The Enactment of the Federal Labor Law, 1925–1931
maintaining the importance of the federalization of labor law. They contended that only a few states had implemented the mandates of Article 123, with scant enforcement of the statutes. And they pointed out that Obregón’s insurance bill could not be “lawfully considered” unless Article 123 was amended. Schoenfeld believed that the outcome of the standoff depended on what Calles would do, qualifying this opinion by noting that the president could not disregard entirely the wishes of Obregón. In turn, he thought that Obregón’s “obligations” to the CROM complicated his position, despite his antipathy to the organization and his strong preference for a workers’ insurance scheme.36
One week later Schoenfeld wrote that the conflict between Obregonista senators and Labor deputies had “markedly increased.”37 The Obregonista bloc wanted to vote for the workers’ insurance legislation but not for a national labor statute. The Labor congressmen insisted on the immediate passage of the acts to federalize labor law. To support them, the CROM issued a public statement, published in Excélsior on October 27, calling for rallies throughout the country to counter senatorial opposition. The CROM’s insistence, consistent with resolutions taken at its sixth and seventh conventions, precipitated a breach within the Obregonista bloc in the Senate, embarrassing Obregón.38
Congress finally rejected the CROM’s demands. In May 1928, the CROM, and its related Labor party, appealed to the congressional permanent committee to consider the bill to regulate Article 123 during its special session. The permanent committee denied the request on May 16. The federal legislature reflected Obregón’s influence. Schoenfeld opined:
It is of interest to report that from the discussion which resulted in rejecting the appeal of the Labor Party and the CROM for consideration of the bill regulating Article 123 . . . it appeared that General Obregón himself now has in preparation a bill of his own to regulate this important article. . . . It was indicated in the discussion yesterday that this bill would be introduced in the regular session of Congress beginning September 1, next, and that it would include the scheme of workers’ insurance, the substance of which has already been reported to the Department, and in which . . . General Obregón is particularly interested.39
The denial of the CROM’s appeal demonstrated the overwhelmingly Obregonista composition of the Congress, while the legislators affiliated with Morones’s party were no longer as amenable to his direction.40
Shortly after Obregón won the presidential election in July 1928, a close associate of his, José Aspe Suinaga, told the American embassy that the president-elect had indicated “it was his intention, when Congress convened on September 1, 1928, to submit two bills to that body, the first dealing with insurance for labor, and the second, regulating Article 123 of the Federal Constitution.” Aspe added that given the composition of the Congress, “these bills will undoubtedly be enacted and that the texts thereof are such that when given the force of law the political power of the CROM and its regional leaders will be reduced to unimportance.”41
The assassination of Obregón in July 1928 delayed only briefly Obregonista plans for federal labor legislation. Upon his nomination to be interim president, Portes Gil convened a conference of labor and capital representatives to discuss the draft code that he had prepared, still in his capacity of minister of the interior. On October 20, 1928, his announcement of the legislative project to the press invoked the memory of the deceased president-elect:
A few weeks before the last trip of General Obregón to this capital, I received a letter from him in which he manifested his wishes that I formulate a project of a regulatory law of Article 123 in order that, as soon as he arrived to Mexico City, we would have an exchange of ideas, as much as in respect of said project as in respect to what constituted his most legitimate aspiration during the last years of his life, that is, the Labor Insurance Law. With the indication of General Obregón, I began to elaborate said projects, which will be completed by the first fortnight of next November.42
At the time, Portes Gil contrasted his commitment to enact a labor statute, which he claimed paralleled similar legislation promulgated in 1925 in Tamaulipas when he was the state’s governor, with the CROM’s failure to have done so during its years of greater influence.43 In view of the CROM’s repeated frustrated efforts, Portes Gil’s criticism of the confederation appears politically motivated, reflective of his antipathy for it.44 The incoming presidency signaled the end of the obstructed CROM-backed labor bill: “in the Senate there has existed for some time a bill for a Labor Law and [Emilio Portes Gil] will duly take up with that Chamber a request to suspend decision thereof since it is believed that this bill is untimely, defective and incomplete.”45
The convention of labor and employer representatives, or Convención Obrero-Patronal, met between November 15 and December 8, 1928. Among the more important business and labor groups, only the CGT abstained from attending the convention.46 The CROM participated fully until it verbally attacked Portes Gil, in a self-defeating political move.47 Before this occurred, Portes Gil stated in his parting message to the convention, as he assumed the office of the presidency, the objectives of enacting a federal labor law. The legislation should be practical, not a useless, idealistic law; it should encompass the rights achieved by workers, that is, their conquests, while considering the relationship that should exist between capital and labor. Put differently, the legislation should recognize the needs of capital, too.48 These points would reverberate in ensuing debates around passage of the federal labor law.
Portes Gil’s legislation was a comprehensive legal code meant to encompass most aspects of industrial relations and covered most issues arising from the employment contract while promoting the collective contract. It outlined a hierarchy of factory commissions, local (municipal), state, and federal boards to adjudicate labor disputes and a national council to determine other economic issues.49 In view of the CROM’s recent collaboration with the state, it outlawed any political activity by unions. Along with the regulation of the strike, the code implied extensive state intervention and supervision of industrial relations.
At the convention, Lombardo Toledano presented the critical positions of the CROM, still the main labor federation in the country. Lombardo affirmed two points Portes Gil conceded in his parting statement, the same ones repeatedly championed by labor and acknowledged at least rhetorically by governmental leaders as they pressed for the federal legislation. First, any statute should implement the rights established by Article 123. Second, it must incorporate the progress achieved by workers due to collective contracts and state laws—in other words, their conquests.50 The CROM, Lombardo insisted, had supported the federalization of labor law and still did. Lombardo did object to Portes Gil’s proposals for regulating union activity, contending that the legal personality of the union derived from Article 123 and was not a privilege to be accorded by the state.51 Yet while Lombardo criticized provisions for monitoring labor organizations, his argument allowed for state supervision of union conduct, provided governmental intervention was limited to general prescriptions.52
On December 21, 1928, Portes Gil presented the Senate his initiative to amend constitutional Articles 123 and 73, Paragraph X, so that Congress could pass labor legislation applicable to the entire country.53 The interim president justified the constitutional amendments mostly on economic grounds.54 To appease state governors, Portes Gil compromised the future legislation: while labor law would be nationally uniform, state governments would enforce and apply this law in industries not specifically under the jurisdiction of the federal labor boards. Portes Gil acknowledged that the federal government had already created the federal labor boards because of the “need . . . so widely felt” and “in order to try to limit to one regulation the labor difficulties which were presenting themselves in these industries throughout various States of the Republic,” thereby alluding to the major conflicts that had occurred in the railway and other important sectors of the economy.55 The federal labor boards’ jurisdiction would be restricted to these sectors. Although the Senate quickly approved the constitutional amendments, some chamber deputies opposed them because they believed amendments did not protect the states’ jurisdiction over labor matters adequately. The final language of Paragraph X of Article 73 was as follows:
The enforcement of the Labor Laws shall correspond to the authorities of the States within their respective jurisdictions, except when it is a question relating to railways or other enterprises of transportation, operating under Federal concessions, mines or hydrocarbons, and, lastly, labor performed at sea or in the maritime zone, in the form and manner which the regulations shall fix.56
Excélsior, on August 4, reported one more compromise reached between the president and Congress: to leave the textile industry outside of the jurisdiction of the federal labor boards. Portes Gil initially had wanted to place the industry within their scope.57 The amendments to Articles 73 and 123 became effective on August 31, 1929.58
THE PROYECTO DE CÓDIGO FEDERAL DE TRABAJO
The Escobarista military rebellion and the inaugural convention of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), sponsored by Calles, both happening in early March, delayed Portes Gil’s completion of the draft federal labor code, or Proyecto de Código Federal de Trabajo, until July 1929.59 Consisting of 639 articles, in addition to eight transitional ones, compiled into four books or parts, it remained as ambitious as the draft circulated at the convention in late 1928. A lengthy statement of purpose (Exposición de motivos) by Portes Gil adumbrated the main themes covered by the code, in the order of their appearance in the text.60 A legal code, it was conceived as “a systematic and logical classification of general and mandatory dispositions corresponding to a unitary subject doctrinally and philosophically.” It was meant to be a “legal organism.”61 The exposition said that the code should definitively establish the rights and obligations of workers and employers as well as the role and coordinating function of the state, meeting the “urgent” and “palpable” necessity for national legislation.62
The Portes Gil code’s purpose to ensure social peace and order at the site of production was to be achieved by affording workers security in their employment and employers security in their investments, while directing them to recognize unions, closely regulated by the state.63 Employers had to enter into collective contracts with unions. Unions had to limit themselves to representing workers in connection with economic issues; they could not engage in political activity. The code severely circumscribed the right to strike and aimed to replace it with arbitration by labor boards. The code would limit the boards’ discretion through its detailed rules encompassing most aspects of labor relations. The code protected business’ most important interests: it transformed the constitutional right of profit sharing into a savings scheme, and it conserved managerial prerogatives regarding investment and disinvestment by clearly distinguishing suspensions of production or reductions in operations from the lockout.
The code’s structure posited as a premise of labor relations the employment contract, modified and elaborated by the state; or, as the exposition put it:
The matter in the present case is labor economically considered. This develops and manifests itself within human will as a natural product of the relations between men in the contract of labor and as a product also of the force and will of the State, which balances and orients individual and collective activity or activities. That is the object of the Code: to establish the juridical norms that regulate these relations and set the conditions in which work should be realized.64
The code’s organization sets out, first, the rules to govern the individual contract; second, the contrato de equipo, or labor contractor’s agreement (an institutional innovation of the code); and, third, the collective contract.65 Echoing Macías’s valuation of the collective contract in his speech to the constitutional convention in December 1916, the exposition emphasized that it was the most important institution encompassed by the code. Not only were larger employers obliged to sign one; it would not be legally effective until filed with the relevant governmental authority.66 The code further posited the contrato ley, or contract law, as an industry-wide agreement (similar to the textile convention) that would follow from collective contracts entered into by specific companies and their workers, and which the government could impose under certain conditions. Portes Gil ultimately justified its imposition by suggesting that the constitution recognized not only the individual person but also the collective.67
The code contemplated quelling acrimonious interunion rivalries, which had plagued industrial relations in the 1920s, by privileging the majority union exclusively.68 Portes Gil rejected Lombardo’s main criticism of mandatory union registration, namely, that the state might thus be attempting to suppress an already existing organization; the state would have little discretion to deny registration. More theoretically, Portes Gil asserted that the labor organization was a public or semipublic entity.69 The code balanced the constitutional right to strike against prescriptions also in Article 123 directing the resolution of disputes through arbitration. The exposition made a convoluted interpretation of the tension between the right to strike and the establishment of arbitration boards:
How is it possible that on one hand workers are permitted the right to strike, in order to obtain the realization of right[s], and on the other hand, the State intervenes with its force to obtain the same end? Therefore the right to strike is useless and unnecessary. Constitutional arbitration as further ahead we shall see is a semi-mandatory arbitration, and the strike in itself is not a right, rather a means of coercion that the Constitution recognizes, and accords it juridical process to obtain right[s].70
Code provisions actually narrowed procedurally and substantively the range of permissible strikes.
Organized labor guardedly subscribed to Portes Gil’s project. The ad hoc workers’ association, the Alianza de Uniones y Sindicatos de Artes Gráficas para el Estudio del Código Federal del Trabajo, convened a conference to formulate amendments to it as a unified labor front. The Convención Pro Ley del Trabajo met between August 15 and August 20, 1929.71 Almost all major labor organizations, except the CGT, attended it. The CROM criticized the project systematically while the communist Confederación Sindical Unitaria de México (CSUM, the Unitary Mexican Union Confederation) labeled it fascist. The organizing committee for the convention remained more conciliatory.72 Attendees recommended changes to the draft code as corrections that would reestablish rights already attained (conquistas logradas).73 The proposals could be quite specific—for example, elimination of the contrato de equipo,74 which, according to Lombardo, made the union a labor contractor “the most hated figure” of the working class and restricted its presence in a plant.75
The convention tacitly accepted the state’s intervention in the internal affairs of unions, although it strenuously objected to the prohibition on political activity, reasoning that in practical terms union activity often assumed a political character without overstepping a defensive function of protecting members’ interests. The prohibition, too, contravened constitutional principles. As a compromise, the convention suggested limiting the prohibition to electoral activity. After the convention, labor groups demonstrated for their amendments and a federal labor law.76
Excélsior, which was then linked to the powerful group of Monterrey industrialists, published capital’s concerns about the pending legislation.77 Business groups initially adopted a guardedly sympathetic stance toward Portes Gil’s project, applauding the constitutional amendments enabling the federalization of labor law, then became critical of many of the code’s provisions, lobbying publicly for far-reaching modifications. The industrialists’ rhetoric reiterated that the needs of production, the economy, and foreign investment required legislation reconciling the interests of labor and capital. The rights of capital needed assurances; if the code upheld labor’s rights under Article 123, it should not extend them. An open letter of the Grupo Patronal (Employer Group) published in Excélsior in late July described Mexico’s economic crisis and said that the only viable solution was to attract foreign capital. Since the potential for investment was affected by conditions in other countries, burdening production costs any further would discourage investment and worsen the depression. The federal labor law had to ensure capital’s right of property and managerial discretion to direct enterprises and select personnel, from foreign countries if necessary.78
An editorial in Excélsior in mid-July, denouncing union líderes, an allusion to the CROM, opined that laws covering industrial relations must stimulate production. To realize this purpose, the legislation should conciliate both the worker and the entrepreneur’s interests; preferring one at the expense of the other harmed both.79 Another editorial in early August applauded Congress’s enactment of the constitutional amendments authorizing federalization and criticized defenders of the more “advanced” labor legislation in some states. The editorial approved of Portes Gil’s proyecto conditionally. Congress, it asserted, should legislate for all, not just workers; the radicalism of “advanced” laws implied the ruin of industrial enterprises, breaking the equilibrium that ought to exist between capital and labor. The legislature, like the judge, should accord each its own, guaranteeing the rights of capital and labor.80 This was a liberal argument: it formally resembled Vigil’s, Prieto’s, Martínez de la Torres’s, and Lozano’s, to a degree.81 But whereas they, in the 1870s, had contended that labor was the equal of capital in order to advance labor’s position, now the argument was deployed to curb labor’s pretensions for more.
The Chamber of Deputies began consideration of Portes Gil’s project on September 2, 1929.82 An article published in Excélsior on September 11 reported employer complaints, such as indefinite or “perpetual” employment contracts, mandatory, collective contracts, “forced unionization,” and the recognition of the solidarity strike as licit. Too burdensome for industry were obligations regarding rest periods, paid vacations, housing, as well as third-party liability.83 Portes Gil personally tried to placate the Monterrey industrialists. He failed.84 An extensive memorandum presented by the Convention of Industrial Delegates (Convención de Delegados Industriales de la República), filed with the Chamber of Deputies on September 20, and summarized by Excélsior, recommended multiple changes to the code.85