Legislating Labor Law, 1911–1924

this avowal. The convention that was finally held, and moved to Aguascalientes, became an arena for the confrontation between Villistas and Carrancistas and resulted in November with the withdrawal of Carrancista generals from Aguascalientes (abetted if not provoked by Villa). The convention declared Carranza in rebellion on November 10, and by December 13 had confirmed a provisional president and a commission to draft a reform program, which would not be completed until April 1915.³³

As civil war loomed between the Convention forces and the Constitutionalists, Álvaro Obregón committed himself to the latter. In November, Obregón supported within the Constitutionalists a faction, the Confederación Revolucionaria, which included Gerardo Murillo, Alberto Pani, Jesús Urueta, and Rafael Zubarán Capmany.³⁴ They favored social legislation. Carranza did not object to the group, although Félix Palavicini, around whom a number of renovadores coalesced, did. According to one historian, the Confederación pressed Carranza to consider measures to address the social question.³⁵ Palavicini’s group also set to work on drafting such measures. Thus, in the fall of 1914, as the Convention moved to depose the first chief, and he maneuvered against Villa and the Convention, rallying as many revolutionary generals as he could, Carranza reconsidered social legislation.³⁶

On December 12, 1914, Carranza promulgated the Additions to the Plan of Guadalupe. Authored by the renovadores, the decree contrasted Carranza’s Constitutionalist movement with the Villista “reaction” that allegedly intended to postpone social and economic reforms.³⁷ Carranza’s preconstitutional government “would be concerned with the expedition and implementation of reforms for which the country had been fighting for four years.” The second paragraph of the decree ambitiously set forth a social agenda of reform, promising the expeditious implementation of “all laws, dispositions and measures which will satisfy the economic, social and political needs of the country [and] legislation to improve the condition of the rural peon, worker, miner, and, in general, the proletarian classes.”³⁸

In view of the political situation in the fall of 1914, it is probable that Carranza issued his December 12 decree both to counter the developing Convention program of social reform (if not social revolution) and to maintain his leadership of the Constitutionalist movement. Constitutionalist generals in the regions they controlled had already issued orders establishing minimum wages, maximum workdays or prohibiting Sunday labor—and abolishing peonage.³⁹ By the end of 1914, and thereafter in 1915, these decrees reflected in part the increasing saliency of social issues in the civil war against the Conventionists: many of their preambles alleged that one of the main objectives of the Constitutionalist revolution was social reform.⁴⁰ On April 9, 1915, while combating Villa in the pivotal battles near Celaya, Obregón promulgated a minimum wage decree for all workers in the states of Michoacán, Querétaro, Hidalgo, and Guanajuato.⁴¹

Most importantly, military orders pronounced the end of debt peonage.⁴² On September 3, 1914, Pablo González canceled the debts of rural laborers in Puebla and Tlaxcala and of all urban workers in his zone of command.⁴³ On September 11, in Mérida, Yucatán, Eleuterio Avila declared that since indebted agricultural workers (jornaleros) could not enjoy the constitution’s individual rights, and one objective of the Constitutionalist movement was to ensure social evolution and extend justice throughout the country, all their debts were canceled, and they were free to remain on the plantations or leave.⁴⁴ On September 19, 1914, in Tabasco, the military governor Luis F. Domínguez abolished the system of indebted servitude. He further mandated a minimum wage and eight-hour workday for agricultural workers in language similar to that of Article 5 of the constitution.⁴⁵ General Jesus Agustín Castro, governor and military commander of Chiapas, enacted the Ley de Obreros or Workers’ Law on October 30, 1914, which proclaimed, “there are no servants in Chiapas.”⁴⁶ Thus, where the Porfirian federal judiciary had been able to rule against coerced labor only occasionally, in individual cases, revolutionary decrees aimed to end servitude altogether. But it was the same concept of free labor, articulated in the 1857 constitution, which inspired both Porfirian justices and revolutionary generals.

Some of the Constitutionalist decrees verged on more extensive legislation. In Veracruz, General Cándido Aguilar, governor and military commander of the state, issued Decree Number 11, Ley de Cándido Aguilar, on October 19, 1914.⁴⁷ Its preamble justified the public power’s dictating legislation to establish equilibrium between economic interests in general and individually, on the basis that it was necessary to conserve life, health, and the well-being of workers. The first article limited the workday to nine hours, echoing the prohibition against forced labor of Article 5 of the constitution. Among other prescriptions, the law made employers responsible for sick and injured workers. It proscribed company stores. It also established a mechanism for resolving disputes: boards of civil administration (Juntas de Administración Civil) would resolve employer and worker’s complaints, while also hearing representatives of trade unions (gremios) and associations (sociedades).⁴⁸

Subsequently, in October 1915 and January 1916, Veracruz’s military governors promulgated legislation to regulate labor unions. Both laws contemplated unions negotiating over the terms and conditions of work and sanctioned employers who refused to negotiate with a union enjoying civil personality. To secure civil personality, the union had to register with the Juntas de Administración Civil and report each semester its financial operations.⁴⁹ The January 1916 law justified the right to associate by referencing Article 9 of the constitution and instructed unions not to deny admission to individuals with the same occupation as members.⁵⁰

The most distinctive state legislation reflected the revolutionary process initiated by General Salvador Alvarado. As military commander and governor of Yucatán, he promulgated two decrees within a few months, the second an elaborate statute on December 11, 1915.⁵¹ The statute established a state mechanism to avoid strikes. State dependent unions would complement conciliation agencies and an arbitration tribunal.⁵² The freedom to associate was partly predicated on the concept of free labor; statutory incentives encouraged workers to join unions registered with the government. State board arbitration of labor conflicts would prevail over unauthorized strikes by workers not members of officially recognized unions or strikes occurring while a collective contract was in effect.⁵³

While Constitutionalist generals decreed, Carranza’s civilian advisers wrote labor legislation. Toward the end of January 1915, the Carrancista periodical El Pueblo published five bills that together could have formed the basis of a labor code: one amended the commercial code, another concerned the employment contract, yet another was a workers’ compensation bill, a fourth directed the formation of local agencies or commissions to set an adequate minimum wage, and the fifth regulated labor organizations. José Natividad Macías and Luis Manuel Rojas, both lawyers, mainly authored the bills as members of the Section of Social Legislation under the direction of Félix Palavicini, then minister of public instruction. Palavicini later wrote that he had set up the section as part of the project to realize the social transformations required by the Mexican revolution: to study and draft protective laws for the proletariat in the cities and country. In addition to Macías and Rojas, the lawyers Alfonso Cravioto, Manuel Andrade Priego, and Juan N. Frías worked with the section.⁵⁴ The bills shared similarities with the earlier endeavor of Macías and Rojas to amend the commercial code in the last Congress. Although Carranza did not promulgate the bills, they embodied the same principles that continued to form labor law in the ensuing years; and Macías subsequently invoked them during the debates among delegates in the constitutional congress held in Querétaro in 1916–17.

The amendment to the commercial code extended coverage to more workers, although still describing specific occupations, as did the civil code. Similar to the criticism of the socially oriented French jurists (or Dorado), the bill’s introduction said that civil legislation (legislación común) governing the employment relationship through the contract, if valid ideally, was marred in reality.⁵⁵ The bill, however, still contemplated the contractual framework to regulate employment, and its approach was to limit abuse, not reconceptualize the employment relationship. To end debt peonage, for example, workers were required to repay advances only when they did not exceed one month’s wages. The bill in this sense echoed some of the proposals to ameliorate servitude made during the Porfirian era. The workers’ compensation bill, in contrast, directed all employers to provide relatively generous benefits in the case of work-related accidents.

The preamble of the project to establish minimum wages by boards of conciliation (juntas de avenencia) reflected the understanding of the functions of such administrative organs in 1915. Only with the consent of the interested workers and employers could such boards mediate or arbitrate a dispute. In addition, they should set minimum wages and check compliance with laws protective of workers.⁵⁶ The preamble further contended that the collective contract could fix wages more equitably than individual contracts of employment. The last bill closely regulated the union, specifying its permissible purposes.⁵⁷ For an association to obtain legal personality, it had to satisfy a number of conditions; and the interior ministry had to approve the articles of incorporation and bylaws. The bill authorized the interior ministry to dissolve an association, if its purpose was altered in a fundamental way or it assumed a religious or political character.

After Macías and Rojas had completed their project, Carranza sent Macías to the United States to study labor law and industrial relations. According to Macías, during his absence from Carranza’s side, Zubarán Capmany, then interior minister, persuaded the first chief to assert federal jurisdiction over labor matters.⁵⁸ On January 29, 1915, by decree, Carranza amended Paragraph X of Article 72 of the constitution.⁵⁹ The decree declared that although the constitution had established fundamental labor rights as human rights, they had become a dead letter before the painful realities of peonage and the exploitation of the worker by an industrial system. The latter did not compensate justly and exhausted the individual and human species with an inhumane workday. This occurred because of the lack of laws implementing Articles 4, 5, and 32 of the constitution and the absence of appropriate organs to make effective their guarantees. The federalization of labor law was necessary because of the nature of such legislation; its impact on the agricultural, commercial, and industrial interests of the entire nation; and the desirability of extending its beneficial effects to all of the inhabitants of the country.

In rivalry with the bills prepared by the section of social legislation, Zubarán also prepared draft statutes, published on April 12, 1915, when the labor department was under his charge as interior minister.⁶⁰ By one account, both Zubarán’s and Macías’s bills were given to Carranza for review, without his reaching a decision to promulgate either legislation.⁶¹ One historian writes that Zubarán drafted his project in response to the demands of the anarchist-leaning Casa del Obrero Mundial, at the time probably the country’s largest network of workers’ organizations, and in 1915 allied with the Constitutionalists.⁶²

Zubarán’s draft legislation is more sympathetic toward organized labor than Macías’s bills; it is also conceptually more elegant.⁶³ Using language similar to that of Macías’s bills, Zubarán disparages nineteenth-century civil law and appeals to European and American examples of reform legislation. Because of its social importance, this legislation should be justified in terms of public law, requiring the creation of new, completely modern institutions. Like Dorado or French legal reformers at the turn of the century, Zubarán distinguished his position from modern socialism, with whose sentiments he could nonetheless sympathize. Socialism was the threatening alternative to labor legislation; the latter was an attempt to protect the weak, without failing to recognize the rights of capital.⁶⁴

The legislative paradigm was again the contract of employment. Regulation of the workday and minimum wage was justified in terms similar to Macías’s analysis.⁶⁵ More than Macías’s legislation, the Zubarán project outlined how the collective contract would structure industrial relations, commented that the labor movement favored it, and cited examples from other countries, particularly French models. In accord with French legal thought, Zubarán suggested that collective agreements were not actually labor contracts but conventions made between the parties that set the conditions for individual employment contracts. The draft statute also regulated the labor organization, but less intrusively than Macías’s project. All collective contracts had to be registered to have legal effect, and all unions had to register with the municipal government. The final chapter directed local judges to resolve disputes arising from the labor contract, contemplating a summary process for claims and arbitration if the parties wished it. Mandatory arbitration ran afoul of constitutional Article 13 (and its prohibition of special tribunals). The legislation charged the labor department with the interpretation and application of the proposed statute.

After disregarding his civilian advisers’ proposed labor legislation in 1915, Carranza promulgated on August 1, 1916, a decree nearly suppressing any right to strike. Issued in reaction to the general strike called for July 31, in Mexico City, which threatened to cut off all electrical power to the metropolitan area, the first chief based his actions on Juárez’s law that applied the death penalty to treasonous actions, the Law of January 25, 1862. Carranza had the leadership of the strike arrested and tried by a military council. It acquitted the strike leaders. Again Carranza ordered them detained, and a second military council tried them, with the same outcome, although it sentenced one leader to death; he was eventually released from prison, in 1918.⁶⁶

The general strike, although potentially crippling, had been peaceful, its purpose to secure wage increases and protest the spiraling inflation and relative devaluation of wages resulting from the government’s issuance of paper currency. Carranza’s order, if grudgingly acknowledging the possibility of strikes occurring, asserted that they became illicit the moment they not only pressured the affected employer but also directly prejudiced society.⁶⁷ Carranza’s decree referred to the strikers’ disrespect for the government’s currency and denounced the workers as anti-patriotic. Supposedly they had carried out the strike in collusion with the state’s enemies who wanted to undermine the government’s security; among other things, the strike had allegedly disrupted the production of munitions while the Constitutionalists still were reestablishing order. The first chief therefore commanded that the death penalty would be applied not only to those causing a disruption of order as signaled by Juarez’s Law but also to those who “incited the suspension of work in factories or enterprises providing public services” and almost all other workers who knowingly adhered to the suspension. The decree covered physical and property destruction, as well as the use of force and threats to impede workers who tried to continue working. It charged the military authority with trying cases arising from such strikes.⁶⁸ Apparently, for Carranza, Article 925 of the penal code was not an adequate deterrent against the mass strike.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONGRESS’S DEBATES TO ESTABLISH LABOR RIGHTS

Less than two months after repressing the August general strike, Carranza scheduled elections for a constitutional convention to meet between November 20, 1916, and January 31, 1917. Carranza and the Constitutionalists, still fighting Villistas and Zapatistas but now the dominant force in the country, had concluded that the 1857 constitution needed amendment. As noted, many Constitutionalist generals, including crucially Obregón, championed social reform, and Constitutionalist propagandists close to Carranza like Palavicini had argued that this was a major objective of the revolution since 1915. Carranza, moreover, needed to legitimize his future presidency in a reestablished national state and wished to strengthen the president’s legal powers, which were relatively weak in the 1857 charter. Formal amendment of the constitution was therefore prudent. Constitutionalist military commanders across most of the country were able to hold elections for the convention’s delegates successfully on October 22, and the convention opened in Querétaro on November 20, 1916.⁶⁹

The delegates or deputies largely identified with the interests of Carranza or the Constitutionalist generals, if they were strongly committed.⁷⁰ Carranza probably expected that his civilian advisers, the renovadores, would dominate the convention. Many of the deputies, disdaining their close links to Carranza and ostensibly their congressional service initially under Huerta’s regime, balked at their machinations and pretensions and rallied around their opponents, sometimes labeled jacobins and probably inspired at least partly by (the never present) Obregón. The renovadores lost control of a key constitutional commission at the congress and, after losing a major contest over the extent of permissible religious education, compromised on such social issues as labor rights.⁷¹ The congressional debates themselves indicate a division between Carranza’s legal advisers (many of the principal renovadores were lawyers) and the deputies who first expressed the need for more constitutional protections for labor. Still, despite personal animosities, ideological differences at the convention were not as significant as once reported.⁷² The deputies who expressed themselves on the labor question mostly shared an ideological view about workers’ rights, consistent with the military commanders’ 1914–15 decrees and labor laws and not altogether inconsistent with the renovadores’ social liberalism. In this context, it was possible for José Natividad Macías along with other Carrancistas to guide the constitutional debate toward the adoption of a program closer to their more legalistic views about industrial relations. They thereby avoided the more radical implications voiced by a few of the delegates and proved partly successful.

Carranza presented the constitutional congress with a draft charter that barely altered the labor-related provisions of the 1857 constitution. Similar to his January 29, 1915, decree and Zubarán’s April 1915 project, the draft constitution gave the national Congress authority to legislate on labor matters. Carranza’s inaugural speech suggested that the federal legislature would then be able to establish all of the institutions of social progress beneficial to the working class—and mentioned specifically a minimum salary, limiting the workday, employer liability for occupational accidents, and insurance for old age and illness. Carranza was silent on any right to organize or strike.⁷³ The constitutional commission of five delegates, all leftists according to E. V. Niemeyer, added a few items to Carranza’s proposed Article 5, including a requirement of mandatory judicial service for lawyers and a directive to punish vagrancy.⁷⁴

The addition of several protective measures at the end of the commission’s version of Article 5—limiting the workday to eight hours, prohibiting night work for women and children, and prescribing a day of rest—resonated with the earlier decrees issued by Carranza’s generals. The commission’s report justified its measures as limits on the libertad de trabajo for the interests of future generations, to prevent the exhaustion and waste of humans caused by excessive, debilitating work.⁷⁵ The freedom of labor embodied in Article 4 now operated to defend employers’ power to impose the contracts they wished on individual workers, instead of forbidding restrictions on workers’ rights to quit work. These were the same justifications for the state’s curtailment of the workday stated in Zubarán’s project or the Ley de Cándido Aguilar.

The commission adopted its few labor protections on the initiative of Veracruz’s delegates: Cándido Aguilar and Heriberto Jara, both generals, and Victorio Góngora, an engineer. Their draft had also proposed pay equity, compensation for occupational accidents and illnesses, and the resolution of conflicts between labor and business by conciliation and arbitration committees. The commission’s report said the latter proposals should be deferred until the deputies discussed congressional powers.⁷⁶ This was consistent with Carranza’s aim to delegate jurisdiction over labor law to subsequent federal legislatures.