In March 1996 Martin Hernandez and Eric Mann attended the "International Conference Against Privatization" in Mexico City, hosted by the SUTAUR 100 bus drivers union. It turned out that we were witnessing the last days of an independent militant union that had defied the Congress of Mexican Workers (CTM), the official union organization allied with the government, and the government's plan to privatize Mexico City's bus lines. Jorge Cuellar Valdez, the union's international liason, explains in this interview the unique gains that the union won through its independent, left. However, it was precisely the strength of its relationship with the left organization MPI (Independent Proletarian Movement), its fraternal ties to the EZLN Zapatistas, and its overt challenge to the state that resulted in government repression--including a 382 worker lock-out. The SUTAUR workers were eventually forced to accept two privatized routes that they will operate, not as a labor union, but as a cooperative. The settlement involved the guaranteed participation of 1,500 workers in alternative transportation projects, 72 percent of the severance pay demanded by the union, 5,000 scholarships, the release of 12 arrested SUTAUR 100 leaders, and the release of the their frozen bank accounts containing 140 million pesos. In short, even in militant defeat the union won more concessions than many U.S. unions do by embracing labor/management cooperation. Significantly, 8,000 workers stayed with the union until the end and will create a new political base that, like the embattled Zapatistas, will have to reinvent themselves in new forms of struggle and new forms of organization. The advanced nature of this Mexican workers movement gives strong indication that a reformulated SUTAUR, with enormous moral authority, and with ties to the left MPI, will indeed regroup. The interview with Jorge Cuellar Valdez excerpted here brings to life the past achievements and uncharted future of this brilliant experiment in worker self-organization. AhoraNow: What happened in your life that led to your transformation from drivers to militants, and from militants to revolutionaries? Jorge Cuellar Valdez: Well, I think we, the drivers, made a radical change in our behavior based on the understanding we got from our fellow drivers that are in jail. This derives from a series of injustices that we've been suffering all along as workers. Add to that the repression to which the people of Mexico have been subjected. This brought out the indignation that we had felt for a long time. Our anger about the repression was reignited. It makes me very angry that my children weren't able to go to college. It makes me even angrier that I don't make enough to feed my children. And that makes me want to do something. It makes me think that as a worker and a member of the disenfranchised class I have to do something to ensure my children's future. Otherwise my children will suffer the consequences of my passivity. I have to do something because I love my children very much and I want to make a future for them. My children were rejected from the university, I don't have the means to feed them. I have another son also that I can't support, and all this upheaval was caused by the government's attitude. It rekindles our class consciousness, of what it means and what one can do to make a better future for our children. AhoraNow: Tell us about the history of SUTAUR 100. Cuellar Valdez: SUTAUR 100 was founded first as a labor organization. The workers were members of the CTM. When bus transportation was taken over by the government in 1981, we no longer wanted to belong to the CTM because it didn't do anything for the workers. So we became an independent union. We fought for independence, although our leaders were also jailed at that time, the same ones that are jailed now. That was the first struggle we won. AhoraNow: Given that Mexico City is four times larger and Los Angeles, and has four million less cars, public transportation is a vital issue to everyone. How did you cultivate community support? And what about your relationship to other oppositional struggles? Cuellar Valdez: In 1984, because we sympathized with popular demands, many low-income organizations came to us asking for support so bus lines could be extended to the squatter settlements and we, as workers, supported their demands. We'd go and provide the service, and that's how bus riders organizations sprang up in each established popular settlement. The workers would go support the delegations when they got off work so they could actually get what was promised them. When all those issues were brought to the members of SUTAUR 100, the need for a bus stop here, a bus route there, the demand was overwhelming and there were too few buses. We also supported their demands for public utilities. SUTAUR had its own problems and couldn't deal with all the requests for support by so many organizations that were demanding streets, sewer service, other public services. So the union leaders decided to form the Independent Proletarian Movement (MPI). After that the MPI starting growing, independent peasant organizations from other parts of the country joined, student organizations from the Polytechnic, the University, started to join the MPI. And after that SUTAUR became a member also. Ours was a rank and file movement that spread to the community, and afterward we became part of that movement, the MPI. SUTAUR is now a part of the Independent Proletarian Movement as one more member because it's made up of many organizations. AhoraNow: Tell us about some of the concrete things SUTAUR 100 has won for its workers and how it differs from other labor unions. Cuellar Valdez: Well, we raised our salaries through struggle. At one point we were earning as much as $12 a day, while most workers were making $3 a day...It took other organizations decades to get improvements we got in one decade. That's why we're not willing to lose so much. The gains we won are not prevalent throughout Mexico, or other parts of the world, or even in the U. S. as I've discovered. They gave us six uniforms, two pairs of shoes, two jackets, six ties, six shirts, a towel, soap, loofahs. For Mother's Day, they'd give us money so we could buy our mothers presents. We had a good contract. That's why the government destroyed it to keep it from being an example to other labor organizations. AhoraNow: That's an amazing piece of organizational work. .At times, it seems that your workers are more politically conscious. What is the role of the United States, and are workers in SUTAUR discussing this? Cuellar Valdez: We think the situation hasn't changed much. The United States is a capitalist, imperialist country. Today the modality is neoliberalism with the strategy to exploit the labor force of the peoples of the Third World and to exploit the natural resources in the rest of the countries. And of course it is one of the main promoters of the neoliberal model and through cooptations, like the loan to Mexico, it forces governments to submit to its interests, to the interests of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the multinational corporations. We believe the policies of many countries of the world obey the interests of the U.S. ruling class. We, the members of SUTAUR, have learned to distinguish between the U.S. working class and the U.S. government. A while back it was hard to say: "Here's a comrade from the U.S., he's going to support us." "No, he's a gringo, an exploiter." Today, our brothers and sisters are fully aware that there's a difference between the capitalist, imperialist government and the workers. In fact, the workers themselves in the U.S. have been hoodwinked. They tell them they're part of the middle class so they can keep on exploiting them. We've got political consciousness and in that regard, without meaning to be presumptuous, we think we're a little more advanced ideologically than the workers in the U.S. AhoraNow: So what is happening in terms of privatization? We understand that the government is proposing that you accept three bus lines, which would be about 4,500 jobs. About 1,000 may retire, and three of four thousand may not return to the company. This is very difficult, what' going to happen? Cuellar Valdez : The government will have no employees. They'll sell us the franchise. They'll force us to buy the buses... to be accomplices in their privatization efforts. The government isn't offering us anything, except they say if we want to be drivers, transportation workers, they'll offer us six modules so we can set up three companies with 4,500 workers. We don't have a chance of recovering all the losses. We're going to fight for what we can recover to keep the organization alive, because the struggle is going to continue. We of course will demand our union funds be returned to us before we sign anything, and that our comrades be released. It would be suicide for our organization to keep this pace up for another year. It would mean disentegration; we have to keep that from happening by agreeing to the three lines and keep on fighting for more. And by using our own funds and the severance pay [we can] set up other companies because we have installations...that we can use as a maintenance yard for buses. We can provide work for the 4,500 they're offering, establish our own companies as cooperatives and pay for franchises so everyone will be employed, and that way we can stay alive, not commit political suicide, and not be exterminated. We want to stay alive as an organization to fight another day. AhoraNow: Would there be other private companies that have workers that you could organize? Cuellar Valdez: Yes, we think we can set up linkages. I think that's the intention. Right now, several comrades in the private sector have approached us. They want to be a part of the company that we set up because they know we have organizational capacity. The ones that run the microbuses, they want to form a partnership with us, because many of those that run those lines are part of the MPI. There are a lot of them, there's Route 37, 14, Route 1, many of them are part of the MPI. They've said to us, when you form your company, we want to be a part of it. AhoraNow: Can you give us some closing thoughts on the role of public transportation in building an oppositional movement and what you think about the Strategy Center's Bus Riders Union? Cuellar Valdez : I was thinking about a proletarian relationship between those that need transportation services, as a means of defending the consumers' economic interests, and the relationship with the IPM in Mexico. We, the proletariat, should unite to defend all the public services that help our standard of living. That relationship immediately translated into a tangible movement, the enthusiasm among the founders of the Bus Riders Union was contagious. It was great because it reminded us of our organization here in Mexico, too. Your event was beautiful, the unity, the proletarian internationalism. On the issue of linkages, there should be communication between the transportation workers and the bus riders, because it's important to make the brothers and sisters in the transportation industry understand that they make good wages, but the other workers don't. The people are in dire economic straits. Certainly, wages are low in Los Angeles. I understand the minimum is $4.25 an hour. There were operators that were making $18 per hour. They need to understand they should support the Bus Riders Union, because they're defending public transportation by defending the bus riders, and when the bus riders defend public transportation, they're defending their own good salaries and their jobs. They should have that understanding and consciousness, that they are providing a public service, they are public servants, and they have a job because there's a community that needs that service. So they need each other and should support each other. I think that's the understanding that should be sought, that relationship between workers, between the poor and the workers. It's good that they have all those benefits, I'm sure they fought for them, just like we did. We managed to raise our families' standard of living through struggle and effort. But they should understand the need to support the public, which also has great needs. |
