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	Workers Vanguard No. 1090	20 May 2016

Mexican Steel Workers Win Strike

The following article is translated from Espartaco No. 45 (May 2016), newspaper of the Grupo Espartaquista de México.

In a refreshing show of power, Local 271 of the Mexican mining and steel workers union (SNTMMSRM) went on strike in March against the global steel giant ArcelorMittal. For more than a year, the biggest steel producer in the world has been telling its workers in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, that some of them will have to be sacrificed so that the company can maintain its obscene profits. (ArcelorMittal’s CEO is worth $13.1 billion.) After many months of negotiations and in response to more than 300 layoffs, 3,500 workers at the steel plant stopped production at noon on Friday, March 4. The workers paid no heed to the decision by the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board (JFCA) an hour earlier refusing government authorization for the strike.

Seeing that the workers were not cowed by the JFCA, the government threatened to send in its armed thugs to ensure the safety of the plant and its surroundings. The workers know exactly what that means, since two of their comrades died at the hands of government forces while defending their strike ten years ago. This time, the union mobilized quickly, got letters of support from powerful workers organizations internationally and led a demonstration on March 12 of about 10,000 people, including other union contingents (notably the SNTE/CNTE teachers). In the end, the union settled the strike; instead of being laid off, 125 unionized workers were relocated and 81 took voluntary early retirement with 100,000 pesos [$5,500] in severance pay. The workers also won no reprisals and full pay for the days of the strike.

The SNTMMSRM has a long history of confrontation with the mining bosses. The fact that miners receive better wages than most workers in Mexico is a reflection of their being organized in a union and being willing to play hardball. Likewise, the bosses understand that their profits derive from the labor of the miners, steel workers and others who play a role in the production of steel. The bosses would like to destroy the union and trample on the workers at will. They have not succeeded, though not for lack of trying.

On 19 February 2006, a mine explosion in Pasta de Conchos, Coahuila, killed 65 miners. In the wake of this industrial murder, and in a clear attempt to divert attention away from itself and the mining bosses, the government launched a union-busting attack, removing the national leader of the union [Napoleon Gómez Urrutia], bringing charges against him and freezing the union’s bank accounts. After other union officials were arrested, Gómez Urrutia fled to Canada. On the heels of repeated work stoppages throughout the country protesting the attack, a 2006 strike in Lázaro Cárdenas, which lasted over four months, handed the bosses and their government a humiliating defeat: the workers got their raise, they got paid for the duration of the strike, and the company had to recognize Gómez Urrutia as general secretary of the union.

We oppose binding arbitration in the struggles between labor and capital. The government tries to pretend, through the JFCA, that it is a neutral intermediary helping in labor negotiations. Nothing could be further from the truth. The government is the executive committee of the capitalist class (the owners of the mines, the manufacturing plants and the banks), and does everything in its power to defend the ability of the capitalists to exploit the workers. That includes using its armed forces and police to break strikes, using its courts and prisons to go after union leaders and passing laws against everything that the working class needs to do to defend itself and protect its interests.

The main purpose of the Federal Labor Law (LFT), which has been in effect since the early 1930s, was to legitimize the intervention of the bourgeois state into workers’ struggles and provide a “legal” framework for maintaining capitalist exploitation. In any case, the bourgeoisie has been chipping away at the limited rights enshrined in the LFT, implementing changes to the law that have made it easier for the bosses to avoid granting benefits, outsource jobs and get rid of workers.

One of the issues in the recent strike was the hiring of non-union workers at the plant and leaving jobs normally filled by unionized workers vacant. This is a transparent attempt to weaken the union and cut back on labor costs, since non-union workers have far fewer rights and benefits. In April 2001, the Supreme Court declared that those sections of the LFT permitting closed shops were unconstitutional. The right of a union to demand that all the workers at a given company be union members is an important weapon in the workers’ arsenal against the bosses, who seek to divide the working class and weaken its organizations by hiring non-unionized labor.

Internationally, there has been a growth of temporary and subcontracted work. This has served to undermine the labor movement but has also sparked various kinds of union struggle. From the existence of labor brokers in South Africa and the proliferation of temporary contracts for young workers in Europe to the replacement of unionized jobs by non-unionized ones through outsourcing, all over the world there is an urgent need to organize the unorganized and fight the bosses’ divide-and-rule strategies through joint class struggle.

The bourgeoisie also pushes nationalist ideology in its attempt to prevent workers from uniting across borders. In fact, in order to fully bring its power to bear against huge global corporations, the working class—whether steel workers in Mexico or iron ore miners from Canada to South Africa—must be united against its common enemy. The defense of the class interests of the proletariat must be imbued with the program of international solidarity and struggle that Marx and Engels inscribed on the banner of the communist movement more than 160 years ago: “Workers of the world, unite.”

The union bureaucracy serves to tie the working class to the bourgeoisie through one or another capitalist party, i.e., through the illusion that the capitalist system of exploitation can be made to work for the proletariat. To the contrary, the working class must mobilize independently of the bourgeoisie. Break with the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] and Morena [Movement for National Regeneration]! For a workers party!

Only in this way will the proletariat be able to fight for its historic interests: the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a society in which production is aimed at satisfying human needs.