Workers

No longer ignored, the men and women who made up Mexico's first generation of industrial workers demanded not only higher wages and better working conditions, but respect from their fellow citizens as well.

Rodney D. Anderson, 1976196

With some notable exceptions, during the Porfiriato, the government assumed a hands-off stance in labor disputes. In 1877, Interior (and later Treasury) Minister Trinidad Garcia expressed this view, “The government should grant private enterprise complete freedom of action with respect to labor.” Nonetheless, labor leaders, realizing that they could never match the economic power of industrialists, frequently demanded government regulation of labor relations in hopes of improving their bargaining position.197

With a virtually inexhaustible labor supply, management felt little pressure to increase wages or even to keep them abreast of inflation. Wages for the unskilled plateaued just above subsistence. In 1893, a newspaper in the textile town of Orizaba, Veracruz, noted: “There is poverty, great poverty, and the struggle for a living is. . . painful (but not so for those who have capital). In addition to this, the cost of living increases daily, and labor is compensated disgracefully.” The worst conditions existed in urban areas where workers were crowded together with no plumbing or safe water supply, amid filth and diseases. At the turn of the century, the newspaper El Pais referred to Mexico City’s working-class neighborhoods as “centers of sickness and death.”198

In addition to low wages, labor had a number of grievances. In the 1890s, with the advent of electric lighting in mills, the fourteen-hour day became common and the sixteen-hour day was not unusual. Miners and textile workers were often paid in script only redeemable at the company store. Despotic treatment by supervisors, many of whom were foreign, produced widespread resentment. Workers’ safety, especially in mines, emerged as an issue, since the lack of compulsory workers compensation laws provided management with little incentive to invest in safety.199

At least 250 strikes occurred during the Porfiriato. Those striking most frequently were workers in textile mills and cigarette factories—two groups with a long labor tradition. Miners and rail workers also used the strike to further their demands. As was the case with strikes in earlier decades, strikers most often demanded higher wages. Most of these strikes failed due to the workers’ lack of strike funds.200

By the turn of the century, labor militancy was increasing. As manufacturing shifted from artisan shop to factory, increasingly large numbers of workers were thrown together, thus facilitating a higher degree of working-class consciousness, much of which was tinged with nationalism—a response to the abuses of foreign owners. More workers were the children of other workers, not transplants from rural areas. These second-generation workers measured their lot in life not by comparing themselves with agricultural workers but by comparing their situation with that of the Porfirian elite. The contrast between workers and the elite became all the more galling as the purchasing power of industrial wages in central Mexico declined 38 percent between 1898 and 1908. Mexican workers also protested that they were being discriminated against in their own country. As U. S. investment increased, especially in railroads and mining, Mexicans often found themselves working alongside U. S. workers. Almost invariably, the best jobs were reserved for Americans. U. S. workers also received substantially higher pay for doing the same work as Mexicans. Increased exposure to U. S. workers, who were better organized than their Mexican counterparts, and the message of radical labor organizers added to labor militancy.201

Strikers during the first decade of the twentieth century faced a number of obstacles. As had been the case during the nineteenth century, the lack of sizable strike funds remained an almost insurmountable hurdle. The economic downturn after 1907 reduced strikes as anxiety over job loss increased. Management exploited national divisions. When U. S. locomotive engineers struck the Monterrey—Nuevo Laredo rail line, their strike was broken by replacing them with Mexican engineers, inevitably raising the issue of why Mexicans were not regularly employed by the railroad as engineers. Unions were frequently infiltrated. In Monterrey, Governor Bernardo Reyes’s supporters packed the rail workers’ local, rejected their union newspaper El Ferrocarrilero, revised the local statutes, and named the governor honorary president of the local.

Labor effectiveness was also undermined by the government’s subsidizing pro-government labor organizations and rewarding pliant labor leaders—two practices that would figure prominently in post-revolutionary government-labor relations. One of the pliant labor leaders cultivated by the Diaz administration was Pedro Ordonez, an activist since the 1870s. He was elected to the Mexico City municipal council, a position to which he was reelected for more than two decades. He also served as alternative deputy in the National Congress. He justified his serving in this position by claiming that his holding public office allowed him to voice labor’s concerns.202

Until the end of the Porfiriato, the government officially maintained its hands-off attitude toward labor disputes. This attitude was justified by writer and presidential advisor Francisco Bulnes, who declared:

The words “just remuneration” have no meaning in political economy. In political economy nothing is just or unjust as far as remuneration is concerned. Labor is a product, like any other, such as corn, wheat, flour, and is subject to the law of supply and demand.203

Official declarations not withstanding, organized labor repeatedly suffered repression. Such oppression frequently occurred in the mining industry where workers were often concentrated in isolated areas, removed from the public view, and where mining companies were wont to share their wealth with local officials. One mine manager wrote:

There is no objection to a man or any number of men striking, but the moment these began to interfere with other men taking their places, or the moment they began to destroy property, the Federal Government takes a hand, and the leaders will, in all probability, be shot without trail.204

During the Porfiriato, many first generation workers maintained the rural tradition of shortterm wage labor. Later, as an increasing number of workers were the children of other workers,

Mexican labor became more stable, and workers increasingly viewed themselves as full-time industrial workers, not as farmers sporadically working in industry to supplement their income. By 1910, the nearly 750,000 workers in modern industry, frustrated in their efforts at reform, came to favor Diaz’s removal.205