La Raza Founder - Kill the Gringos (José Angel Gutiérrez)
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”
The CTM is rightfully hated by workers as a stooge of their exploitative bosses. However, by joining the SNTMMSSRM, the workers are tying themselves to another nationalist organization that, by its very nature cannot defend, let alone guarantee, their social rights.
Union thugs kill
two striking mineworkers in Mexico
By Alex González
27 November 2017
On November 18, armed thugs of the Confederation of Mexican
Workers (CTM), the largest union in Mexico, reportedly killed two striking
mineworkers in the southern state of Guerrero. The mineworkers have been on
strike to demand the right to join the National Union of Mining and Metal
Workers (SNTMMSSRM) and cease being a part of the CTM.
About 800 mineworkers have been on strike since the beginning of
November against La Media
Luna mine, operated by Canadian firm Torex Gold Resources,
arguing that their right to join the union of their choice was not being
respected. The mineworkers refused to be a part of the CTM, arguing that the
CTM “does not defend our rights and betrays us, offends us, assaults us, and
threatens us.”
The workers were also striking against the fact that the company
had artificially divided its workforce into “locals” and “foreigners”, with
“foreign” workers coming from other states in Mexico, such as Zacatecas,
Chihuahua, Sonora, and Durango. In an effort to sow divisions among the
mineworkers, “local” workers were given more difficult jobs and worse salaries
than their counterparts.
The striking workers report that on the night of November 18,
“armed groups of thugs from the CTM” assaulted workers at a barricade they had
installed near the mine, killing two people and injuring many others. Far from
being punished by authorities, the mineworkers claim that “although a group
from the Army was able to detain the aggressors, they were released
immediately, due to the action of some authority that was not made known.” The
Army patrol that intervened in the assault corresponds to the area of Iguala,
Guerrero, where 43 teaching students disappeared in the hands of state forces
in 2014.
An eyewitness told the newspaper La Jornada that “They [the police and the
thugs] arrived with their faces covered. They started shooting into the air and
yelling at us.” The mineworkers allege that the attack took place even though
the company’s leading negotiator had agreed to work to resolve the labor
conflict.
In a press release to “clarify media disinformation,” Torex Gold
denied that the workers who had been killed were employed by the company or
that a strike was even taking place, instead calling the refusal to work an
“illegal blockade.”
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governor of Guerrero,
Héctor Astudillo Flores, said that the situation was very “delicate” because
the mineworkers’ struggle might make Guerrero a less appealing low-wage
platform for corporations. “Of course, this scares away investment. These facts
undoubtedly chase away any investor that has come to Guerrero or that wishes to
come here,” said Astudillo Flores. He also made it clear that his
administration is firmly on the side of the multinational corporations and that
the mineworkers can expect no governmental assistance in their dispute: “I
understand that this is an issue of an occupational nature, which escapes our
state influence.”
The mineworkers at La
Media Luna work under what is known as a “protection union,”
which has supposedly been banned in the United States and Canada but are still
legal in Mexico. Under such contracts, a union is imposed upon the workers and
is automatically authorized to negotiate wages, benefits, and working
conditions without any democratic input or representation from workers. A
company can then, in one fell swoop, null previous contracts and eliminate
concessions won by workers over decades of struggle. Workers who question or
refuse to accept the new conditions are fired and blacklisted by the mine
owners.
At the Cananea mine in the northern state of Sonora, for example,
one of the oldest labor contracts in the country was eliminated in 2007. Four
years later, the CTM was imposed upon the workers under a new contract. More
than 2,000 striking mineworkers were fired by the mine’s owner, Grupo México,
after their strike was declared illegal. Workers’ rights were reduced to a bare
minimum, with the resulting contract removing 197 of the standing 253 contract
provisions. Mineworkers’ vacation days were reduced from 12 to 7, holidays were
lowered from 35 to 18 days, and contract workers were introduced into the labor
force. Grupo México is the third largest copper producer in the world and is
owned by German Larrea, the second richest person in the country.
The CTM is rightfully hated by workers as a stooge of their
exploitative bosses. However, by joining the SNTMMSSRM, the workers are tying
themselves to another nationalist organization that, by its very nature cannot
defend, let alone guarantee, their social rights.
The SNTMMSSRM is affiliated with the United Steelworkers union
(USW) and “global union” IndustriALL. Just like the CTM, the USW serves as an
enforcer for the corporations and has betrayed countless struggles by US and
Canadian workers. After the election of Donald Trump, USW President Leo
Gerard pledged to work with his administration
based on their common agenda of trade protectionism and economic nationalism.
IndustriALL was formed in 2012 from a merger of other “global
unions,” including the International Metalworkers’ Federation and the
International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation. These
organizations trace their lineage to the CIA-funded International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which was founded at the onset of the Cold War as
an explicitly anti-communist organization to combat the influence of socialism
in the labor movement.
There can be no “global union” under a capitalist market if
nations—and unions themselves—can pit workers against each other to see who can
offer the lowest wages and the tamest labor force. Workers can only be
genuinely united on an international basis if they are armed with a program to
consciously link their struggles across national boundaries for the socialist
transformation of the world economy.
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