A mass strike at 48 maquiladora, or manufacturer, plants in Mexico’s border city of Matamoros was heading for victory, bringing pay raises for laborers who make less than US$1 an hour, or about 100 pesos a day, assembling auto components and TV sets for export to the US — and causing jitters for the business community.
The labor battle broke out in the middle of last month after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, widely known as AMLO, decreed a doubling of the minimum wage in Mexico’s border zones, apparently unaware that some union contracts at the maquiladora plants are indexed to minimum wage increases.
The decree sparked a wave of walkouts involving 25,000 workers.
The maquiladoras said the strikes threaten the very existence of their industry, which has attracted more than 5,000 mostly foreign-owned plants and 2 million jobs by paying very low wages.
Union leaders said the worries were overblown, adding that workers at the border plants still earn far less than their counterparts in the US.
Less than a week after the strike broke out, a majority of the export plants in Matamoros — 29 companies with a total of about 34 factories — have agreed to the union demands, a rare victory that owes a lot to something the Mexican president probably did not intend to happen.
After taking office on Dec. 1 last year, Lopez Obrador doubled the minimum wage in communities along the US border to 176.20 pesos (US$9.22) a day. With maquiladora pay averaging about 146 pesos a day, the Matamoras workers went on strike to demand the 20 percent raise be applied to everybody — even those making above the minimum — and a one-time bonus of about US$1,685.
“Perhaps he didn’t take into account what was in the labor contracts,” said Javier Zuniga, an advocate with the Miners’ Union who has helped coordinate the strike. “The president acted in good faith, but he didn’t measure the impact that was going to have on union contracts and the workers came out winners for once.”
Since the 1990s, many companies in Matamoros, which is across the border from Brownsville, Texas, signed contracts indexed to minimum wage hikes.
It was a way to keep wages down, given that in most previous years, annual increases were about equal to the inflation rate.
One such contract signed in March last year at the Kongsberg Interior Systems plant, which makes automotive cables, stipulates that “the company will reach an agreement with the union to increase wages by the same percent that minimum wages are increased.”
In addition, many companies’ annual bonuses are calculated by multiplying minimum wage increases by 365, a figure that in past years usually amounted to only about US$100.
“They [the government] never thought there was a real union, or that there were [contract] clauses like that,” said Cirila Quintero, a sociology professor at Colegio de la Frontera Norte who has studied the Matamoros union that has represented maquiladora workers for more than a quarter century.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS