Jose Luis Velasco (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico)
Abstract
The problems of Mexican workers are obviously related to an international environment that is highly detrimental to traditional forms of labor organization and working conditions. Thus, the factors mentioned here should be understood as arising from the interaction between such an environment and the internal conditions of Mexico. The ideas summarized here may give a rather negative image of Mexican labor. In fact, it is not that workers have been uncourageous or indolent. But their bravery and energy have been largely confined to issues that are perhaps more fundamental and pressing: searching for jobs or creating their own jobs, keeping them, working hard, surviving. Similarly, the fact that labor has not played an active role in Mexico’s democratization does not mean that it has played no important role at all. But this role has been mostly passive. Without labor’s political restrain, the transition to a competitive regime perhaps would have never taken place. It is important to remember that a tacit but omnipresent condition put forward by the economic and social elite of the country is that political change must not alter the country’s socioeconomic structure.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Migration and Development. in its series Working Papers with number
1090.
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