Mexico’s COVID-19 Wildcat Strikes

By KENT PATERSON

May 1, International Workers Day, is a Mexican national holiday. Every year, labor groups and their allies hold demonstrations to commemorate the day, usually by slipping into official celebrations, where demands are vociferously raised, while also staging a big counterdemonstration in Mexico City.

But in the year of the COVID-19 coronavirus, May Day street protests of necessity turned into pro-labor evocations on cyberspace. Yet the issues at stake for Mexican workers this year carried an even more dramatic message than usual: one of life and death.

Alarmed by a new and sudden threat to their lives, in the weeks prior to May Day workers staged wildcat strikes in scores of assembly-for-export factories known as maquiladoras in northern Mexican states.

Fighting for their own health and that of their family members, protesters demanded that employers respect an emergency federal health decree effective March 30, ordering the closure of non-essential businesses and send workers home at full pay.

“We are risking the life of our family,” Ciudad Juarez maquiladora worker Antonio Gutierrez was quoted in El Diario de Juarez. “...And if you show up to work people are crowded together; obviously we are exposed to (the virus) and transmitting the disease to our families.”

Gutierrez’s concerns were shared by workers at other plants in the city bordering El Paso, including at Lear Corporation, which employed at least 14 workers who reportedly perished in recent weeks due to the effects of COVID-19.

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in Mexico during the grim spring of 2020, virus infections of maquiladora industry workers, including deaths, were reported in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and other cities hosting large plants operated by foreign owned companies with names like Honeywell, Lear Corporation and Electrolux, among others. Employing hundreds or thousands of workers, the factories constitute potential “virus greenhouses” in the words of longtime Juarez labor attorney and activist Elizabeth Flores.

Flores said unsafe working conditions in the maquiladoras encompass the close-quarter working environment, the lack of protective gear for employees and even the accident-prone privately owned buses used to transport workers from home to plant that rumble dangerously down the streets in the best of times but are potentially even deadlier in the time of the pandemic.

Jesus Casillas, representative of the Peoples and Workers Organization in Mexicali, Baja California, described similar employment conditions in his city, where he calculated that workers for at least 20 plants staged wildcat strikes in early April.

Overall, the job actions netted mix results, with some workers winning their demands, some getting sent home with 50-75 percent of their regular pay, and still others ordered to show up for “essential” production which, as time passed, was revealed to include auto parts as well as components manufactured by Pentagon contractors.

Precisely how many Mexican maqui-ladora workers have succumbed to or fallen sick from COVID-19 is unknown because of the lack of testing in the country. According to Casillas, The average maquiladora worker who earns a minimum salary of $54-66 per week simply cannot afford tests by private companies that charge upwards of $600.

Consequently, it’s widely suspected that official Mexican numbers of the virus’ toll represent a gross undercount, and that recent hospital mortalities reported as deaths resulting from pneumonia and other complications were really triggered by contraction of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

In the wake of the worker protests, polemics flared across borders over the definition of essential business, the timing of factory reopenings, and whether Mexico’s industrial plant should first serve Mexican needs as opposed to the business plans of US and other foreign corporations, which is currently the case.

At a press conference, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was asked by a reporter about the contradiction between Mexico’s capability of producing medical goods and the ongoing purchase of such items as ventilators and facial masks from China and the United States.

Thanking China and the United States for helping fill the gap in emergency Mexican needs, Lopez Obrador blamed preexisting supply problems on domestic health care “monopolies” that enjoying a privileged relationship with the previous government which had now ended.

For Flores, the spectacle of maquiladoras churning out facial masks for the United States while people in her own country lacked them was “absurd.”

But as the pandemic raged on, Lopez Obrador’s government faced mounting US pressure to ensure that the maquiladoras dutifully keep supplying the powerful nation to the north. At the same time, the Mexican president seeks new infusions of foreign capital investment that will create Mexican jobs and prevent his nation from sinking deeper into economic morass.

Expressing concern about the ability of Mexican maquiladoras to do their part in keeping the transnational assembly line buzzing along, statements and letters soon ushered forth from the US National Association of Manufacturers, US Ambassador to Mexico Chris Landau and Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Sustainment Ellen Lord (former president and CEO of Pentagon contractor Textron) who all alerted the Mexican government that nothing less than business as usual was at stake.

Adding to the diplomatic squeeze, an April 29 letter signed by 11 US senators led by Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican John Cornyn appealed on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to coordinate with Mexican officials in order to prevent “disruptions in the US supply chain.” The bipartisan missive further urged Pompeo to “press your Mexican counterparts” into defining as essential businesses that produce food, medical, transportation, infrastructure, aerospace, automotive, and military goods for El Norte. The letter did not mention the health and safety demands voiced by Mexican workers.

Although senior Mexican officials downplayed the US pressure, others south of the border took special note. “I understand the economic worry,” Chihuahua state legislator Benjamin Carrera, a member of Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, told El Diario de Juarez. “But it is first necessary to guarantee health. A job comes back, but a life does not.”

As Elizabeth Flores put it, Mexico should not “put up the dead” for products to arrive in the US.

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2020

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