Some 7,000 workers will elect a new union at the General Motors pickup plant in Silao, Guanajuato, in a two-day vote.
The process takes place six months after 3,214 workers (55% of the total number of those who participated) decided to dismiss the CTM union that had represented them since 2010, the ‘Miguel Trujillo López’, in a vote that was highly publicized and which was followed by international observers, by the Federal Electoral Institute and by the Ministry of Labor.
The last vote, which took place on August 17 and 18, 2021, opened the possibility of the arrival of a new union leadership at the complex, which can represent the workers in the next negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement with the company.
This election will take place on February 1 and 2 and four organizations will participate in it, including the National Union of Workers of the Automotive and Metallurgical Industry in the Mexican Republic, which according to critics has ties to the CTM, as well as the National Union of Workers of the Industry of Workers of the Autotransport, Construction, of the Automotive Industry, Autoparts, Similar and Related of the Mexican Republic of the Mexican Republic.
The National Union of Workers of Industries, Commerce and Services in General ‘Carrillo Puerto’, and the National Independent Union of Workers of the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA) will also participate. The latter was created by workers from the automotive complex, most of them sympathizers of the dissident Generando Movimiento, created in 2019 with the aim of forming an independent union that could be an alternative to the CTM that was in place at the time.
Willebaldo Gómez, a researcher at the UNAM Faculty of Economics, explained that a new union requires that at least 30% of the complex’s workers – some 2,200 of a total 7,000 – join in order to summon the company to sign a new contract. collective agreement.
The Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration, which is the new decentralized public body that will keep the registers of unions and collective contracts at the national level, will be in charge of supervising the election process.
Both the two unions of the CTM and the ‘Carrillo Puerto’ have openly criticized SINTTIA, while rumors surface that workers could lose their jobs if they support the rival group, a tactic used in the last vote to try to convince the employees to vote in favor of the cetemista union in turn.
For their part, workers sympathetic to the independent union have denounced threats against two of its leaders, Alejandra Morales, general secretary, and Claudia Juárez, organization secretary, on the eve of the vote. “We denounce gender violence,” says a statement published by SINTTIA, which also asked local and federal authorities “to provide the necessary security so that the process runs smoothly.”
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union, the main union in the sector in the United States, will also redouble efforts to guarantee that workers at the pickup plant can vote freely to elect a new union.
This vote is part of the labor reform carried out by the Mexican government in 2019 to comply with the T-MEC. The new regulations oblige the 2,116 unions with federal registration and the 10,868 with local registration —according to the Ministry of Labor— to legitimize their collective agreements before 2023, through a “personal, free, secret and direct” vote. Check that there are violations of the rights of workers to freely elect their representatives can generate trade reprisals from partner countries In the case of GM, it can mean a 25% import tariff on the pickups it manufactures in Silao, a measure that would add thousands of dollars to the cost of each vehicle.
