Remaking Mexican Labor
The CTM then proceeded, with the implicit help of the State, to eliminate independent union leaders in industrial unions such as miners, oil and railroad workers. The state exercised its authority to oust uncooperative union leaders, either by removing them directly or manipulating internal union elections. The CTM concurred, leading some observers to joke that the CTM now meant se teme ("to be feared").
New leaders thus imposed were referred to as "charros", or "cowboys", after Jesús Díaz de León, the new leader of the railroad workers union in 1948, who was fond of the finery associated with Mexican cowboys. The government coerced the Sindicato de Trabajadores Petroleros de la República Mexicana, the union that represented the oil workers at PEMEX, to accept Gustavo Roldán Vargas as its new leader in 1949. Likewise, Jesús Carrasco was impossed on the Miners and Metal Workers Union (the SNTMMSRM) in 1950.
These heavy-handed efforts did not always go unopposed: when the government installed Carrasco as the head of the SNTMMSRM, a number of locals bolted from the union to form the National Miners Union. When a strike broke out at the Nueva Rosita coal mine in 1950, the employer managed to force local businesses to refuse to sell food to the strikers. In the meantime the government declared martial law in the area, arrested the rebel union leaders, seized the union's treasury and prohibited further meetings. The government used similar tactics in 1959 after the nationalization of the rail industry, firing thousands of strikers and sentencing union leaders to more than ten years in prison. The CTM approved these and other measures to isolate or eliminate independent unions and rebel movements within its membership.
The CTM did not hold a monopoly on labor organizing or even the exclusive relationship with the PRI: the CROM and other organizations also had a formal relationship with the PRI through the Congreso de Trabajo (CT). The CMT had, however, the advantage of State sponsorship, which it used to oppose any independent unions and to hold down the demands of its constituent unions at the behest of PRI leadership. The CTM adopted a practice of entering into "protection contracts" --also known as sweetheart deals-- where the workers not only had no role in negotiating, but in some cases did not even know such deals existed. Many of these "unions" degenerated into organizations that "sold" contracts to a CTM affiliate as a guarantee against representation by independent unions, but which did not function unions in any meaningful sense.
Read more about this topic: Confederation Of Mexican Workers
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