Collapse of Dignity (2 page)

The story begins with a terrible disaster—an explosion at the underground coal mine at Pasta de Conchos on the morning of February 19, 2006 that killed sixty-five men. As the story unfolds, we learn that the miners' deaths were no accident, but rather the result of corruption and negligence on the part of the company, Grupo Mexico, and the government authorities. We see the events through the eyes of Mexican workers and their families as they confront the enormous power of the Mexican state at the service of a multinational mining company controlled by an avaricious billionaire.

But we soon learn that there is more to the story. The workers at Pasta de Conchos turn out to be pawns in an evil campaign by Mexico's ruling elite to destroy democratic labor unions in Mexico, starting with the Mineworkers led by Napoleón Gómez.

Since the 1970s, the PRI and later the PAN governments have systematically sought to weaken organized labor and reduce labor costs to maintain Mexico's low-wage, export-oriented economic model,
enshrined in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1995. This policy has succeeded in increasing the wage gap between Mexico and the United States. Whereas in 1975 Mexican real wages of manufacturing workers stood at 23% of the US level, by 2007 they had dropped to 12%.

The government and employers control the majority of labor organizations through the system of “protection unions,” which in Canada and the U.S. we call “company unions.” However, a small number of democratic unions have continued to resist government control and to demand higher wages and better living standards for their members.

It is no accident that mineworkers would lead this resistance. Everywhere in the world—from the British miners' strike in the 1970s to the Pittston strike in the U.S. to the National Union of Mineworkers' leading the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa to the Ontario nickel mines where my own family labored—the courage and determination of mine workers has propelled them to the leadership of the labor movement. In Mexico, not only the labor movement but the Mexican Revolution itself began at the Cananea mine, which would again become a battleground in the first decade of the 21st century.

Los Mineros refused to bow to the elites. Instead, they demanded wage increases proportional to company profits, improved health and safety protections, and elimination of subcontracting. In 2005, the union struck the Las Truchas steel mill in Lázaro Cárdenas for forty-six days, winning an increase of 8% in wages and 34% in benefits, plus a 7,250 peso bonus and 100% back pay. Clearly this was a threat to the neoliberal model.

Napoleón tells us how President Vicente Fox and his advisers, working closely with giant mining companies, planned a coup against the democratically elected leadership of Los Mineros, including the derecognition of the union leadership, criminal and civil charges against Gómez and other union leaders, a massive public relations campaign funded by the companies, the imposition of company unions in many workplaces and support for traitors within the union—all backed by the use of armed force. These attacks took a terrible toll on Los Mineros
rank and file, including the loss of four more lives at the hands of police and company goons.

Yet despite this unprecedented attack by the entire might of the state and private capital, with their leader in forced exile in Canada, Los Mineros have not only survived but year after year have continued to win the highest wage increases of any union in Mexico (over 8% in average per year over the past seven years) and have organized thousands of new workers, while President Fox and his successor, Felipe Calderón, have landed in the rubbish bin of history. How is this possible?

I think there are three reasons. First and foremost is the courage and tenacity shown by the members of Los Mineros in the face of great and sometimes deadly adversity. It is the workers of Pasta de Conchos, of Lázaro Cárdenas, who won their strike after being strafed from helicopters by police who killed two workers and injured dozens more; the workers of Cananea who maintained their strike even against an onslaught of 4,000 police and goons. It is Los Mineros leaders who spent years in jail on trumped-up charges rather than betray their union. It is the tenacity of Napoleón Gómez himself, who has continued to stand tall despite many threats against himself and his family.

The second reason is the quality of the Mineros leadership. I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Napoleón and the members of his Executive Committee over the past decade, and I can truly say that this is a band of visionaries. Los Mineros are not afraid to use the strike weapon. But unlike any other union in Mexico, they calibrate their wage demands to the company's profits, bargaining hard but always showing flexibility when a company is facing real difficulty. This is why—despite the ferocious attacks of the government and a few big mining companies—Los Mineros maintain good working relations with dozens of employers, both multinational and domestic. Los Mineros have also shown courage and creativity in launching campaigns to organize unorganized workers in mining and manufacturing, building alliances with rural communities and grassroots committees of industrial workers. They have challenged the government and Mexico's corporatist unions on wage policy, accountability and union democracy. The union's crack legal team has
won battle after battle—most recently when the Mexican Supreme Court, in May 2012, ruled that the government's refusal to recognize the result of the union's elections was unconstitutional and violated Mexico's commitment to uphold the conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The third reason for the success of Los Mineros' resistance is global solidarity. From the beginning of his leadership, Napoleón showed a commitment to strengthening his union's international relationships and global trade union structures. This is why he pushed for affiliation to the International Metalworkers' Federation (IMF) and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), which merged in 2012 to become IndustriALL, a global union of 50 million industrial workers—with Napoleón elected to the Executive Committee. This is why the global trade union movement responded by organizing delegations, campaigns, and global days of action to expose the Mexican government's systematic violations of worker rights.

Most important to my union, the United Steelworkers, Napoleón understood from the beginning that industrial workers in North America, faced with the NAFTA regime that seeks to drive down wages everywhere, can only survive if we work together to build a single organization that can organize, bargain, and mobilize the political power of our members in Canada, Mexico and the United States. With this goal in mind, the USW and Los Mineros negotiated a strategic alliance in 2005, which was expanded and strengthened into a North American Solidarity Alliance in 2011. Today our organizations are engaged in continuous coordination in bargaining with common employers, organizing health and safety, education, economic policy and many other areas. Our members are meeting and marching and organizing and bargaining together in Michoacán and Indiana and Québec, Sonora and Arizona, Durango and Ontario, Hidalgo and Illinois, Coahuila and British Columbia. We are well on the way to our goal of a single organization harnessing the power of industrial workers throughout North America.

All of this is a collective story told by working people, but it is also, distinctly, Napoleón's story—the story of a genuinely modest man who
did not seek power but, when the moment came, was determined to use all of his talent and capacity to exercise that power for the benefit of his members and workers everywhere. As well, it is the story of Napoleón's wife, Oralia Casso de Gómez, who has stood shoulder to shoulder with her husband on behalf of the members of Los Mineros and the Mexican people as their family has endured threats and forced dislocation as they all fought for justice and workers' rights.

It was my honor to be in the room with Oralia when the AFL-CIO Executive Committee in 2011 presented Napoleón with the Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award “for his courageous commitment to defend the aspirations of Mexican workers to higher living standards, to democratize labor unions, to promote rule of law and a better future for their country . . .”

This is why Napoleón is, for me, a hero.

And this is why anyone who cares about the future of working people should read and study this book.

Leo W. Gerard

International President

United Steelworkers

Pittsburgh, November 2012

Deep in the unforgiving terrain of Chile's Atacama Desert, just north
of the town of Copiapó, lies a small copper and gold mine. Now abandoned, the San José mine was the site of one of the most dramatic rescues in recent history. In October of 2010, the world watched as thirty-three Chilean miners, miraculously discovered alive seventeen days after a cave-in had trapped them underground, were brought to the surface one by one after a long and complicated rescue effort. Television stations and computer screens around the globe showed images of the grimy, weary-looking miners joyfully reunited with friends and family.

In the days after the collapse of the roof of the San José mine, on August 5, 2010, dozens of family members set themselves up near the mine's entrance, calling their encampment Camp Hope. Though they were originally told by the mine's operators that air and food in the mine would last only about forty-eight hours, the relatives of the miners nevertheless stayed at the mine, desperately hoping for good news. It came over two weeks later, when a drill that was breaking a borehole to the cavity where the miners were thought to be located came back up with a note attached to it. It read, in bright red letters, “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33”—
All 33 of us are well inside the shelter
.

Despite the elation of the moment, there was still no certainty of the miners' safe rescue. Some estimated it would take four months to drill a hole wide enough to pull the men up, and many were worried about the mental state of the miners if they had to stay underground much longer, as well as about the possibility of further collapse. Nevertheless, the rescue effort—nicknamed “Operation San Lorenzo” after the patron saint of miners—went forward, and less than two months later, drilling
was complete. On Tuesday, October 12, the first rescue worker made the eighteen-minute descent in a one-person capsule, and over the next twenty-four hours, the miners made their way to the surface they hadn't seen in sixty-nine days.

It was a rousing victory, cheered on by the world. But for a group of people in Mexico who had witnessed a similar situation four years earlier, happiness for the Chilean miners and their families was tinged with pain. In 2006, thousands of miles to the north of the San José mine, a similar collapse had happened in a coal mine called Pasta de Conchos, near the town of Nueva Rosita in the northeastern Mexico state of Coahuila. In the early morning hours of February 19, a methane explosion caused a collapse that blocked off the sole entry to the mine. Two bodies were recovered a few months after the disaster, but sixty-three others remain on the other side of the cave-in, sealed within the mine's main tunnel.

Though the Pasta de Conchos miners were estimated to be about three hundred feet below the surface—less than a seventh of the 2,300-foot depth from which the Chilean miners would later be recovered—Grupo México, the company that operated the mine, was unable to mount an effective rescue effort. At the San José mine, caving to strong pressure from the families, the workers, the unions and their communities, the government and the company had stepped in reluctantly, spending millions of dollars and using state-of-the-art technology to penetrate the cavity that held the miners. President Sebastián Piñera, a conservative, had been at the site, along with a throng of reporters and family members, to greet each one of the miners.

But four years earlier at Pasta de Conchos, the people laboring to save the lost men were their fellow colleagues working with whatever tools they had, and Mexican president Vicente Fox never once visited the scene. Germán Feliciano Larrea, owner of Grupo México, also avoided the site. A few labor department officials and company officials did rush to Coahuila to be present at the scene, but it soon became clear that they were more interested in damage control and covering up their own starring role in the shameful series of events that led up to the explosion than in saving any lives. The landscape around Pasta de Conchos was
smooth and flat, much more manageable than the rocky, mountainous terrain the Chilean rescuers would later face. Yet the sense of responsibility and ethical obligation wasn't there. After five days, the rescue effort was abandoned and the miners left to their fates, with no clear indication of whether they were alive or dead.

Some of these miners were members of the National Union of Mine, Metal, and Steel Workers of the Mexican Republic, an organization I had led for five years at the time of the explosion. In that span of time, I had seen firsthand the systemic abuse and exploitation of our members, at Pasta de Conchos and far beyond. Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN) had taken control in 2000, and his administration was characterized by its close ties to business interests, including many of the men who owned the mines and steel plants our union's workers labored in. There was constant pressure for the lowest wages possible, and an unmistakable favoritism shown toward these companies. The PAN government allowed them to take up huge concessions and run them with no regard for safety, fairness, or environmental impact.