Guild, other unions protest Mexican attacks on labor

Guild protesters include (r to l) Jay West, Bernie Lunzer and Tim Schick.

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   Citing Mexican government complicity with big businesses there – especially with mine and metal companies – a group of more than 100 U.S. unionists demonstrated outside the Mexican Embassy in Washington on Feb. 16, demanding justice for Mexican workers.

    Led by Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts and Josh Williams, President of the AFL-CIO’s Metropolitan Washington Council, the U.S. unionists demanded Mexico end its complicity with big business, bring perpetrators of crimes against unionists to justice and allow free and independent unions to operate.

    Mexico’s record also drew protests in other cities worldwide, according to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which co-organized the D.C. demonstration.  The protests mark the 5th anniversary of the Pasta de Conchos coal mine explosion near Urrutia.  That blast killed 65 miners.

    The explosion, the fact that nobody has been brought to justice for it and Mexico’s crackdown on the independent miners-metalworkers and electrical workers unions – unions strongly supported by the Mine Workers and the Steel Workers – brought Roberts into the fray.  Unionists from UMW, the Steelworkers, CWA and The Newspaper Guild, among others, joined him in presenting demands to the embassy.

    “Mines don’t just explode,” said coal mine veteran Roberts, who is also a preacher in what little spare time he has.  “Miners don’t have to die,” he told the crowd while standing on the steps of the Mexican Embassy, just blocks from the White House.

    “If the laws were being enforced, miners could come home to their families every night.  What happened that day (in Urrutia) was industrial homicide,” he declared.

    The group not only had strong words for the Mexican government, but also for the Obama administration.  After praising Obama for taking the side of Egyptian workers in pro-democracy protests that toppled dictatorial President Hosni Mubarak, Roberts urged Obama to “look a little closer,” just across the southern U.S. border.
     
    “We should not stand for the exploitation of these workers in Mexico,” Roberts said, after reading four names of dead workers there – including Santiago Cruz, an organizer of Mexican workers for the AFL-CIO affiliated Farm Labor Organizing Committee.  Cruz was killed in his Monterrey, Mexico, and office.

“We’ll deliver a formal message to the embassy of Mexico,” Williams said, referring to the letter, which he handed to an embassy representative – who replied the Mexicans would try to meet AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka about the issue.  “But this is not a one-time visit.  If we don’t hear something positive, we’ll be back.”