Strikes could reach beyond factories on border
MATAMOROS, Mexico — Strikes and wildcat walkouts at dozens of foreign-owned factories and other companies have jolted this industrial city across the Rio Grande from Brownsville for weeks now, providing encouragement to lowwage workers and a warning to companies across Mexico.
The initial strikes at nearly four dozen of the factories known as maquiladoras have been resolved, with tens of thousands of workers winning 20 percent pay bumps and a steep one-time bonus.
But as those plants return to production, workers have been walking out of still more — as well as at supermarkets and other businesses — demanding the same concessions.
“The constitution says that every Mexican has a right to a dignified wage. That’s what we are pushing for,” said David Cabrera, 25, one of scores of workers who walked off the floor at Castlight de Mexico, which is owned by an Atlantabased maker of lighting systems. “Those in power refuse to understand that things are changing, that people have changed.
“We are fed up.”
The concessions won by the Mat-
amoros strikers so far include a bonus of some $1,700 — as much as a quarter of some workers’ annual income — and an average pay bump of less than $2 per day. While pay varies according to skills, strikers say wages average about $12 a day, plus benefits.
The strikers have dubbed themselves the 20/ 32 movement, referring to the 20 percent pay boost they’re demanding and the bonus, which is 32,000 pesos.
Atlanta-based Acuity Brands, which owns the Castlight plant, had no comment, a spokeswoman said. Rolando González, president of the Matamoros branch of Index, a national association of export industries to which most of the targeted companies belong, did not respond to requests for comment.
The strikes haven’t yet spread much beyond Matamoros, but they nevertheless threaten to rattle fragile supply chains for the North American automotive industry, heavily dependent upon Mexican proximity and low wages.
Maquiladoras employ more than 50,000 workers in Matamoros, a city of about 550,000 people. In all Mexico, some 1,200 maquiladoras employ more than 1.2 million. Most of the factories are near the U.S. border and major transportation networks, and many produce electronics, seats and an array of parts for the automotive industry.
Strikers here say they were partly inspired by the election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has promised to govern on behalf of the poor.
Since taking office in December, López Obrador has reached agreement to sharply increase Mexico’s minimum wage — raising it 16 percent nationwide and doubling it along the U.S. border to about $9 a day. Wage increases have failed to keep up with inflation for much of the past 30 years, economists say.
Only a small fraction of Mexican workers actually earn the minimum wage, but few earn more than triple it. Companies and unions use the officially set minimum as a guidepost in setting pay scales.
“The recovery of purchasing power has begun,” López Obrador said in announcing the wage increases. “We’re all going to benefit because where there are greater earnings, the internal market is strengthened. If people don’t have enough to even buy the indispensable, there is no growth.”
López Obrador also has called for democratizing Mexico’s widely corrupt unions. Critics contend that many politically connected union leaders stay in power through rigged elections and sign contracts that are frequently more favorable to management than their own rank and file.
“They are the right hand of the human resources departments of companies,” said Susana Prieto, a labor lawyer advising the Matamoros strikers. “They blackmail and threaten workers.”
López Obrador’s political allies, who control the new Congress, are working on labor reforms. Provisions for greater workers’ rights also were written into the revamped North American free trade pact that President Donald Trump has signed with Mexico and Canada. But the U.S. Congress has yet to approve the treaty, and opponents say it still doesn’t do enough for Mexico’s workers.
“It’s part of the scenario we are living in Mexico,” said Ricardo Castro-Garza, head of the labor practice in the Mexico offices of global law firm Baker McKenzie. “The real question is, what is going to happen with the rest of industry.”
Even as wages have stagnated, manufacturing has emerged in the past three decades as Mexico’s economic engine. The maquiladoras, and the automotive industry overall, are the most important manufacturing sectors.
While the labor turmoil in Matamoros owes to conditions particular to the city and its unions, they serve as a warning for the rest of industrial Mexico. Companies and business groups routinely warn that they will leave Mexico if worker demands and other factors grow onerous.
That flashes a yellow warning for López Obrador as well. A sharp drop in foreign and Mexican investment could bring havoc to his entire agenda. López Obrador himself has yet to comment on the strikes. His labor minister, Luisa Alcalde, didn’t meet with strikers when visiting Matamoros recently.
“Caution and restraint are really the watchwords of what López Obrador and his folks are doing,” said Ben Davis, international affairs director at United Steelworkers, the U.S. union, who closely follows Mexican labor issues.
Some of Matamoros’ factory workers have been blessed with better contracts won decades ago by late union leader Agapito Gonzalez Cavazos, an oldstyle labor boss. He firmly controlled his members but also squeezed concessions from companies duplicated in few other places, said Cirila Quintero, a labor expert at the Matamoros campus of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a think tank.
A clause in many of those contracts dictates that any percentage increase in the minimum wage be mirrored in the augmented pay of all union members.
Members of other unions here and across Mexico face a tougher gauntlet to win the same concessions, Quintero said. Still, she said, “Matamoros is a laboratory for imagining the reconfiguration of labor relations in highly unionized places.”
As strikers gathered late last week outside the gates of Castlight, which is in an industrial park blocks from the Rio Grande, senior officials from their national union met inside with factory managers. After several hours of talks, the officials emerged to tell their members that they’d achieved nothing.
“The company says it can’t do it in these economic conditions” because of competition from China and elsewhere, said Heriberto Serrano, a representative of the national Chemical and Petrochemical Workers union. “These type of actions aren’t going to achieve anything.”
Workers responded with heckling and angry stares. They said they’d continue their walkout. Further talks Monday produced the same results.
“We don’t even know who this guy is,” said Fernando Lara, 33, a father of two young U.S. citizens who has been working at the plant since being deported last year from upstate Michigan. “These guys are saying they are going to go to China. That’s what they all are saying. It’s blackmail.”
Lara, who migrated to the U.S. at 15 and speaks unaccented English, said the $12.50 he earns a day at the Matamoros plant equals what he made per hour in Michigan.
As the Matamoros walkouts continue, some workers have their eye on the U.S. debate over national security, immigration and President Donald Trump’s demands for a border wall.
“If you don’t want people to go north looking for work, then pay us a dignified wage,” said Samuel Cruz, 50, who was among the hundreds of striking workers outside a Fisher Dynamics plant that makes car seat parts. “It’s that simple.”