MEXICO: Constitutional Strike

In Mexico City last week, taxi drivers alarmed their passengers by driving in quick spurts, coasting as far as they could before spurting again. This maneuver was supposed to save gasoline, which was not to be obtained at all. Reason: 18,000 members of Mexico’s Syndicate of Petroleum Workers, settling into their second week of strike against Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey and 15 other Foreign companies, had shut Mexico’s $500,000,000 oil industry down as tight as a petroleum drum.

Impressed by this large-scale demonstration of his power was Secretary-General Vicente Lombardo Toledano of the year-old CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers), a hot-eyed little industrial unionist who likes to be compared with John L. Lewis. CTM’s Toledano was one big step ahead of CIO’s Lewis in that the employers had voluntarily formed a syndicate to bargain collectively under Mexico’s 1931 Labor Law. Negotiations were stalled when the employers stuck flatly at the Oil Workers’ demands: a 40-hour week instead of 44, a boost in minimum wages from roughly $1 to $1.70 a day, old-age pensions of from 75% to 100% of salary, & 6-day vacations with pay. The employers’ syndicate, dismissing the pensions and vacations as “exaggerated and impossible,” offered successively a $1.20 and then a $1.33 minimum wage, a 40-hour week split into five days instead of the five seven-hour days and one five-hour day the union demanded. These proposals were turned down as promptly as everyone expected, and red-&-black strike flags continued to fly peaceably over orderly picket lines. Since in Mexico any form of strikebreaking is heinously unconstitutional, no worker was afraid of being displaced.

Mexico’s sleepy old CROM (Regional Confederation of Mexican Labor), whose head, Luis Morones, is a good friend of A. F. of L.’s William Green, revived sufficiently to snipe at Leader Toledano as a “Communist.” This has been common Mexican talk ever since his union friends gave Toledano, a dapper intellectual, a trip to Russia to study the Soviet scheme. Leader Toledano returned first-class with the news that he had not been converted to Communism. But last week the news that Mexican Trotskyists were agitating to turn his oil strike into a general strike was enough to set him off into a Stalinist rage against “counterrevolutionary tactics.”

For a week Government services were being supplied with oil by the Government-owned Petromex, whose employes do not enjoy the legal right to strike. But with about $60,000 a day in oil taxes being nicked from his budget, Labor-loving President Lázaro Cárdenas finally persuaded the strikers to go back to work, let a Federal conciliation board hammer out a settlement.