ABSTRACT: "The Mexican laborer within 'world-class' production" IX Southern Labor Studies Conference
Author: Marco Gomez,
Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico

Mexican labor is considered to be integrating to the so-called world economy as a result of the dual process of "globalization" and "regionalization". Globalization on the one hand, would mean mostly the economic and political processes leading somehow to an integrated world economy, and in the case of Mexico integration is considered to have openly initiated with its adherence to GATT. Regionalization, on the other hand, is held to be the process by which regional blocks are built up around one of the three contemporary lead ing industrial poles. Mexico's inclusion in the dynamics of regionalization is marked by its subordination to the juridical framework of NAFTA.

The common view is that "globalization" -and its "regional" subsets- is an inevitable, objective, and steadily increasing unilineal process, determined both by the nature of modern technology and the exigencies of the market (for instance, as the only mea ns by which the economic crisis can be overcome). Subsequent agreements reached by States -whereby the juridical framework for integration is set up- are deemed consequential of the former, mere adjustments of the political structure to "economic realitie s". Through these means, the Mexican government justifies a whole range of "free-market" policies that include, not only the surrender of public property rights to foreign capital, not only the surrender of juridical domain to foreing bodies (as is the ca se with the foreign mortgage on oil, subordination to foreign bodies on key policies, and the preponderance of foreign courts in certain legal matters), but also the restructuring of entire aspects of the Mexican economy to meet the needs of foreing capit al. Labor market policies in particular -below-subsistence wages, savage rationalization programs- are publicized as necessary for "attracting" foreign investment and keeping the country within world class "competitiveness". To be "viable" or "inevitable" are fashionable terms in official and government related circles in relation to potentially unpopular policy decisions.

Studied more closely however globalization is no simple matter, free from conflicting tendencies. Quite the contrary. Whether globalization is considered from the point of view of technological processes or those of market forces and State actions, the wo rld system of capitalism reveals opposing mechanisms in all domains. In effect, certain technologies are potentially conductive to world-integrated systems; also, no one denies the integrating effect of the concentration of capital and property, mainly th rough the de-regulation of financial capital movements. However, in spite of all talk on the annullment of national sovereignty: first, there are no visible mechanisms of how the nation-State in general (that is, other than one weaker State being absorbed by a stronger national State power or than regional national State agreements) could be substituted by a higher form of State power (notwithstanding the existence of extra national bodies); second, those same market mechanisms that are disrupting national sovereignties are also disrupting the social fabric; and third, those active social-bonding processes that are appearing seem to point to a reconstruction in many places o f the national State on new grounds, inasmuch as, apart from certain technologies and national-State agreements, there are no direct world-bonding social processes. For the present time at least, there are no theoretical or practical basis for presuming t he trascendence of the dual nature of the market, as internal and external market and, therefore for overcoming the nation-State. One can forsee however that an extreme polarization of these opposing tendencies can lead to an aggravation of conflict.

Mexican labor is caught up within these conflicting tendencies: on one side, the "new corporate consensus" -Big Business and government- trying to press labor to comply to the "new realities" of globalization, regionalization, privatization, and rationali zation; on the other side, labor itself -broken the "social contract" with capital established on the basis of the Welfare State- forced to seek new horizons as the onslaught of de regulated "savage capitalism" wreaks havoc in its ranks (extreme poverty, atomization, marginalization).