It was under this new administration that SITIAVW forged ties with IG Metall in Germany, which invited its leaders to visit Germany and witness the system of integration of the union and Works Councils into management. In 1987, after management sought to impose a brutal plan of mass layoffs and cuts to benefits, the union was compelled to strike for 57 days and organize demonstrations and road cuts. Workers in Germany defied their own union leadership to oppose the use of parts made in Mexico. The company had to shelve its plan in Puebla and agree to a 78 percent wage increase.
This episode in particular showed how unleashing the enormous international strength of VW workers requires breaking the control of the union apparatus.
In the 1990s, so-called “working groups” were established at the plant bringing together the union and management to oversee a restructuring program of firings and outsourcing, where delegates were in charge of enforcing company mandates. In 1995, a new leadership under a Unificación Democrática caucus was voted in and there was yet another change in 2000, but throughout this period the new leaders made constant concessions and justified them as necessary to avoid mass layoffs. This included the 12-hour, 4 x 3 schedules.
In 1997, SITIAVW joined other unions that were leaving the sinking ship of the CTM to found the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), which it still belongs to today.
The AFL-CIO soon took the new federation under its wing. A UNT official told researcher Thomas Collombat “the AFL-CIO would later realize that it needed allies more representative of Mexican labor, leading US unions to support and work with the UNT as soon as it was launched.” The UNT also joined ORIT and participated in trainings and events sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), a foundation affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that is financed by the German government.
During the 2000s, union leader José Luis Rodríguez Salazar joined the VW Global Works Council and the German-Ibero-American Network of the Auto and Metal Industries launched by IG Metall. Rodríguez Salazar explained that these international ties helped “refurbish the discredited image of the union,” even as he celebrated government handouts to the company and imposed further concessions.
Most recently, in 2018, IG Metall and its associated “Global Union,” IndustriALL, openly financed the former leader of SITIAVW, Rodríguez Salazar, to lead the establishment of a new Federation of Independent Unions in the Auto, Aeronautics and Tire Industries in Mexico, which was joined by SITIAVW, SITAUDI, Los Mineros and other unions sponsored by US, Canadian and German imperialism.
Today, these unions maintain corporatist ties—similar to those that characterized the CTM and PRI—with the ruling party Morena of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Puebla governor Sergio Salomón Céspedes, who applauded the SITIAVW’s sellout. “I recognize in the union a prudent agent with conviction that seeks dialog and reaches agreements,” he said.
The sellout in Puebla confirms the conclusion stated by the World Socialist Web Site in a recent analysis of the expansion of the intervention of the AFL-CIO and its Solidarity Center across Latin America:
“The fight against inequality, war, fascism and imperialist oppression today means rebelling against the entire union apparatus and building the International Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-17 11:12:00
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