Porfirian Industrial Relations and the Rights of Labor
sufficiently trustworthy to lead the reformed union, pursuant to ideas of “order and morality.”23 (Evidently the federal court did not entertain any amparo petitions of workers asserting their constitutional rights to assemble or control their labor freely under Articles 9 or 5.)
As if to confirm the new relationship with the government and secure its tolerance for workers’ associations, Morales sent Díaz on September 16, 1906, a patriotic manifesto affirming the union’s loyalty and memorializing the foundation of the union. Morales emphasized the GCOL’s adherence to law, order, and other principles necessary for the progress and security of the union, government, and Mexican nation.24 Morales also lauded the justice of the political prefect Herrera and local judge Rocha and the advice they had furnished.25 The recital of patriotic ideals along with reassurances of collaboration with local state officials can be construed merely as a supplicant’s tactical prudence. Under the civil code and constitution, it should have sufficed to establish legally the organization. Perhaps Morales might have tried to register the GCOL, if the state of Veracruz required this, so that its legal existence could be recognized separately from that of its members; there is no indication that registration was attempted.26 In any case, Morales had further requested the protection and other guarantees of the supreme government. Another word for “protection” was amparo; the word “guarantees,” was associated with the notion of rights: constitutional articles guaranteed rights to citizens and workers.27 If Morales and the GCOL were not appealing to the judiciary for constitutional protection, they were to the federal government and its chief executive, Díaz.
With at least governmental tolerance, the GCOL quickly set up branches elsewhere in Mexico. In October, the major independent Pueblan labor organization became affiliated with it; like its Orizaban counterpart, the GCOL in Puebla reassured the local prefect of the union’s exclusively charitable purposes and desire to refrain from any subversive or political activity (as stipulated in its bylaws).28 In Tlaxcala, organizing efforts encountered intimidation: the state governor threatened to draft into the army workers affiliating with the GCOL.29 The GCOL appealed to Díaz, framing its petition with references to its establishment with the knowledge of authorities, including Díaz’s, and to the legitimate purposes of the union or sociedad, similar to those of mutual aid associations.30 The petition lastly underscored the GCOL’s adherence to order and its respect for authorities and that it would continue to operate under the safeguards and guarantees of the laws and of Díaz.31
In the fall of 1906, workers walked out of mills repeatedly in Puebla and Veracruz. They protested their treatment by foreign supervisors and companies’ wage deductions or fines for damaging articles and tools, among other issues. Fines and deductions frequently provoked grievances but arguably were lawful under the civil code.32 In both Puebla and Orizaba, strikers prevailed initially; local officials mediated the disputes.33 Near Orizaba, the largest strike began on October 26 in the modern Santa Rosa plant, where the GCOL’s demands included abolition of fining practices and the reinstatement of workers associated with the union. The company eventually agreed to negotiations mediated by the prefect Herrera. According to one historian, the company finally stipulated to ending the practice of fining workers as well as to a pay increase. During the strike, workers’ letters and manifestos appealed to the liberal principles of the constitution, denouncing foreign supervisors who mistreated Mexicans and violated their constitutional rights.34 Later, in November, Santa Rosa workers backed a GCOL faction led by Samuel Ramírez that nearly toppled Morales from the union’s presidency: workers during the strike had found Morales too conciliatory.35 With the aid of Herrera and the GCOL leader in Puebla, Pascual Mendoza, Morales reasserted control over the union. The influential role of the prefect was manifest: he refused to recognize the new leadership of Ramírez, who was suspected of being tied to the PLM, and had only avoided detention previously with the assistance of legal counsel.36
Earlier in September, in Puebla, at one factory, workers wrote a petition stating that they would return to work the moment that the factory owner signed in the presence of the prefect a contract ending all abuses leading to their stoppage and allowed all workers to return without exception.37 The prefect obtained a broad settlement with affected industrialists. Meanwhile, Díaz stopped Puebla’s governor from drafting into the army the GCOL branch president, Mendoza, who was already collaborating with the government. The governor had sought Díaz’s advice in regard to drafting him in case he applied for an amparo.38 Díaz pointed out that among other things Mendoza had done nothing outside of the law until then.39 By the end of October, the governor warned Díaz, following several minor strikes, of the GCOL’s increasing assertiveness. He believed it should be punished as soon as it overstepped any legal limits. Díaz concurred that the governor should “proceed with the greatest severity that the law permits in the case that workers commit some outrageous act; and on that occasion Pascual Mendoza could be made responsible for the actions and punished energetically.”40
Pueblan textile manufacturers, anxious about the growing strength of the labor movement and possibly also about the government’s apparent reluctance to repress it, then organized the Mexican Industrial Center (CIM, or Centro Industrial Mexicano).41 As the GCOL demanded better working conditions and pay, the CIM posted an industry-wide set of factory work rules, the Reglamento Interior Único, around December 3, 1906, at members’ factories.42 The brief set of rules asserted absolute managerial authority over all aspects of production, including the determination of deductions for damage to product or machinery. The rules partly aimed to rationalize production and reduce petty abuses that were prevalent in the factories: the reglamento prohibited kickbacks to supervisors and any kind of physical assault (whether by supervisor or worker). The rules also prohibited the introduction of any reading material, arms, or matches to the factory. Companies reserved the right, moreover, to discipline any action causing them prejudice or disorder and to monitor visitors to employer-provided worker housing. These were surely provisions aimed at barring union organizers from plants and housing. The work rules did not set wage rates but did prescribe hours (twelve per day with ninety minutes for meal breaks), workdays, and paydays.43
Workers began to walk out from factories, as of December 3, with the imposition of the reglamento. The GCOL prepared a counterproposal within a few days that was lengthier than management’s.44 Although the GCOL’s reglamento’s form followed the CIM’s and was generally moderate, it actually anticipated a new mode of conceiving of industrial relations. It proposed that workers’ representatives—the society (one may infer, the GCOL)—would be involved in the industrial relations of the factory. And its final article stated, “the rights of this society are retained, for all time, for any eventuality or impasse, basing itself in all on the laws of our Fundamental Charter.” This was not the only reference to the constitution. Company stores that exercised a monopoly were prohibited, in part for their unconstitutionality (a reference to Article 28). Furthermore, “[i]n all the factories of the Republic, the owners, administrators, managers and supervisors should submit themselves to obey, without excuse or pretext, articles 5 and 13 of the Federal Constitution.”45 For the GCOL’s leaders, the constitution clearly mattered: while Article 5 guaranteed freedom of labor, Article 13 guaranteed equality before the law; by 1906, workers envisioned that foreigners (and textile factory owners, managers, and supervisors were largely foreign) should also be subject to the laws and courts of the republic, as workers were.46
The CIM ignored the workers’ counterproposal. Perhaps it had composed its set of work rules as an ultimatum to provoke a showdown with the GCOL. The CIM responded to the strikes that began throughout Puebla and Tlaxcala by locking out all workers employed in its member factories.47 It is clear that the CIM intended to break the GCOL and the growing labor movement that challenged the managerial prerogatives of the industrialists.
The GCOL appealed to Díaz’s mediation. The CIM refused to consider governmental arbitration. Apparently, the federal government initially divided over the labor dispute. In early December, El Imparcial reported the demands of the GCOL sympathetically.48 As textile manufacturers, including, crucially, Orizaba’s industrialists, joined the lockout across the country after December 22, the newspaper justified the lockout—by comparing it to the workers’ right to strike: “An employer has the same right to close his factory as a worker has to abandon his work. . . . To the workers’ strike, employers will respond with ‘the lock-out,’ their strike.”49 In the same issue, El Imparcial dismissed as spurious the GCOL’s reglamento that would have set up workers’ commissions. The article quoted an anonymous manufacturer who compared the employment contract to a lease in which the tenant accepts the conditions of the landlord and does not impose his terms on the property owner.50 It appears that the CIM obtained the support of Limantour, who had ties to the Orizaban textile manufacturers as well as to Puebla’s.51 The shutting down of Orizba’s factories was crucial to the outcome of the industrial conflict because the largest textile plants were located there, as was the center of the union movement; and GCOL members had been sending aid to their Pueblan associates, enabling them to survive the CIM’s lockout. Liman-tour was especially hostile to the aspirations of organized labor and any alliances it might make with his political rivals, like Dehesa or Nuevo León’s governor, Bernardo Reyes.52
Not until December 31 did the CIM finally agree to presidential arbitration. Workers had begun to cause disturbances.53 Or perhaps the GCOL had withstood the lockout longer than employers had anticipated workers could remain unemployed.54 In any event, by January 3, employers had reached the consensus to accept the president’s judgment, after manifesting a threat to disinvest from Mexico if the workers’ movement continued to grow and lobbying Díaz to draft an award fully acceptable to them.55
Díaz announced his laudo, or arbitral decision, on January 4, 1907.56 The decision clearly had the purpose of precluding the development of the independent labor organization, which might align itself with radical movements, but Díaz did not deny altogether fundamental workers’ rights as then recognized in the constitution and civil code. The award largely accommodated industrialists’ interests; it did compromise them slightly to concede reasonable points to workers. Thus, the first article stated that work rules in effect at the time of factory closures, or dictated subsequently by owners, would prevail. This meant that the CIM’s reglamento was the starting point for Díaz’s award, qualified slightly by an allusion to customary factory practices. The third article prescribed a passbook system in which employers would record workers’ conduct and industriousness in a notebook, and workers would have to show new employers the book upon being hired. The fifth article stipulated the procedure workers had to follow to make complaints: they had to sign personally any complaint and continue working for fifteen days thereafter while management evaluated it. If workers were dissatisfied with the resolution, they could then separate themselves from the employment. This provision did not ban the strike categorically. The withdrawal from employment could be asserted as a concerted action—a strike. The last article of the award did prohibit strikes but framed the prohibition as an implicit contractual commitment made by the worker not to strike, especially rashly, and referenced the fifth article in connection with the appropriate procedure to follow in a dispute. In addition, the eighth article directed workers to accept prefects’ supervision of the censorship of their publications to avoid the dissemination of subversive doctrines or defamation. Díaz did relent regarding the extent to which workers would be monitored in their company housing. And the award balanced the interests of employers and workers in connection with deductions and fines. Child labor was limited, and employers and public authorities were encouraged to promote factory schools. Significantly, the award contemplated an extensive wage system for the benefit of lower-paid workers. With these terms, Díaz’s award constituted the first industry-wide collective contract, in effect not just the result of bitter employer and union proposals for an agreement but also the product of the national government’s direct participation in industrial relations.
The award should have represented a triumph for the Porfirian regime. As Rodney Anderson noted, it seemingly conciliated employers, reluctant to agree to such arbitration, with a labor movement that had accepted state tutelage, after having been briefly led by more radical leaders, whom the government had successfully marginalized.57 Order had been maintained without the withdrawal of capital. Or, as one of the leading textile industrialists said in a letter dated January 6, the CIM had approved unanimously “the proposals to which we agreed in the capital with the president of the republic . . . to end the strike . . . [and] thanks to the clauses approved, the authority of owners remains intact, important concessions are made to workers, and the social alarm that the suspension of work had produced is ended, and measures are dictated that tend to suppress the repetition of strikes.”58
The award actually proved a failure that revealed the regime’s incapacity to resolve comprehensively the social question—the incipient challenge to the social order of an emerging working class. If the decision had accommodated the interests of manufacturers and maintained their authority, it left workers dissatisfied. In Puebla and Tlaxcala some workers renewed strikes and Mendoza had to dissuade further opposition to its acceptance.59