Excelsior has run a series of stories this week about dastardly union leaders and potential remedies to outdated labor laws. The articles are all designed to support one of two basic premises: caciques, as the labor leaders who operate like mafia dons are called, are thoroughly harmful, for their unions' members, for the economy, basically for everyone minus themselves; the upcoming labor reform should aim to do away with these caciques.
José Antonio Almazán, the PRD politican heading the Labor Commission in Mexico's lower house, says three basic reforms could do an enormous amount of good: 1) mandate a secret and universal vote for union leadership (today it's by a count of hands in public meetings, which, needless to say, engenders pressure); 2) establish a mandatory method of accounting for the union's funds, which would reduce corruption; 3) eliminate the required recognition from the Secretary of Labor for union leaders.
The first and second are obvious no-brainers. The third is a little more controversial. If he so chooses, the Secretary of Labor can act as a vital check on dirty union leaders. A perfect example was Javier Lozano's decision to withdraw recognition of mining leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia. Absent this control from the Secretary of Labor, a fugitive exile holed up in Canada would still be pulling the Mexican miners' strings.
Incidentally, Excelsior also has some polling on Lozano-Gómez episode. Seventy-one percent say that the Secretary Lozano did the right thing, and 62 percent said that any retaliation from the miners would be completely unjustified.
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