Mexican Miners' Strike for Life

By: David Bacon - reprinted from the American Prospect

CANANEA, SONORA, MEXICO -- In its natural state, Cananea's copper ore
is part of a sagebrush-covered mountain in the middle of the Sonora
desert 70 miles south of Arizona. To extract the metal indispensable
to computers, automobiles, and iPods, the rock is first blown out of
the mountainside with explosives and then loaded onto dump trucks so
huge the tires would dwarf a basketball player. The trucks then dump
their loads -- small boulders, in effect -- into the first crusher on
the hilltop overlooking the huge complex. When the crushed rocks pour
out down below, into tunnels deep in the hillside, they're still about
the size of watermelons. The next crusher breaks them into smaller
pieces, and then enormous mills below grind them down even further,
until they are no longer rocks at all, or even pebbles, but a steady
stream of fine sand.

Even though the mine has been still for over 50 days, shut down
because its workers are on strike, rock dust in parts of this huge
complex, called the concentrator, is so deep that it rises up over
one's boot tops. In the dark tunnels where rubber conveyer belts
normally carry the ore from crushers to mills at breakneck speed, the
fine powder mounts up against the machinery in drifts. "When the mine
is running," says Victoriano Carrillo, a member of the mine's health
and safety commission, "you can't even see more than a few feet in
front of you."

Mine dust is more than just uncomfortable or inconvenient. It's
deadly. Superfine particles lodge in the lungs, so tiny that the
cilia, the small hairs that expel most foreign substances from the
lungs, can't get them out. Miners who breathe rock dust year after
year suffer a variety of lung diseases, but the most dangerous is
silicosis. In mine communities from Cananea to Tucson, on both sides
of the border, generations of copper miners have died from it.

In a well-run mine, huge vacuum cleaners suck dust from the buildings
covering the crushers, mills and conveyer belts. The Cananea miners
call these vacuums colectores, or dust collectors. Outside the hulking
buildings of the concentrator complex, those collection tanks and
their network of foot-wide pipes are five stories tall. But many of
the tanks have rusty holes in their sides the size of a bathroom
window. And the pipes, which should lead into the work areas inside,
just end in midair. None of the dust collectors, according to the
miners' union, have functioned since the company shut them down in
1999.

So for the past eight years, the dust that should have been sucked up
by the collectors has ended up instead in the miners' lungs. That is
the most serious reason why the miners are out on strike. But there
are other dangers. Many machines have no guards, making it easy to
lose fingers or worse. Electrical panels have no covers. Holes are
open in the floor with no guardrails. Catwalks many stories above the
floor are slippery with dust and often grease, and are crisscrossed by
cables and hoses. Not long ago, one worker tripped and fell five
stories to his death onto a water pump below.

"We know what's safe and what's not," one miner commented, "but they
never want us to spend time fixing problems -- just get the production
out. If we tried to stop the line for safety problems, we would lose
our jobs." Many safety lines running alongside the conveyers, which
should stop the speeding belt in case of an accident, have been cut so
they can't be pulled, or are simply absent.

The Cananea strikers want to force the mine's owner, the giant Grupo
Mexico corporation, to abide by the union contract that mandates the
missing protections. Because of the deadly conditions, it is a strike
for life, but it is also one for the life of the union itself, Section
65 of the Mexican Union of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers. Across
Mexico, miners are locked in conflict with Grupo Mexico, which seeks
to replace the 70-year-old miners' union with one that would let the
company run the mines as it likes.

It is also a strike for the survival of the families that make up the
small towns, like Cananea, in which the miners live. If the union
loses, and the strikers lose their jobs as many have in the past, they
will have to leave Cananea. There is no other work in small mining
communities that can sustain a family. Often even the workers' homes
belong to their employer. And since the mine's average wage is $39 a
day, plus bonuses and profit sharing, the strike seeks to protect a
standard of living higher than most jobs on the border, especially in
the maquiladoras.

But in Cananea, the health-care system doesn't even help workers
assess their physical condition. In the union office, files are filled
with letters signed by Dr. Alfredo Parra Ybarra, director of the
Hospital Ronquillo, where the company pays for miners' medical care.
The forms repeat a few stock phrases. Miners with 15 or 20 years on
the job are told they've either had a "normal medical examination," or
are given diagnoses of problems unrelated to work, such as
"overweight" or "poor eyesight." Recommendations amount to simply
"consult the medical service." Of course, sometimes miners themselves
don't want to know the real state of their lungs. With no alternative,
keeping a family together means going to work every day, regardless of
the potential cost.

The Hospital Ronquillo was built even before the famous armed uprising
in Cananea in 1906, when miners rebelled against then-owner Col.
William C. Greene in the first conflict of the Mexican Revolution.
Although miners, their wives and children all get their care at the
hospital, it still has only one bathroom for men and one for women.
Its inadequacy led miners half a century ago to build a clinic of
their own, the Clinica Obrera, with a beautifully equipped operating
theater, a children's wing, wards with one bed and bathroom per room,
and specialized prenatal care, obstetrics, and other services. The
union contract required the company to pay its costs, and the workers
ran it. "I was born here," says Jose Luis Zamora, who was elected
administrator by his fellow miners. "So were most of us."

In 1999, however, Grupo Mexico and the state government reached an
unusual conclusion. Comparing the larger, better-equipped clinic with
the Hospital Ronquillo, they decided that the hospital was better. The
company refused to continue paying the clinic costs, although the
union contract required it. After the Clinica Obrera closed, Zamora,
its last director, was kept from returning to his job in the mine for
three years. "They were punishing me," he says, "for fighting to keep
it open." Reopening the clinic in accord with the contract is another
strike issue.

It's no accident that the dust collectors stopped the same year the
company halted payments for the clinic and forced workers' families
back into the Hospital Ronquillo. Both happened the year after the
union lost a disastrous strike in 1998. That strike capped a long
series of battles in which the union tried to resist the impact of the
mine's privatization.

The Cananea mine was begun by the Greene family over a hundred years
ago and belonged to a succession of U.S. companies until it was
finally nationalized in 1976, like many other Mexican industrial
enterprises. In the late 1980s, however, the Mexican government and
the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) began to reverse
their nationalist economic policy. Under pressure from rising debt and
mandates from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Mexico
began to open up its economy to corporate investment, which eventually
led to the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In
1991, three years before NAFTA even took effect, President Carlos
Salinas de Gortari began a sweeping sell-off of large mines,
railroads, airlines, and other state-owned businesses.

Often he didn't really sell them. Cananea, for instance, was virtually
given to a wealthy investor, German Larrea. Eventually Larrea's
industrial empire, Grupo Mexico, owned most of the large mines in
Mexico, of which Cananea was the biggest. He also gained control of
its privatized railroad system, and other formerly state-owned assets.
Larrea didn't stop at Mexico's border. Today Grupo Mexico's Southern
Copper Co., which owns Cananea, also owns two even larger mines in
Peru. And Larrea also bought up ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining
Co.), with two mines and a smelter in Arizona.

Throughout the 1990s Larrea cut the Cananea workforce as he sought to
reduce labor costs and increase profits. Finally, in 1998, he proposed
cuts so severe that the union refused, and went on strike to try to
halt them. After three months the government declared the strike
illegal and said it would send troops to reopen the mine. Under the
threat of military occupation, and fearing armed conflict, miners
agreed to go back to work. But they paid a high price. The copper
smelter and other mine departments were closed, leading to the loss of
800 jobs. Strikers who had gone to Arizona and beyond, helping to
organize caravans of food and clothing during the strike, found
themselves on a blacklist.

"[My foreman] told me I'd never get a job anywhere in Mexico after
that," recalls Chema Pacheco, a strike leader. "I had no alternative
but to leave Cananea, to look for work in the U.S."

The company refused to continue operating the municipal water system,
although its permission to operate the mine requires it. The state of
Sonora had to take over the water system. Over the next few years, it
contracted out dozens of jobs. Today 1,350 working miners belong to
the union, and have permanent employment in the mine. But another 450
people work alongside them for contracting services that sell their
labor to Grupo Mexico. The contract employees receive none of the
benefits union members do. That, too, has become an issue in the
current strike. The miner who fell to his death from the catwalk, for
instance, was a contract employee.

When Napoleon Gomez Sada, the national president of the Mexican Union
of Mine, Metal and Allied Workers, died in 2001, his son, Napoleon
Gomez Urrutia was elected union general secretary. The process in
which powerful Mexican political figures pick their own successors is
normally a device to prevent change and keep power in the hands of a
tiny elite. In the miners' union, however, it did the opposite.

Gomez Urrutia immediately began to push hard against declining
conditions for miners. Taking advantage of record-high copper prices,
he won 6 percent to 8 percent wage increases -- twice the amount
dictated by government austerity policies. He forced open the doors of
the elite Technological Institute of Monterrey, where 700 workers and
their children now study. He won better housing. When former Mexican
President Vicente Fox pushed to reform the country's labor laws at the
behest of the World Bank, Gomez Urrutia brought even conservative
unions into a coalition that finally spiked the proposals. The union
then helped kill Fox's plan to tax workers' benefits.

But all hell broke loose when 65 miners died on Feb. 19, 2006, in a
huge explosion in the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, owned by Grupo
Mexico in the northern state of Coahuila. Horrified by the deaths, the
union discovered that workers on the second shift had complained of
high concentrations of explosive methane gas in the shafts the evening
before the accident. "They told us that welding was still going on,
even after the failure of some electrical equipment," Gomez charges.
At 2:20 a.m., after the start of the third shift, the gas ignited in a
huge fireball.

In a July 2006 report, the National Human Rights Commission found that
the local office of the federal labor ministry had "clear knowledge"
before the accident of the conditions that would set off the
explosion. In 2004, labor safety inspectors had found 48 health and
safety violations in the mine, including oil and gas leaks, missing
safety devices, and broken lighting. Although Grupo Mexico was given
an order to fix the illegal conditions, no compliance inspection was
carried out until Feb. 7, 12 days before the explosion. Only two
bodies were ever recovered, and Grupo Mexico has since announced it
will no longer look for the others.

Two days after the explosion, Gomez Urrutia accused the secretary of
labor and Grupo Mexico of "industrial homicide." Fox filed corruption
charges against Gomez Urrutia less than a week later. Former Labor
Secretary Francisco Xavier Salazar Sáenz, with support from Grupo
Mexico, appointed an expelled union leader, Elias Morales, to replace
him. Under Mexican labor law, the labor secretary has great power over
the choice of any union's leader, regardless of what union members
themselves decide.

In defiance, miners re-elected Gomez Urrutia twice, and then went on
strike at Cananea, the Nacozari mine, and the Sicartsa steel mill to
demand his reinstatement. Two strikers were even shot and killed
during the Sicartsa plant occupation. The strikes did not achieve
their goal, however. At Sicartsa and Cananea workers eventually
returned to work, preserving their jobs and contracts. But in
Nacozari, the government permitted Grupo Mexico to fire its entire
workforce. It then selectively rehired about 700 union members, and
brought in another 1,200 workers from southern Mexico, who were housed
on the mine's premises.

"Most of the miners who lost their jobs at Nacozari also had to leave
their homes," explains Jorge Luis Morales, president of the Vigilance
and Justice Commission of the union at Cananea. "I'm sure most of them
are working in Tucson or Phoenix now, or even California. These are
very skilled workers, but where could they go?" This fall, when a
group of fired miners marched to the mine in Nacozari to demand their
reinstatement, one of them, Reynaldo Hernández, was killed.

Gomez Urrutia also left Mexico to avoid arrest, and over the next year
mounted a legal effort to win back control of the union. The labor
secretary's decision appointing Elias Morales was overturned a year
later, when it was discovered that signatures on his petition to
become union leader had been forged. Now the corruption charges are
also likely to be dismissed. Gomez Urrutia was accused of stealing the
$55 million that Grupo Mexico paid miners when it took over the
state-owned properties. In September, however, a Swiss accounting
firm, Horwath Berney Audit SA, went over the union's books and
accounted for all the funds.

In the meantime, a new organization applied for a registro, or legal
status as a union, from Mexican labor authorities, which granted the
application in November 2006. The National Union of Workers in the
Exploration, Exploitation and Benefit of Mines (SUTEEBM) is headed by
Francisco Gamez, who once worked at Cananea, and then tried to
organize a business contracting labor for the mine. Mexico's new labor
secretary Javier Lozano, called the organization a legitimate union,
saying that "without a strike its members receive profit sharing" from
Grupo Mexico.

Mexican labor authorities and employers have a long history, however,
of using brutal tactics to deny legal status to independent unions.
The fact that the new "white union" (the Mexican phrase for company
union) received a registro so easily indicates it was organized with
the support of Grupo Mexico and the government. The white union than
announced its affiliation with the National Federation of Independent
Unions, a company union group set up in 1936 by employers to oppose
the nationalist policies of then-President Lazaro Cardenas.

Company support for the new union became even more evident at the
beginning of September, when the Mexican labor board set up elections
to allow it to take over representation rights in eight mines. The
Center for Labor Action and Reflection (CEREAL), a human rights
organization, charges the election process was manipulated to get rid
of the miner's union.

Before the vote, 15 workers were fired at a San Luis Potosi mine,
CEREAL says. In Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, miners on the first and second
shifts were locked inside the coal mine for a day before balloting
began. The union charges that 300 federal, state, and municipal police
then maintained an intimidating presence in the polling place,
surrounding the mine entrance.

At Nacozari, over 900 workers were denied voting rights, while the
mine's new workers were told they would be fired, evicted from company
housing, and sent back to southern Mexico if the white union didn't
win. Rita Marcela Robles Benitez, an analyst with CEREAL, charges that
Grupo Mexico "changed the working hours from 8 to 12 per day, which
has resulted in more accidents because of the lack of safety
protection and training." The change, she said, was made with the
agreement of the white union. Seventy percent of the miners at
Nacozari now work for contractors, rather than for Grupo Mexico
itself, and therefore have no union rights or benefits at all.

By the time of the election, however, miners at Cananea and two other
mines in Guerrero and Zacatecas were already on strike over violations
of the existing union contract. That barred elections from taking
place there. Jesus Verdugo Quijada, head of the strike committee at
Cananea, accused the company of not taking their demands seriously,
and refusing to negotiate over them. "They say one thing and do
another," he told the Mexico City daily, El Imparcial. "There's no
more time for playing games. We're not playing, which is why we made
the decision to strike." Jorge Morales says that "980 workers signed
the strike declaration, and the 300 who didn't simply wanted to wait
until the contract expired on August 27." The union has postponed the
contract termination twice, but now may also strike over new contract
terms at the beginning of October, when those extensions expire.

Manny Armenta, a representative of the United Steel Workers of America
(USWA), accompanied a delegation of striking miners to Tucson,
Arizona, where they spoke to a support meeting organized by the
immigrant rights group, Derechos Humanos. The day after, they
collected over $2,000 in donations from working miners as they passed
through the gate at the ASARCO mine in Kearney, Arizona, on their way
to work. The USWA and the International Metalworkers Federation helped
the Mexican union arrange for the audit that proved that the charges
against Gomez Urrutia had been invented. Following the release of the
report, USWA President Leo Gerard wrote to the Mexican government,
demanding that it drop charges against him and recognize his
legitimate status. The USWA is also helping to organize a
three-country alliance with the unions in Mexico and Peru to face
Grupo Mexico together.

Armenta believes that miners on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border
have a common interest, especially since so many of them work for
Grupo Mexico. "The miners in Cananea want the company to clean up
conditions we'd never stand for here," he explains. "If we don't help
them, eventually we'll face the same problems. Plus, they're fighting
for basic principles that we believe in. They want the right to elect
their own leaders, and to belong to a union controlled by miners, not
by the company. We can all identify with
that."________________________________

For more articles and images on Mexico, see
http://dbacon.igc.org/Mexico/mexico.htm

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US,
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575