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.
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