Beyond Contratos de protección: Strong and Weak Unionism in Mexican Retail Enterprises

Abstract

As part of a long-standing debate about the extent to which official, government-linked unions in Mexico actively seek to win gains for their members, analysts of labor relations in Mexico have described the dominance of contratos de protección, collective bargaining contracts that offer little or nothing to workers while protecting employers from real union representation. In particular, a number of researchers have asserted that such contracts are universal in retail. Analyzing forty-one retail collective bargaining contracts from four Mexican cities, I find strong evidence that this is not the case. I find considerable variation in wages and fringe benefits, benefits in excess of the legal minimum in 27 to 68 percent of cases (depending on the benefit), and cases of sustained improvement in contractual benefits. Detailed consideration of the patterns suggests that these contracts are not uniformly protection contracts, indicating that there is strong as well as weak unionism in Mexican retail, including among official unions, but that competitive conditions in Mexican retail constrain the possibilities for strong unionism.

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