The Rights of Free Labor, 1875–1910
had progressed very far in Mexico. The civil code did require employees, such as servants and day laborers, to obey completely the employer unless the request contravened the law or contract; to discharge their service loyally and with all the diligence commensurate with their abilities; and to care for things received while in service, avoiding damage to them.21 The worker was responsible for the value of all entrusted instruments and objects, except when faultless for any damage or loss.22
The civil code, while centered on relations among individuals, also governed their freely constituted associations, including those of workers and artisans who organized groups and meetings for mutual support and aid.23 Article 47 subjected all private interest associations, as any labor association would have been deemed, to the rules of the contrato de sociedad. The conditions for this contract of an association did not specifically require its registration with any authority but did refer to a need for a public writing, possibly a charter of its constitution and bylaws reached in a public meeting.24 The code set out the definitions of moral and legal entities or persons, that is, of collective associations:
Art. 43. Moral persons are associations or corporations, temporary or perpetual, founded with a joint public and private end or reason, which in their civil relations represent a legal entity.
Art. 44. No association or corporation is a legal entity unless it is legally authorized.
Art. 45. Associations or corporations that are legal entities can exercise all civil rights relative to the legitimate interests of their institution.25
The code did not outline how a legal entity was authorized or whether a public authority had to license an organization for it to be “legally authorized.”
The Penal Code of 1871 addressed the strike. Article 925 imposed a fine ranging from 25 to 500 pesos or incarceration lasting between eight days and three months, or both on “those who cause a disturbance or riot, or employ any other kind of physical or moral violence, with the purpose of causing the raising or lowering of salaries or wages of workers, or impeding the free exercise of industry or work.”26 The sanction against a riot or (physical) violence was clear; in contrast, the notion of moral violence was ambiguous. Article 925 did not define the term, although moral violence was understood as intimidation or a threat of future and imminent harm, capable of sufficiently debilitating the individual’s will.27 Thus, the same code in the chapter on robbery described moral violence present when the robber threatened a person with grave harm, actual or immediate, which was capable of intimidating him or her.28
If one reads Article 925 in the context of its surrounding provisions in the same section of the code, it seems clearer that the penalties against certain strike activity aimed to punish rioting and tumultuous mass behavior capable of intimidating the employer or nonstriking workers. Article 922 penalized a public reunion of three or more people, which even if formed with a licit purpose degenerated into a tumult disturbing the repose of others with yelling, fighting, or disorderly behavior; Article 928 penalized those who caused a riot, tumult, or fight, with the objective of provoking the pillage of a fair or market so that, intimidated, the vendors sold their merchandise at a lower price. Article 926 targeted a verbal act—defamation—uttered in order to affect the price of merchandise or credit documents, but it did so without using the phrase “moral violence,” which suggests that the drafters of the code distinguished such injurious, nonviolent verbal behavior from intimidation akin to moral violence.29 In general, these articles concerned the maintenance of public order and prevention of harm to economic interests: aside from Article 926 they covered physical acts. The entire section (Title Eight) in which the drafters placed Article 925 was entitled “delicts against the public order.” If the strike were undertaken to pressure an economic interest forcefully or threateningly, the state could punish strikers. The strike understood as the peaceful withdrawal of labor was another matter.
THE RIGHT TO STRIKE
The hatters’ strike in the spring of 1875 in Mexico City was practically a paradigm of the kind of concerted action that liberals then could tolerate or support under the constitution and codes.30 The strike was peaceful; hatters simply desisted from working. Their action did not violate Article 925 of the penal code. The then radical newspaper El Socialista stressed the lawfulness of the strike.31 Guillermo Prieto advised and represented strikers in negotiations with employers; Francisco T. Gordillo, whom one periodical wrote was a learned and eloquent attorney, also served as their counsel.32
Striking hatters founded a society on May 3, 1875, that set a wage rate (tarifa) to which employers had to accede for hatters to return to work.33 An extensive set of bylaws or statutes was drafted for the association, the Sociedad Reformadora del Ramo de Sombrerería.34 In most respects its bylaws typified those of artisans’ mutual aid societies.35 Distinctively, one of the objectives of the bylaws was to protect the interests of the striking workers; and they contemplated the need to discipline members.36
Press sympathetic to the strike emphasized the value of cooperation among workers and producers. La Firmeza urged compromise because labor and capital needed each other: rights and obligations were identical, and consequently both should compromise to reach a satisfactory arrangement.37 El Socialista, in an essay entitled “La Asociación,” enumerated the practical benefits of association. After the strike ended, consistent with an ethic of cooperativism, the governing board of the society projected a conciliatory stance to employers and government. It explicitly thanked the nation’s president and the government of the federal district, which “had facilitated the peaceful transaction of our and the proprietor’s interests.”38 The sources do not indicate whether the society submitted its statutes to any government office for approval or review.
Following the hatters’ strike, and in response to it, the prestigious Colegio de Abogados in Mexico City sponsored a symposium on the right to strike in August 1875.39 Speakers included the eminent lawyer Rafael Martínez de la Torre,40 and the rising attorney Emilio Velasco. Prieto also spoke; he called the symposium “transcendental.” Plainly, it represented an important event: the nation’s president Lerdo de Tejada attended, in addition to a couple of hundred other people.41 It is significant, then, how the mentioned speakers concluded that workers had the legal right to strike. They based their analyses on the constitutional rights of free labor and association, also finding substantial support in political economic theory. Their discourse, particularly Martínez and Prieto’s addresses, illustrates how liberalism and legal thought by 1875 had established an essential element of labor law.