De la Garza Toledo 2003

De la Garza Toledo 2003

De La Garza Toledo, E. 2003. "MEXICAN TRADE UNIONISM IN THE FACE OF POLITICAL TRANSITION". Research in the Sociology of Work. (11): 207-228.

from cornfield and McCammon 2003

Overview

• Two factors causing crisis of corporatism
  
  • Neoliberal turn
    
  • Restructuring of large firms and production processes
    
    • Has resulted in flexible and/or unilateral collective bargaining model
      
• Tried neoliberal corporatism, failed
  
• New working class in Mexico has lost its ideology and project, new working class (maquila sector) have no class identity, no trade union tradition
  
• The state, unions, and firms prefer ghost unions to no unions
  
• Little has changed
  
• UNT not being overly confrontational
  
• Predicts unlikely that Fox will wage war against corporatism (he’s right!)
• NEW TAKE
• the "neoliberal corporatist" attempts during the early 1990s totally failed to change unions (210)
• this also failed because the state partially withdrew from labor relations leaving firms to carry out their own restructuring (211)
• AGAIN STATE IS A PASSIVE PLAYER
• 
  

Quotes:
“The unions appeared in the nineties as mere control instruments sustained by a formal and informal political, judiciary, and institutional superstructure constructed over workers since the thirties”

“It would seem these leaders are more interested in survival or in gaining power that in taking advantage of the situation in order to reorient trade unionism toward non-corporate, democratic and representative paths”