Accountability remains an open issue for Mexican unions. Although labor reform requires these organizations to inform their members of the origin and destination of their resources, only 249 of the approximately 6,000 active unions have complied with this obligation, according to the Federal Center for Arbitration and Labor Registration. The director of the Federal Committee for Conciliation and Arbitration, Alfonso Domínguez Marrufo, points out that this is a right that the members themselves must claim from their organization, a challenge for the future, for the work organization itself held accountable. Many don’t do it because workers haven’t claimed that right,” the manager said on Wednesday.
The director of the Federal Employment Service claimed that only unions with large structures that have a full team of accountants such as IMSS, Pemex or the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) have complied with this requirement. Domínguez Marrufo acknowledged that a next phase of labor reform would be looking at changing the law that would allow unaccountable unions to be punished. “Apart from the fine, we don’t yet have too many instruments in the law to be able to enforce this obligation, but the labor courts should already force the union, even prescribe concrete emergency measures, if a worker claims that there is no accountability,” gave the director to.
“In many states unions have been registered by merchants, street markets, boleros and taxi drivers, and then there’s still an underworld that are unions, but they’re workers’ associations that don’t have a collective agreement,” he acknowledged. In Mexico, the union rate is currently 17% of all workers.
Three years into the implementation of labor reform in Mexico, Domínguez Marrufo reported that to date, 23,316 collective agreements are legitimate in the country and 10,140 documents are still in the validation process. Therefore, the labor authority assumes that the process of legitimizing collective agreements can be completed with around 33,000 data sets out of a total of 140,000 collective agreements that were registered in the employment offices before the reform. A purge of contracts that only endorse agreements that protect their members, and getting rid of those documents that only protect corporate interests.
So far, the federal conciliation body, which replaced the federal conciliation and arbitration body, has reported an arbitration rate of 69%. A milestone in labor matters because it means that disputes between employer and employee are resolved in less than 45 days and do not have to go through a court, unlike lawsuits, which could cost the affected party years of time and resources. .
“Labor reform does not aim to end unions or the old unions, but rather to end union simulation practices. “One has to innovate or die, or (the unions) have to change their relationship with their workers, or these organizations are destined to disappear because they no longer have collective agreements,” he concluded. This change in the law and the new inspection and consultation requirements have involved an investment of 23,000 million pesos since the implementation of the labor reform began.
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