Note published on march 10, 2021, on El Economista, section Empresas by María del Pilar Martínez
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Calls to strike with the objective of getting the signature of a collective bargaining agreement with companies fell 88.9% in comparison to the two first months of 2019, the date in which the labor reform that integrates a new labor model for establishing the signature of agreements was presented.
According to data from the Department of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS), only 50 calls to strike seeking the signature of an agreement were presented in the first two months of this year.
It is worth noting that the new labor model has already entered into force and its implementation has already been carried out in 21 states; while the last stage, which includes the entities with the greatest amount of labor conflicts, such as Mexico City and Nuevo León, will only enter into force in October of this year.
In an annual comparison, calls to strike were 86% higher in February of 2021 versus the ones reported this year, as only 27 unions presented their calls for this reason in 2022.
Protection agreements developed, recalled Óscar de la Vega, partner at De la Vega & Martinez Rojas, because “there was a series of cases of extortion and bribery by union organizations, there were thousands of cases in which we already had a call to strike because of the signature of the agreement when we didn’t even know the workers yet. The last thing these unions cared about was the protection of the workers of the construction industry, but they were sinecures that existed in a corporate system in which all of the corporate unionism was a pillar of the party in power that for 60 years was the PRI.”
Currently, in order to achieve the signature of a CCT [Collective Bargaining Agreement], at least in the 21 entities in which the labor reform has already entered into force, it is indispensable that the union organization has the Certificate of Representativeness that attests that they have at least 30% of the approval of the workers.
Nevertheless, unions with operations in the entities of: Mexico City, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, Nuevo León, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas and Yucatán can still present calls to strike for the signature of a collective bargaining agreement, without the need for presenting their Certificate of Representativeness.
Another one of the reasons why union organizations present calls to strike is for reviews, whether in regard to salary or to the contract, but they can also be presented under the argument that there have been violations in the fulfillment of the agreement.
Of the union organizations that comprise the Labor Congress (CT), the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) is the labor central that has presented the greatest number of calls in the last three years; nevertheless, a decrease is taking place; up to February 2022, 55 calls to strike, for different causes, have been reported.
