Mexican Labor Law - Organizing, Elections and Strikes

Organizing, Elections and Strikes

In order to participate in this system, a union must have a legal registration (registro), must have an officially recognized right to negotiate collective bargaining agreements (titularidad), and must periodically re-register its officers and be accepted by the state (toma de nota). This system can be used to hobble independent unions not associated with the CTM or other federations that have established relations with the state, since all three members of these boards often have self-interested reasons for denying or delaying registration to rival unions.

Employers can also avoid unionization by entering into "protection contracts" with "sindicatos fantasmas" or "ghost unions", often before a plant is ever built. Such contracts frequently give the union a closed shop, which authorizes the union to demand that the employer fire a worker who is not a member in the union in good standing; that power can, in turn, be used to single out employees who seek to organize independent unions for termination. Some observers, including the independent Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (http://www.unt.org.mx) or UNT, estimate that between eighty and ninety percent of all collective bargaining agreements in Mexico fall into this category.

Employees are not always aware that they are covered by a protection contract or that they are represented by a union; while the ghost union may have registered with the Board and filed its contract with it, those records are not made public. An outside union that has filed a petition seeking to organize workers may have its petition dismissed if it is unaware that another union is already recognized or if it does not list the correct name or legal address of the incumbent union.

If an outside union challenging a recognized union is able to obtain registration, then it must go through an election to oust the incumbent. Local Boards often delay such elections for long periods; when they do take place they are by voice vote, rather than secret ballot, in elections held in the workplace under the supervision of a representative of the labor board, the employer, the official union and the independent union. In recent contested elections workers have been required to pass through a gauntlet of armed representatives of the incumbent union in order to report for work and to vote in their workplace. Even if the independent union wins the election, the original contract remains in place until its expiration.

While Mexican labor law gives workers powerful rights to strike, barring employers from hiring replacement workers or operating during a strike, those rights are dependent on official approval from the Board. These local Boards frequently declare strikes to be "inexistente" or non-existent, depriving striking workers of all their legal protections. As a result, while labor protests and work stoppages are frequent in Mexico, legal strikes are rare.