I began this study with the object of examining what, in the early 1970s, was a widely held proposition about the role of organized labour in the political system of contemporary Mexico. Briefly, the idea had been developed that the emergence of new forms of ‘independent’ unionism would challenge the previously dominant forms of corporatist union control. The ‘official’ unions, tied to the dominant party, had been one of the major pillars of political stability in the post-war period. The development of this new form of ‘independent’ unionism, then, implied a potential threat to political stability in Mexico.

I decided to examine the behaviour of these independent unions in a single industry, the automobile industry, characterized by the coexistence of both independent and official unions. My aim was to see whether there really were important differences in behaviour between the two types of union.

The results of the empirical research suggested that there were, indeed, important differences between types of union in the auto industry, but that these differences could not be traced solely and exclusively to the dichotomy of independent versus official unionism.

As a result, I was led to explore the implications of my findings in a number of areas. On a fairly concrete level, the research presented in this book seemed to have a number of implications for theories of industrial democracy and militancy, particularly (though not exclusively) in third world countries.

Mexico's authoritarian political system

Many recent analyses of Mexican politics stress the authoritarian features of the political system and the way in which the stability of the regime rests, at least in part, on the control and co-optation of organized labour. According to Lawrence Whitehead,

This orthodox vision of the Mexican polity clearly implies that insurgent movements within the ranks of organized labour are likely to be ephemeral or irrelevant. If they pose any threat to the status quo such movements will be either repressed or brought into the official system of control. As was noted in chapter 1, such arguments are frequently made for other Latin American countries as well.

The argument, elaborated by Guillermo O'Donnell and others, may be summarized briefly as follows: the exigencies of capital accumulation in certain types of peripheral regimes require a strong and autonomous state which will, inter alia, exert control over unions in order to prevent wages from rising too fast (i.e. to the detriment of capital accumulation) and will keep strike activity to a low and manageable level so as not to scare off potential investors.

This chapter looks in detail at wages in the Mexican auto industry, and examines the hypothesis that rates of increase in wages are correlated with union militancy. There then follows a description of the social background of workers in the auto industry and a discussion of the utility or otherwise of describing these workers as an ‘aristocracy of labour’.

Wages

The principal interest in examining differences in wages among the various auto companies is to see if there is any relationship between union militancy and wage gains. The hypothesis is that there is a positive relationship, and it is argued that such wage gains are a direct result of union militancy. For a variety of methodological reasons the argument is somewhat complex. There are three principal sources of difficulty. The first is incomplete data. It was exceedingly difficult to obtain complete and comparable time series for all the companies. As a result, a number of partial comparisons have had to be made, and inferences drawn therefrom. Secondly, and relatedly, we are not interested primarily in comparisons at one point in time. Wages do differ between companies, and this reflects, among other things, the different local labour markets. It is not surprising that money wages are lower in the towns outside Mexico City. What is of more interest is the rate of growth of wages over time: i.e. do the more militant unions obtain higher percentage wage hikes, irrespective of the varying starting points?

The labour courts

According to the Mexican labour law, workers in specified industries fall under the jurisdiction either of the Juntas Locales de Conciliación y Arbitrage or of the Junta Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje. This is not a two-tiered system; there are two separate labour court systems, the local and the federal. There are a number of differences in the operation of the two systems, of which the principal is that the local Juntas appear to be much more open to political pressure from the state Governors and local political forces.

Generally speaking, the industries which are of national importance, such as railways, steel, textiles, etc. fall under federal jurisdiction. In 1975 the automobile assembly industry was transferred from local to federal jurisdiction. Since federal records are centralized in Mexico City whereas local records are not, this makes data collection considerably easier and the federal records only were consulted. This meant that the universe of cases was considerably reduced, and clearly any thorough study would have to utilize the records of the local Juntas as well.

The labour courts have three judges. These judges are supposed to represent the interests of capital, of labour and of the government. The representatives of labour and of capital are designated by trade unions and employers' associations, and the representative of government is, of course, a functionary of the Ministry of Labour.

The aspect of union power which is considered in this chapter is primarily organizational. It concerns the ability of the union to function effectively as an organization at the plant and company levels, dealing with a range of industrial conflicts. In addition to the yearly or biennial negotiations over wages and contract revisions, trade unions are involved in a complex web of daily negotiations and conflicts with management. For the union to operate effectively in this sphere, a certain minimum level of institutionalization is required. This implies some degree of acceptance by management, some level of support and legitimacy from the workforce, and some measure of organizational resources for the union apparatus.

The autonomy and effectiveness of the union in the workplace can vary enormously, from situations where the workplace union is a mere cipher and real power rests with the union federation or with a political party, to situations where the workplace union is wholly autonomous and operates effectively entirely on the basis of its own resources. The unions in the Mexican automobile industry vary considerably along this continuum, as will be illustrated below.

The importance of this organizational power of unions is twofold. In the first place it affects the locus of economic bargaining. Only unions with a certain measure of organizational autonomy and power will be able to bargain independently of the support of national union federations.

As indicated in chapter 1, the prevailing notion concerning union government in Mexico is expressed in the concept of charrismo. This has come to be used as a catch-all epithet to describe a variety of union practices. The term is largely devoid of analytic utility, as may be seen from the following representative statement:

In this usage, charrismo simply indicates that the author or speaker disapproves of the union leadership in some way. Furthermore, there is a generalized belief that Mexican unions typically are charro unions. Yet there appear to be very few serious studies of internal union government in Mexican unions. This belief is a generalization from a number of specific cases, such as the 1958–9 railway strike.

Two questions immediately spring to mind: (a) to what extent is this picture of charrismo an accurate description of Mexican unionism? (b) If non-charro unions exist, are they more likely to be found among the ‘independent’ unions, or are these also breeding grounds for charrismo?

This chapter provides a historical account of the development of the unions in the Mexican automobile industry. Each union is treated separately, and systematic comparisons among them are postponed until chapters 5–8.

As indicated in chapter 1, Mexican labour law allows for the formation of a variety of types of union: plant unions, enterprise unions, national industrial unions, craft unions and general unions. There is, therefore, no reason in principle why the Mexican automobile industry should not have been organized into a single national industrial union, like the United Auto Workers of America or, indeed, into a series of craft unions and general unions, as in the United Kingdom. The automobile industry could, also, have been incorporated into the large mining–metallurgical union. As it happened, the automobile industry in Mexico was basically organized on a plant-by-plant or enterprise-by-enterprise level.

The situation in 1978 is outlined in table 2.1. With the exception of the GM plant in Toluca, where the union was organized as a section of a state-wide metallurgical union (and the Ford plants prior to 1977, which were organized in a similar manner), all the unions in the industry were autonomous entities, affiliated to various union confederations but in principle enjoying autonomy in bargaining and union government.

The organization of this chapter follows the chronological establishment of the automobile plants in Mexico. The oldest firms are discussed first.

Control over work processes

In day-to-day industrial relations in Western Europe and the United States, a host of formal and informal agreements about work loads and speeds have developed. This has created a complex of ‘custom and practice’, which is often at the heart of industrial conflict. Custom and practice are the result of the struggle of several generations of trade unionists to bargain, at the plant level, over effort. There have, of course, been managerial counter-offensives, and the outcome of this unceasing struggle has not always been to labour's advantage.

The fact that custom and practice are embedded in the concrete work situation makes investigation and measurement difficult. It indicates that a study of formal agreements such as collective contracts may seriously misrepresent the situation, by underestimating the importance of unwritten, but real, custom and practice.

Because the research in Mexico did not have the resources to investigate the reality of day-to-day industrial relations on the shop floor, the results reported below must necessarily be treated with a certain degree of caution. Nevertheless, as was argued in the preceding chapter, the highly formal and legalistic features of Mexican industrial relations mean that important gains by unions and management tend to be explicitly acknowledged in collective contracts. This may be in the nature of a post factum assertion about previous practice, designed to prevent gains achieved in daily negotiations from subsequently being eroded on the shop floor, or these issues may be raised and fought for primarily around the negotiating table.