America Centrale, Messico, lotte di classe Wsws 06-03-07
Lo sciopero nazionale di minatori e siderurgici mette a
nudo le tensioni sociali in Messico
Rafael Azul
1-3 marzo 2005, Messico: oltre 250 000 minatori e siderurgici in sciopero, una delle maggiori
lotte operaie degli ultimi tre decenni, indetta dalla confederazione nazionale
STNMM.
La lotta è iniziata
come sciopero selvaggio il 28 febbraio in alcune miniere di rame e zinco
del Grupo Mexico, per protestare contro
l’incuria della società che ha causato la morte di 65 minatori nell’esplosione del
19 febbraio alla miniera Pasta de Conchos.
Il sindacato (diretto da Gomez, ricco economista laureato ad
Harvard, puntello della corrotta burocrazia
sindacale messicana e figura di spicco
del PRI, il Partito rivoluzionario istituzionale al potere per 70 anni prima
dell’elezione nel 2000 di Fox) non si è mosso per far chiudere la miniera quando,
due settimane prima della tragedia, il rapporto di un ispettore ha rivelato violazioni nella sicurezza della miniera
ed alti livelli di gas metano, esplosivo.
È il primo sciopero
nazionale dei minatori in Messico dopo quello del 1944 per il riconoscimento
del sindacato e per aumenti salariali, assieme ai lavoratori del settore comunicazioni
e petrolifero.
Lo sciopero della scorsa settimana ha causato la chiusura di 70 miniere in tutto il Messico
che producono carbone, rame, argento, zinco, etc. (perdite calcolate per $17MN);
ha fatto chiudere anche le acciaierie
Altos Hornos e Mittal, il maggior produttore di acciaio del Messico
(perdite per $10mn.).
I minatori hanno un salario giornaliero di $7, lavorano in
condizioni di rischio con equipaggiamento obsoleto e monitoraggio spesso
sabotato appositamente dalla proprietà per evitare interruzioni nel lavoro.
La maggior parte del
settore minerario messicano, di proprietà statale prima del 1982, è stato
privatizzata in seguito alle crisi per il debito statale degli anni 1980 e
1990.
I salari reali per
i lavoratori non qualificati sono continuati a calare negli ultimi due decenni,
quelli dei qualificati sono rimasti stagnanti.
I salari dei lavoratori delle costruzioni hanno perso il 28% del loro potere d’acquisto nel
1988-1994; – 33,31% nel 1994-2000.
Settore
manifatturiero, dopo + 40% 88-94; – 17% 1994-2000.
Produttività del
lavoro +43% 1990-2000; à salario medio
da $1,45 a $1,80 (+24%, circa).
A fine anni 1990, i costi
per unità di lavoro in Messico erano tra i più bassi del mondo.
Dal 2000 la situazione è peggiorata per l’aumento del tasso di disoccupazione, causato dal trasferimento di parte delle
lavorazioni delle industrie esportatrici a basso salario – le cosiddette
maquiladoras – in Cina.
Contro un aumento di 6
mn.della forza lavoro, c’è stato un aumento di 1 mn. degli occupati.
I dati del 2003 mostrano che continua l’erosione del potere
d’acquisto dei salari.
Quasi la metà dei
messicani viveva nel 2003 sotto il livello di povertà, il 17% in estrema
povertà; la situazione sarebbe peggiore senza le rimesse degli emigrati in
USA e Canada.
Secondo uno studio congiunto della Universidad Obrera e della
Autonomous University, nel 2004 una
famiglia messicana media aveva bisogno di lavorare più di 29 ore al giorno,
contro le 25h e 13’ nel 1997, e le 8h e 36’ nel 1987.
Nel 2004 una famiglia messicana media doveva spendere il 94% del suo reddito per cibo e affitto.
Wsws 06-03-07
National strike by miners, steelworkers reveals class
tensions in Mexico
By Rafael Azul
Last week, more than a quarter-million miners and steelworkers walked
off their jobs in one of the largest industrial strikes in Mexico in three
decades. Between March 1 and March 3, hundreds of mines and mills across the
country were affected by the national strike called by the 270,000-member
National Mine and Metal Workers Union (STNMM).
The action began with wildcat strikes
by miners on February 28 at a series of copper and zinc mines owned by Grupo
Mexico, sparked in large measure by company’s callous
disregard for safety that resulted in the death of 65 miners in a February 19
explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine in Coahuila, near the border with the US
state of Texas.
The walkouts followed the decision of
the government to end its rescue and recovery efforts at the mine. Fueling the anger of the miners was the callous indifference of
President Vicente Fox’s administration and the conviction that the
government would do nothing to seriously investigate the causes of the mine
disaster, let alone end the deadly and oppressive working conditions miners
face.
In an effort to contain this explosion,
the STNMM called for a national work stoppage on March 1. In addition to
protesting the miners’ deaths—which union president Napoleon Gomez Urrutia called
“industrial homicide”—the STNMM leadership called the strike to oppose the
Labor Ministry’s decision on February 28 to remove Gomez and replace him with
union dissident Elias Morales Hernandez.
Gomez is a fixture in the corrupt
Mexican labor bureaucracy who inherited his position from his father and is
a prominent figure in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which
ruled the country for 70 years until Fox’s 2000 election.
Although Gomez has long collaborated
with the corporate bosses and suppressed rank-and-file workers, the Fox
administration is concerned that he is losing his grip over his members,
who have been involved in a series of recent struggles. Moreover, the SNTMM has
opposed some of Fox’s initiatives to reform the long-standing corporatist
relations between the employers, the government and the unions that have been
used to suppress the class struggle while providing the labor bureaucracy with
lucrative careers.
The widespread response to the union’s
call for a national strike is not an indication of any support for Gomez—a millionaire and Harvard-trained
economist with no serious connections to rank-and-file miners and steelworkers—but
an indication of the explosive character of class tensions in Mexico.
This was the first national strike
by miners since a strike over union recognition and wages in 1944 that was part
of a broad labor offensive that included strikes by communication workers and
oil workers.
Last
week’s protest strike shut down mines across Mexico that produce coal, copper,
silver, zinc and other minerals. It also shut down the Altos Hornos and Mittal
steel mills; the latter Dutch-owned company is Mexico’s largest steel producer.
Virtually every union miner across Mexico
participated in the walkout. News of the strike caused a rise in the world
price of silver—Mexico
produces 15 percent of the world’s silver. The 70 mines paralyzed by the strike
lost US$17 million on Thursday, and the steel mills lost US$10 million.
Thousands of workers stayed out on
March 2, including the Sonoran copper miners at
the sprawling Cananea and La Caridad mines near the border with the US state of Arizona.
The tragedy at the Pasta de Conchos mine
revealed the level of exploitation that exists in the Mexican mining industry,
where tens of thousands of coal miners risk their lives and health every day
for near-starvation wages. Earning as little as US$7 a day, miners are
working under unsafe and unsanitary conditions and using outdated equipment and
monitoring devices that are in many cases deliberately sabotaged by management
to prevent the interruption of coal production.
Pasta de Conchos also shed light on
the corporatist arrangements between mine owners, government inspectors and
union officials, which exist at the expense of miners. The union’s collaboration became clear when the relatives of the
trapped miners at Pasta de Conchos began to criticize STNMM President Gomez for
letting a week go by without visiting the mine.
When he finally arrived, relatives
called him a “rat” and chased him into the mining company’s offices. Gomez
would not explain why the union had not
moved to close the mine two weeks before the blast, when an inspector’s report
detailed safety violations at the mine, including high levels of explosive methane
gas.
The government’s heavy-handed efforts to
remove Gomez behind the backs of the union membership and replace him with
rival bureaucrat Elias Morales only angered the miners further. The Labor
Secretariat justified its undemocratic intervention by claiming that Morales
had been the real winner in union elections in 2002, reversing the Ministry’s
previous decision that recognized Gomez as the leader.
While the miners’ protests and last
week’s national strike were sparked by the industrial murder of the 65 Coajuila
miners, the motive force behind the walkout is the fundamental
transformation of industrial and social relations over the last two decades.
Driven by the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the bulk of Mexico’s
mineral wealth—which had been state-owned before 1982—has been privatized. Pressured by the US
and the International Monetary Fund to balance its budget through the sale of
state-owned assets, Mexico’s
mines, steel mills and other industries were sold of at very favorable terms to
the buyers.
Hand in hand with the sale of
state-owned firms, so-called labor reforms were instituted that facilitated
an all-out assault on wages. Hammered
by a dramatic increase in unemployment, real wages for unskilled workers have steadily fallen over
the last two decades while wages for skilled workers have remained stagnant.
According to a study conducted by Mexico’s
“Universidad Obrera” (Labor
University), construction
industry wages lost 28 percent of their purchasing power between 1988 and 1994
and 33.31 percent between 1994 and 2000. In manufacturing, after increasing 40
percent between 1988 and 1994, real wages fell by 17 percent between 1994 and
2000.
While labor productivity grew by
more than 43 percent between 1990 and 2000, the average wage only increased
from US$1.45 to US$1.80. By the end of the 1990s, Mexican per-unit labor costs
were among the lowest in the world.
Since
the year 2000, this process has been aggravated by increasing levels of unemployment,
as low-wage export-oriented factories—the so-called maquiladoras—have moved
many of their operations to China, placing a further downward pressure on wages. Since 2000, only 1 million jobs have been created, while the labor
force grew by 6 million workers.
Statistics for 2003 indicate that
the decay of purchasing power continues. Nearly half of all Mexicans in that
year lived below the poverty line, and 17 percent lived in extreme poverty. The situation would be worse if it weren’t for the dollars sent by
Mexican emigrants in the United States and Canada.
A 2004 joint study by Universidad Obrera
and Mexico’s prestigious Autonomous University determined that to live
modestly, an average Mexican family needed to work more than 29 hours a day.
This is up from 25 hours and 13 minutes in 1997 and 8 hours and 36 minutes in
1987. The study also indicates that in 2004, an average Mexican family
would need to spend 94 percent of its take-home pay for food and rent, leaving
6 percent for everything else.
Falling real wages, growing unemployment
and staggering levels of social inequality are what characterize Mexican
society today. These are the conditions that lay behind the massive strike that
shut down the country’s mines and steel mills last week.