Just Equilibrium Between Opposing Interests

In November 1911, when a Huasteca paymaster at Tampico was late in distributing the pay, several hundred workers nearly rioted. Four members of the rurales, the rural police force, helped calm the crowd. At the time, sixteen rurales had also been permanently stationed at the refinery of Waters-Pierce since a 1909 strike to prevent disturbances.^[84] If there once might have been a cozy relationship between foreign owners and the state concerning the control of the working class, it was to come to an end with the Mexican Revolution. This monumental upheaval in the social and political life of the nation — despite the relatively lukewarm participation of organized labor — represents a critical watershed. Before the Revolution, labor had little juridical existence. President Porfirio Díaz and local politicians dealt with strikes and workers' demands according to custom, which in Mexico had always dictated the state's protection of the downtrodden. When ad hoc state patronage did not restore labor's place in the delicate social order, the Díaz regime applied coercion. Indeed, many of these attitudes toward the working class carried over into the post-Porfirian age.

But the Revolution made possible more significant changes. That is to say, the Revolution itself produced nothing for the workers; it merely offered them the opportunity to act on their own agenda. In Mexico, workers made their own changes.

First and foremost, the incessant competition among the elites over who was to control the state raised labor's political importance. Politicians sought support from the working class in order to outflank competitors. Worker organizations had always been involved in politics; yet much of their participation had been subdued and made unimportant during the long reign of Porfirio Díaz. The Porfirian order of the day was "much administration, little politics," removing opportunities for labor to insert itself into the political process. The Revolution occurred at a moment when the urban, industrial working class was now larger, approximately 16 percent of the economically active population of Mexico.^[85] But the clout of the workers was much greater than their number. Although they did not make the Revolution — it had been fought by armies of rancheros and campesinos — the workers did help consolidate it. Holding the cities and collecting taxes in the ports became the paramount task of the new revolutionary government.

The state's need for their assistance, therefore, empowered the urban and industrial workers to advance their own agenda. And the agenda of the Mexican workers of the twentieth century was not unlike the artisan's goals of the late eighteenth: to be incorporated juridically into public life in order to assure the individual's security within the economic system.^[86] Such a goal violated the tenets of liberal capitalism, because the incorporation of labor into the body politic greatly infringed upon the exercise of private property rights. But even under Porfirio Díaz, Mexico had been an imperfect adherent to liberalism. The desire to tether capitalism became even stronger during the Revolution. In the first place, it provided the bourgeois politicians with a tool to end the social chaos and rebellion from below. In the second place, collective action and social reforms proffered the working class a sense of security and place in society. Unfettered capitalist growth did not.

No sooner had the old regime fallen than the politicians recognized the central role of labor in the new. In 1911, the Madero government established the Office of Labor in order to mediate disputes and "harmonize" capital and labor. Huerta turned the office into a labor department. Later governments expanded the personnel of this new bureaucracy, in recognition of labor's expanded role in revolutionary Mexico and in an effort to extend political control over the industrial and commercial regions, like Tampico, located far from Mexico City. While Carranza was in power, the labor department acquired Constitutional powers of arbitration and established an office of federal labor inspectors in Tampico.^[87] The labor bureaucracy served somewhat the same purpose as the petroleum office technocrats. The state expanded both agencies in an effort to gain command over two elements thought to have contributed to the unraveling of Mexico: the excesses of foreign capital and labor unrest.

For these reasons, politicians who sought control of the state openly attempted to win the hearts and minds of the urban and industrial workers. Inhabitants of Tampico, as an important petroleum export center, became particular targets of competing local, state, and national leaders — whether civilian or military. Huerta's new labor department in 1914 assisted the Gremio Unido de Alijadores to win a contract committing the company to hire its members only.^[88] Huerta might have won them over. The workers there responded with passivity when Constitutionalist forces besieged the huertistas at Tampico — but then Tampico workers, except perhaps as individuals, did not fight for or against any revolutionary faction, ever. Nonetheless, when the constitu-

cionalistas took the city, they gained the workers' support by promising land reforms, the eight-hour day, a minimum daily wage of five pesos, and rent reductions.^[89] (Urban workers supported land reform because it would presumably keep their country cousins down on the farm.) Carranza himself, however, repudiated some of the more radical promises of his subordinates. The first chief's tepid support of reforms did not prevent his military officers nor the state governors from mediating labor disputes in Tampico. As commander of northeastern Mexico during 1915, Gen. Pablo González involved himself in the negotiations of various labor organizations with El Aguila and the Mexican Light and Power Company in Tampico. González tended to favor Mexican workers in their disputes with foreign-owned enterprises. One of his staff officers even proposed forming "arbitration tribunals," after the Veracruz state model, in which representatives of government, industry, and labor would meet to settle disputes. Only in this way, said González's aide, could the government guarantee stability and gain the support of the majority of its citizens.^[90]

General Cándido Aguilar also made initiatives for labor reform in the state of Veracruz. As early as 1914, he proposed state legislation that would have established the nine-hour day and a system of state inspectors and mediators. As governor, he later called for state labor legislation. By 1919, he presented a draft bill to the state legislatures. The state had an obligation to regulate capital and labor, he said, because the strikes that had been occurring since 1915 threatened to "disorganize the active life of the State." The proposed law would "put an end to the anarchy which reigned in the realm of labor." Since conflict between capital and labor was natural, Aguilar stated, this law would provide the "just equilibrium between opposing interest" and would "give to each his share."^[91]

Wooing labor became the special objective of those politicians seeking office. Several labor leaders in Minatitlán, in fact, ran for public office. One member of the El Aguila refinery union in 1917 became a local deputy and another the municipal president. In 1919, the young Tamaulipas lawyer Emilio Portes Gil attended the convention of the state's labor organizations in order to help form the Partido Laborista Mexicano, which supported Obregón.^[92] The popular general himself came to Tampico in March of 1920. From the balcony of the Hotel Continental, he spoke to a large crowd (fifteen thousand persons, most of them workers, the obregonistas claimed) in the Plaza de la Libertad. But the local commanders, Gen. Francisco Murguía and Col. Carlos S.

Orozco, both supporters of Carranza, took several of Obregón's entourage into custody for insulting the president. Seven pistoleros confronted Obregón in his hotel room.^[93] Mexican politics of the time was a high-stakes game.

The workers' political agitation gained for them recognition in no less than the nation's new Constitution of 1917. For one thing, more workers than peasants were represented among the writers of the constitution (two artisans, a carpenter, a railway mechanic and union leader, and several miners are mentioned). But the bourgeois military leaders and bureaucrats were unhappy with Carranza's weak draft provisions protecting labor. One laborite allowed his inspirational rhetoric to depart from fact. We need labor reforms in the new constitution, said the ex-miner Dionisio Zavala, because "the workers are the ones who have made the Revolution."^[94] Several constituyentes complained that the states, such as Sonora under Calles and Veracruz under Aguilar, had more progressive labor legislation than Carranza's draft. Among labor's supporters was Gen. Francisco Múgica, the twenty-eight-year-old general from Michoacán, hardly Mexico's industrial heartland. The constituyentes relented and wrote a tough, very specific Article 123 into the 1917 Constitution. Pastor Rouaix and a team of bureaucrats had composed the drafts.^[95]

No matter how it came about, Article 123 reserved a great role for the state as intervenor in the relationship between workers and employers. "The Congress and the State Legislature shall make laws relative to ... the labor of skilled and unskilled workers, employees, domestic servants and artisans, and every labor contract in general." The constitution reserved for the state the right to judge strikes to be lawful or unlawful. "Strikes shall be considered unlawful only when the majority of strikers engage in acts of violence."^[96] Municipal authorities had to approve all labor contracts between Mexican workers and foreign-owned companies, and disputes were to be settled between arbitration boards made up of representatives of labor, capital, and the state. Government commissions in the states and municipalities were to establish the minimum wage. These provisions made the government the deciding, swing factor in the relationship between the employee and his or her employer. Little in the constitutional debates indicated a purposefully antiforeign meaning to Article 123. Its provisions applied equally to foreign as to domestic employers.

Moreover, the labor article of the constitution detailed the precise responsibilities of employers toward their charges. This had been true

of colonial legislation that governed Indian labor.^[97] Indebtedness as a method of holding workers was outlawed, and arbitrary discharge was penalized by fines. Article 123 mandated an eight-hour day and limited night work to seven hours. Employers had to pay two times the salary for overtime work, and they could not ask children or women to perform it. Finally, there came the very specific injunctions of Clause XII. "In every agricultural, industrial, mining or any other kind of labor, employers shall be obliged to furnish their workers comfortable and sanitary dwellings, for which they may charge rents not exceeding onehalf of one percent per month of the assessed value of the properties. They shall likewise establish schools, dispensaries, and other services necessary to the community."^[98] Who assessed property values? Who inspected these educational and medical facilities? The state. The constitution was the perfect compromise between Mexican conservatives, who wanted a strong state to control the impoverished masses, and reformers who wished that the state would ameliorate the distress of the masses. It cannot be forgotten, the constituyentes did not devise Article 123 out of thin air. They drew its provisions from petitions that union leaders had been submitting to local officials and military chieftains. In a sense, Mexican workers themselves helped draft the Constitution of 1917.

Although it is true that revolutionary politicians competed for the favor of labor, the workers too found it expedient to exploit the political factionalism of the Revolution in order to gain certain advantages. Such was the case of the Casa del Obrero Mundial. In 1912, during a season of strikes, labor leaders in Mexico City organized the Casa, probably with the backing of American anarchists in the I.W.W. The Casa always represented a small minority of workers. It affiliated 39 unions representing the traditional artisan classes, such as printers, tailors, stonemasons, tramway workers, intellectuals, and students; few factory workers in the city's textile industry joined. Its leaders, like Rosendo Salazar, who later wrote about Mexico's labor history, were highly educated, erudite, and gifted. The skilled workers of the Casa traditionally distrusted two elements of Mexican life, the peasants and religion. Labor leaders blamed Catholic fanaticism for the "ignorance and backwardness" of most Mexican workers; they resented Zapata for taking Mexicans back to the priests and religious processions. In essence, the urbane Casa leadership was competing with these revolutionary leaders for control of the less-skilled workers, most of whom had not forgotten their rural origins.

When the zapatistas were about to enter Mexico City in the fall of 1914, leaders of the Casa made their political decision. They threw their support to the Constitutionalists. Dr. Atl, a radical painter and Casa orator whose real name was Gerardo Murillo, and Alberto J. Pani, the lawyer and civil servant, visited the headquarters of General Obregón. A deal was struck. Obregón distributed five hundred thousand pesos to Mexico City's urban workers, who had already begun to suffer from famine. Obregón also donated the Santa Brígida Church as the Casa's first headquarters, a symbolic gesture not lost on the anticlerical labor leadership. Carranza agreed to make laws to improve working conditions and to support labor against capital.^[99] In return, the Casa supplied the Constitutional armies with seven thousand volunteers to form six Red Battalions. The famous Red Battalions contributed little to battle, being reserved mostly for guard duty. Nonetheless, the Casa organized twenty-two propaganda missions within these military organizations. They spread the Casa's ideology of a nationally organized and unified proletariat to industrial towns liberated by the Constitutionalist forces.^[100] Eventually, a propaganda team of the Casa entered Tampico.

Casa leaders might well have remarked that to live by politics is also to perish by politics, for Carranza eventually broke with the labor confederation. Mexico City's unions had been increasingly resorting to strikes to combat the cost-of-living rises. Finally, in July 1916, the power and light workers shut down the power station, and the tramway employees halted the mass transit system. It was too much for Carranza. He deactivated the Red Battalions, sent Constitutionalist troops against the strikers, and closed down the new Casa headquarters in the House of Tiles.^[101] The government considered the general strike in the nation's capital to have challenged the political legitimacy of Carranza.

Tampico came into the Casa's scheme of national labor consolidation in 1915, when members of the Red Battalions entered the Constitutionalist-held port city. These leaders supported — but did not originate — the organizational trends then developing among the city's workers. Trade unions of the more skilled proletarians formed first. The carpenters', bricklayers', and boat pilots' unions had between 320 and 460 members each. The journeymen and day laborers (oficios varios ) had unions numbering nearly 550 members each. The local labor inspector described them as independent "groups of resistance for the workers' improvement and progress."^[102]

The Casa leaders at Tampico were every bit as erudite as their counterparts in Mexico City. Spanish anarchist Ramón Delgado, who in

1917 worked in the paraffin department of the El Aguila refinery, and Mariano Benítez, an El Aguila boiler mechanic, edited the Casa newspapers that denounced "the bourgeoisie, the clergy and the state." They dominated the discussion in the workers' assemblies. Always there existed the tension between the imported anarchist ideology attacking the state and the Mexican labor tradition of cooperating with government. But opposition in Tampico grew against the hegemony of Mexico City labor leaders, just as some state political leaders also resisted Carranza's national hegemony. Not all workers conformed to the general strike called by the Tampico branch of the Casa in support of its Mexico City bosses. Therefore, Gen. Emiliano Nafarrete had little trouble rounding up eight Casa leaders and sending them to Querétaro and Mexico City prisons.^[103] The Casa was undone. Although neither strikes nor labor organization in the nation were slowed in the least, the Casa itself could not recover the national hegemony that its political bargaining had once given it. Cracks in working-class solidarity appeared in the Tampico branch of the Casa. Spanish anarchist Jorge D. Borrán attacked the credentials of Luis Morones, chief of the delegation from Mexico City. Borrán called Morones "a mystificator of the socialist ideal" and members of his delegation "Allied-ophiles."^[104] The government of Tamaulipas eventually deported Borrán, who was not a Mexican citizen.

The national disorganization of the Casa finally led to the formation of yet another national labor confederation, the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, better known as CROM. Its new leaders had been active members of the Casa. They met in Saltillo, Coahuila, under the auspices of the state governor. Its top leadership included Morones, who became its general secretary, and Ricardo Treviño, who became one of its directors. Another was Andrés Araujo, like Treviño a Casa organizer at Tampico. (In the early 1920s, Araujo would gain appointment as labor inspector at Tampico.) The CROM was organized very much like the government. Its central committee, like a cabinet, consisted of secretaries of education, interior, exterior, information, and so forth. The centralization of authority and decision making reflected very much the rather authoritarian structure of the government. CROM's leadership also aspired to building a labor hegemony through political alliance. Treviño communicated to Carranza their goals, which included "an energetic opposition ... to the work of intrigue and falsehoods of foreign capitalists who have interests in Mexico" and who impeded the implementation of the Constitution.^[105] CROM actively sought political protection.

Apparently, Carranza's support did not satisfy its leaders, or perhaps they knew the popularity of his chief rival, General Obregón. Upholding the long labor tradition of political involvement, Morones drew up a secret convention with the presidential candidate in August 1919. Obregón promised to appoint prolaborites to the Department of Labor and the secretariat of industry, and a proagrarian to the secretariat of agriculture. CROM was promised access to decisions on all matters relating to labor in an Obregón government. In return, the CROM leadership participated wholeheartedly in the Partido Laborista, which endorsed Obregón's political candidacy.^[106] The labor movement had made great headway in Tampico during the formative era of CROM. By 1920, unions of skilled and semiskilled Mexican workers had formed within the great refineries. Nearly 7,000 workers belonged to formal unions. Among the largest were the unions representing the Transcontinental refinery (1,000 members), the Pierce refinery (932), The Texas Company refinery (850), the El Aguila refinery (820), and the El Aguila terminal (691).^[107] In the final analysis, the Revolution may have given Mexico the kind of labor organization and advanced social legislation achieved by strong popular movements in other Latin American nations such as Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, and Cuba. Yet Mexican workers gained these benefits sooner. They may not have made the Revolution but Mexican workers did take advantage of it to bargain with the government — not necessarily with their employers. But these achievements do not constitute a sharp break with a long tradition of state intervention in the relationship between employers and employees. They had deep roots in Mexico's history.