of the Marne in July and August is the last major conflict on the Western Front. In November, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates, bringing an end to the war.
• 1922: Inspired by the Bolsheviks' example of imposing revolution by means of a coup, Benito Mussolini leads his blackshirts in an October "March on Rome" and forms a new fascist government.
• 1930: Naval disarmament treaty is signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.
• 1942: At the Wannsee Conference, Nazi leaders formulate the "final solution to the Jewish question": a systematic campaign of genocide on a massive scale. By the time the Holocaust ends, along with the war itself, the Nazis will have killed some 6 million Jews, and as many as 6 million other victims in their death camps and slavelabor camps.
• 1948: Israel becomes a nation and is immediately attacked by a coalition of Arab countries. Despite being outnumbered, Israel will win the war in the following year—as it will win many another war against larger forces mobilized by its hostile neighbors.
• 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy launches his campaign to root out communist infiltrators.
• 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to move from her seat near the front of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and is arrested. The incident touches off a boycott of Montgomery's bus system, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., which will last well into 1956.

Event and Its Context

Casa del Obrero Mundial

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) dramatically shaped the country's political and labor history. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), business owners and government officials easily destroyed trade unions and mutualist societies. The revolution that erupted when Francisco Madero challenged Díaz in 1910 radically transformed labor affairs. As successive governments fell apart under the weight of prolonged and widespread warfare, workers in key industries such as textiles, oil, electrical energy, and transportation successfully carried out strikes, built permanent trade unions, and began to implement collective bargaining.

In the midst of revolution, on 16 July 1912, Juan Francisco Moncaleano (Colombian anarchist and fugitive recently arrived from Havana), Luis Mendez, Jacinto Huitrón, and other artisans, workers, and anarchists founded the Casa del Obrero Mundial (Worldwide House of the Worker, or Casa) on the model of the Escuela Racionalista (Rationalist School) of Barcelona. Though not a union in itself, the Casa quickly became the leading national labor organization of the revolution, pursuing broadly anarcho-syndicalist goals. After Madero's assassination in 1913, a coalition led by wealthy landowner Venustiano Carranza, former bandit Pancho Villa, and radical land reformer Emiliano Zapata opposed the return of the Porfiristas to power. Upon the defeat of the old Porfirian general, Victoriano Huerta, the coalition fell apart. Carranza and his general, Alvaro Obregón, allied against Villa and Zapata. In February 1915 the leaders of the anarchist Casa signed an agreement with Carranza to contribute battalions of workers to the Constitutionalist cause, and Carranza promised support for labor's goals. Thus began the alliance of organized labor with the state.

In August 1916 the Casa led a major strike that Carranza ruthlessly suppressed, which effectively destroyed an organization that had come to depend on government despite its anarchist rhetoric. Nonetheless unions and labor militancy continued, as did efforts to build a powerful labor confederation. Even before the defeat of the Casa, the Federación de Sindicatos Obreros del Distrito Federal (Federation of Labor Unions of the Federal District) organized a meeting in Veracruz in March 1916 to unify the labor movement. The organization sent a mechanic from the Mexican Light and Power Company and a founding member of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (Mexican Union of Electricians), Luis N. Morones, to represent the capital's workers.

CROM

In February 1917 the soon-to-be victorious Constitutionalists drafted a new constitution, which included Article 123, the first labor code in Mexican history. Written by radicals against the wishes of the more elitist Carranza, the article legalized unions, protected strikers from being fired, and provided some of the strongest benefits and protections for labor in the Western Hemisphere. Legal protections for unions strengthened labor organizing. After a second national labor congress in Tampico in October 1917, an ally of Carranza, Governor Gustavo Espinosa Mireles, appointed an organizing committee that included Ricardo Treviño, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World locals in the Tampico oil region, to plan for a third conference in March 1918. By then it was clear that the Casa would not recover its former influence and that the various groups allied under the Constitutionalist banner would form the nucleus of a postrevolutionary state. Unionists at the meeting, including former Casa members and anarchists, began work on 1 May 1918 and elected an executive committee that consisted of Huitrón, the former Casa leader, Morones, Treviño, and Teodoro Ramírez. The delegates capped the meeting by creating the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM) and installed Morones as the organization's general secretary.

Morones then created the Grupo Acción, a secret and disciplined group with great loyalty to Morones, which ran Mexican labor affairs in the 1920s. Morones understood that the Casa derived strength from its alliance with the state and collapsed when it challenged government. Having long combated anarchists in the labor movement, he worked to convince laborers that they had more to gain from a state-labor alliance than from an independent stance. In the unstable social and political climate of late revolutionary Mexico, the CROM quickly became one of the country's most powerful political actors.

In August 1919 Morones signed a secret pact with Carranza's former military leader and now political rival, Alvaro Obregón. He promised to support Obreón's presidential ambitions, and Obregón assured the CROM that it would have privileged access to government positions. Many of the anarchists who supported the CROM to that point then quit to form the rival Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT). Morones meanwhile founded the political wing of the CROM, the Partido Laborista Mexicano (PLM), in August 1919. He used the PLM to support the electoral ambitions of his allies. When Obregón assassinated Carranza in 1920, Obregón's alliance with Morones and the PLM assured urban electoral support, with which he won election to the presidency later that year.

From 1920 to 1928 Obregón (1920-1924), Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928), and Morones dominated Mexican politics and the labor movement. When Obregón left office, he placed Calles in the presidency, but Obregón planned to run for reelection in 1928. Morones, the CROM, and the PLM gave full labor support to the two leaders. In return, an increasingly powerful federal government provided legal, financial, and sometimes military support to the CROM and the PLM against rivals such as the new Mexican Communist Party (PCM), the anarchosyndicalist CGT, and conservative Catholic unions. Morones used that support to crush rival labor unions, expel dissidents from the CROM, and force businesses to accept his unions and their contracts.

The CROM was a national confederation of state labor federations, which in turn united local CROM unions organized by trade or by establishment. CROM-government labor policy supported the creation of national federations of unions by industry as well as the principle that contract terms negotiated by the union representing the largest number of workers in a factory or workplace, usually the CROM union, should apply to all workers there. Both policies increased membership in CROM unions, union dues collected by CROM officials, and political support for the new regime.

Obregón and Morones supported Calles' successful bid for the presidency in 1924. Calles repaid the favor by appointing Morones to the Ministry of Industry, Labor, and Commerce. Other CROM leaders became mayors, governors, senators, diputados (deputies), and heads of government offices. From his post atop the government's labor ministry, Morones could influence the recently established federal labor boards, whose decisions favored CROM over its rivals and often over business interests. In towns with a single powerful industry, CROM leaders became virtual local dictators. In Orizaba, an important mill town in Veracruz, the head of the local CROM, Eucario León, determined who worked and who did not, who obtained government concessions, and, sometimes, who lived and died. Antonio J. Hernández later exercised similar power in Atlixco. CROM leaders often employed hired gunmen to kill their enemies, unthreatened by local governments often run by them or their cronies. With state support, the national CROM claimed two million members in 1928. Though certainly exaggerated, the figure suggests the startling degree to which the organization thoroughly dominated the Mexican labor movement in the 1920s.

Morones and his friends earned great incomes from mandatory union dues, from government contracts and concessions, and from their political influence. Marjorie Ruth Clark, author of Organized Labor in Mexico, noted that "when a government department was placed in control of a CROM man, he made it known to every employee in that department that 'voluntary' contributions to the support of the Mexican Labor Party would be welcome and would be of material assistance in keeping the employee in the job." Most business owners understood that to settle a strike, cash would have to change hands. As Ernest Gruening, author of Mexico and Its Heritage, wrote, "The head of the Mexican labor movement, Luis N. Morones … owns many properties including a textile factory—though not in his own name. He lives lavishly. He sports not less than a half dozen automobiles. His parrandas [parties] staged every weekend in the suburb of Tlalpam are notorious for their orgiastic extravagance."

Some unions refused to join CROM, particularly large unions in critical economic sectors such as electrical power, railroads, and oil. In other sectors, the anarchist CGT, Catholic labor militants, and the PCM frequently competed with the CROM for control. Between 1921 and 1924 partisans of these organizations fought violent labor wars, but in the end CROM won.

The Casa collapsed when it fell out of favor with the state; a similar though slower fate befell the CROM. Alvaro Obregón ruled Mexico after the Carranza assassination, governing through local alliances with regional strongmen. Because electoral laws did not permit direct reelection to the presidency, he waited patiently while Calles served, then ran for office in 1928. His predecessors, Madero and Carranza, fell to assassins' bullets, and so did he when a Catholic militant shot him during a campaign dinner. Morones and CROM had not supported Obregón's reelection, so some of his supporters blamed the labor leader for the death of their former president.

Outgoing president Calles made two decisions that seriously affected the CROM. To avoid further assassinations, he decided to institutionalize the new ruling elite and founded the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party, PNR) for that purpose. The move angered Morones, who held ambitions for his own PLM. He supported the presidential candidacy of Emilio Portes Gil, an opponent of CROM, in 1928. Losing support within the government, CROM began a slow decline as many regional federations begin to shift alliances. Portes Gil even supported the PCM's Confederación Sindical Unitaria de México (CSUM) as a rival to Morones. Vicente Lombardo Toledano and Fidel Velázquez led the dissident movement within the CROM. In 1931 Mexico's first federal labor law made unions more dependent on the state.

CTM

Lombardo was more of an intellectual than most Mexican labor leaders. He studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School), earned a law degree from Mexico's National University in 1920 and a doctorate in 1933, and wrote some of the most significant texts on Mexican labor affairs. He began his labor career as secretary general of a Mexico City teachers union in 1920, then served on CROM's central committee from 1923 to 1932, though not in Grupo Acción. He was perhaps Morones's chief rival inside CROM, which he abandoned in September 1932 to form the Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (General Confederation of Workers and Farmers of Mexico, CGOCM) in 1933. The growing distance between the government and Morones and the success of dissidents like Lombardo and the Communist Party led to increasing dispersion of organized labor in the early 1930s, when there were 17 labor confederations and 2,800 individual unions.

In 1934 the PNR elected Lazaro Cárdenas to the presidency. Cárdenas sought a political base among farmers and urban workers, leading him to support efforts to unify the now fragmented labor movement. In 1935 former president Calles and Cárdenas suffered a public split, thus lending urgency to Cárdenas's attempts to gain labor's political support. In 1935 Lombardo organized a meeting of CGOCM, CSUM, and powerful unions in railroads and electrical power, forming the pro-CárdenasComité Nacional de Defensa Proletaria (National Proletarian Defense Committee, CNDP). He then used the CNDP to organize the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Mexican Workers' Union, CTM) in February 1936.

Lombardo became the CTM's first secretary general in 1936 and stayed in the post until 1941. His organization included unions and federations that were formally affiliated with the CGOCM (some of which supported Lombardo, and others Velázquez), the PCM-affiliated CSUM, and powerful national unions in railroads, electrical power, telephones, mining, and other sectors. Only the CROM and CGT unions stayed out. The old CROM dissident, Fidel Velázquez, became the first secretary of organization, 1936 to 1941, and in that post created state and local federations that were personally loyal to him. Quite the opposite of the intellectual Lombardo, Velázquez had worked in a dairy during the revolution. In 1923, with Alfonso and Justino Sánchez Madariaga, he founded a union of dairy workers that affiliated with CROM. Velázquez left CROM in 1929 to join those who supported Calles's project for an official party.

In March 1938 Cárdenas reorganized the PNR into the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexican Revolutionary Party, PRM), to represent four sectors: labor, popular, agrarian, and the military. Despite the withdrawal of the Miners Union in June 1936 and PCM opposition to labor joining the official party, the CTM claimed almost a million workers in 1938 and was the foundation of the PRM labor sector.

Close ties between Cárdenas and Lombardo assured labor support for Cárdenas's chosen successor as president, the more conservative Manuel Avila Camacho, who occupied the post from 1940 to 1946. Despite personal friendship between Avila Camacho and the Marxist Lombardo, the increasing ideological distance between an increasingly right-wing government and the admirer of the Soviet Union led to Velázquez replacing Lombardo as CTM secretary general in February 1941. Lombardo continued to head the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (Union of Latin American Workers, CTAL) from 1938 to 1961.

Velázquez' closest allies were Fernando Amilpa, Jesús Yuren Aguilar, Alfonso Sánchez Madariaga, and Luis Quintero, together known as the cinco lobitos, or five little wolves. Like Velázquez, the five had worked in unions outside heavy industry. These unions required more government support than the industrial unions, undoubtedly shaping their views of the state-labor alliance.

The 1940s was a difficult period for urban labor in Mexico. Wartime inflation brought the sharpest decline in real wages in Mexican history, though both Communist and non-Communist unions of the CTM supported a pact with the government to suppress strikes and wage increases. In 1946 the strongly pro-United States and probusiness Miguel Alemán became Mexico's president (an office he occupied from 1946 to 1952) and transformed the official party into the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary party, PRI), which included only three sectors: labor, agrarian, and popular. The CTM tightened its control over the labor sector of the PRI while becoming an increasingly docile tool of an increasingly conservative government.

An antilabor government with a dependent Velázquez caused a crisis within the CTM. The PCM and the strong industrial unions began to oppose CTM leadership. The lobitos responded by expelling Lombardo from the organization in January 1948. In October of that year, President Alemán jailed the Communist leadership of the railroad union and imposed new leadership that was dependent on government and the army. Alemán then instituted similar measures to weaken previously independent national oil and mining unions.

The 1950s and Beyond

Velázquez had formally ceded the leadership of the CTM to Amilpa in 1947, but once Velázquez again became secretary general in 1950, only his death in 1997 would bring a new leader to the CTM. He retook the reins of power at a moment when the government had eliminated his strongest rivals within the organization, the independent national unions. From that point on the Mexican government both supported the CTM and also controlled it by allowing some national unions to remain outside the confederation and by permitting the existence of smaller, rival confederations. Nonetheless, the postwar CTM was the largest and most important member of the labor sector of the PRI and the largest and most powerful labor confederation in Mexico, bringing together about 1.6 million members and 4,200 unions by the end of the 1950s.

Although railroad, electrical, and telephone workers dared to confront government control of the labor movement in subsequent decades, the CTM stalwartly supported the regime, which in turn never abandoned its allies in the CTM bureaucracy. Many CTM unions required their members to belong to the PRI and to pay dues to both the union and the party, while the PRI-government assured that CTM leaders would defeat legal challenges from the rank and file. When the government began to abandon its protectionist policies after the economic crisis of 1976, and with enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the old industries that had been the heart of Mexican unionization inevitably declined, weakening both the PRI and organized labor. The slow decline of the CTM paralleled the fall of the PRI, which lost its first presidential election in history in 2000, only three years after the death of Fidel Velázquez, labor's leader during every PRI presidential victory between 1946 and 1994. While alive, Veázquez remembered the lesson he had learned from the Casa del Obrero Mundial and CROM: never disobey the state.

Key Players

Lombardo Toledano, Vicente (1894-1968): Lombardo Toledano was the founder and first secretary general (1936-1940) of Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Mexican Labor Confederation, CTM). He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Independent National University of Mexico, UNAM), was interim governor of Puebla (December 1923), and a member of the Confederación Regional Obrera Méxicana (Mexican Regional Labor Union, CROM) central committee (1923-1932). A lawyer and intellectual, Lombardo Toledano wrote La Libertad Sindical en México(1926).

Morones, Luis N. (1890-1964): Morones was the founder and first secretary general of CROM. He was also founding member of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas. Morones served as minister of industry, commerce, and labor in the government of Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928).

Velázquez Sánchez, Fidel (1900-1997): Velázquez Sánchez was the secretary general of CTM (1941-1947 and 1950-1997). Velázquez Sánchez founded the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Lechera (Milk Industry Workers' Union, 1923), which was affiliated with CROM.

See also: North American Free Trade Agreement.

Bibliography

Books

Andrews, Gregg. Shoulder to Shoulder? The American Federation of Labor, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution, 1910 to 1924. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.

Ashby, Joe C. Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution Under Lazaro Cardenas. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

Bortz, Jeffrey, and Stephen Haber, eds. The Mexican Economy, 1870-1930: Essays on the Economic History of Institutions, Revolution, and Growth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Carr, Barry. El Movimiento Obrero y la Politica en México,1910-1929. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1981.

——. Marxism and Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Clark, Marjorie Ruth. Organized Labor in Mexico. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1934.

Cook, Maria Lorena. Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers' Movement in Mexico.University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Gruening, Ernest. Mexico and Its Heritage. New York: The Century Company, 1928.

Hart, John M. Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class,1860-1931. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.

Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

LaBotz, Dan. The Crisis of Mexican Labor. New York:Praeger, 1988.

——. Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Middlebrook, Kevin J. The Paradox of Revolution; Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Ruiz, Ramon. Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries: Mexico, 1911-1923. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Solís de Alba, Ana Alicia. El Movimiento Sindical Pintado de Magenta: Productividad, Sexismo y Neocorporativismo. Mexico: Editorial Itaca, 2002.

—Jeffrey Bortz