Note published on February 22 in El Economista, Empresas [Companies] Section by María del Pilar Martínez.
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Given that the contents of the collective bargaining agreement, as well as salary increases and even the most minimal agreement made by the union leadership with the company must, for the first time, have the consent of the workers, it is essential that organizations work on a crisis plan, in the opinion of labor specialists from the Labor Business School (LBS).
Within the framework of the “Collective Bargaining 2022” webinar, they explained that the labor reform continues with the implementation process, and since it is up to the workers to define whether the agreement reached by the union organization meets their expectations, this will cause crisis situations, which could even lead to the outbreak of a strike, “which makes it essential to work on a plan that allows us to best address the conflict,” said the director of the LBS, Óscar de la Vega.
In this sense, he explained that the plan must include components such as the answer to the petitions document, which must be prepared within 48 hours after it is received, maintain communication to be aware of whether the process will be conducted through the labor judge or through the Conciliation Board; additionally, work must be conducted on the possible inexistence of a strike, particularly when requirements are not met or noting the illegality of the strike when the strikers incur in illicit acts.
For his part, Eduardo Arrocha, a specialist, explained that the “labor reform has the purpose of guaranteeing freedom of association in collective bargaining, based on the fact that it was claimed that collective bargaining did not exist in Mexico, or that it existed at a very low level and collective bargaining was composed of protection agreements.”
Given the above, he said, “collective bargaining will be activated in our country; and workers will be fundamentally the ones to give their consent to the agreements that union organizations will establish with companies.”
For his part, Ricardo Martínez Rojas, explained that there is also the process of legitimation of existing collective bargaining agreements and “as such, it was an invention of the Department of Labor in which they confuse consulting with legitimation.”
He highlighted that companies measure their relationship with the workers and the union, “but nowadays, it is more important to measure the state of the relationship of the union with the workers.”
