State of the Union: Mexico’s Teachers Revolt
One of the biggest disappointments of Mexico’s democratization has been the failure to restructure the country’s public sector unions. These unions were created by the old one-party regime in a context of authoritarianism in order to control the labor force. Over time, some of them have become powerful enough to demand extremely privileged treatment for their workers, while simultaneously failing to meet minimal standards of quality service delivery or internal democracy. No union exemplifies this unfortunate legacy with more fidelity than the teacher’s union, the SNTE.
The SNTE is controlled by Elba Esther Gordillo, possibly the most powerful woman in Mexico. Elba has mastered the political dance necessary to maintain power in a democratic context: she has severed her ties with the old authoritarian party, the PRI, and cozied up to the new ruling party, the PAN. But while Elba gets to control all of the patronage that passes through the union, she is increasingly unable to control Mexico’s teachers, who she no longer faithfully represents.
Last week, dissident teachers took to the streets of Mexico City to protest her leadership, and her endorsement, earlier this year, of the President’s Alliance for Education Quality (ACE). This action followed a dissident teacher strike in the state of Morelos that has entered its eighth week.
There is no one to love in this conflict: while Elba is an authoritarian strongwomen, the Alliance is largely a sensible policy program. The ACE forces teachers to take competency tests instead of being rewarded with automatic jobs, and undermines their traditional prerogative of bequeathing their union position to friends or relatives when they retire. Teachers have attacked the Alliance for, among other things, stimulating unemployment (because many of them will fail the competency test). It is hard to discern any objections to the ACE that do not constitute self-interested protection of excessive teacher privileges.
In order to deflect the attacks on her leadership, Elba has begun to argue that the ACE, while a good program, is not going to work unless the government forks over a lot more money for teacher salaries, and she has threatened to mobilize loyal followers to be the next group to take over Mexico City. She has accused opposition leaders of infiltrating the union to sabotage her, even suggesting that dissidents are linked to the Colombian FARC. She also distributed 12 Hummers to top union officials last week, presumably to demonstrate her continued control over government patronage.
The PAN governments which have been in office since 2000 have been unable or unwilling to take on the SNTE because they have found the union’s political weight and vote bank useful. Elba’s ideological flexibility has allowed her to sign on to the President’s modernizing initiatives, such as the ACE, and to bring a substantial number of teachers along, even though few of them like these policies. But, as we have seen, her power to control the teachers is declining. The net effect is that teachers are not teaching, and students are (still) not learning.
The state of the union is poor. It is time for the Mexican government to get serious about reform. This means creating mechanisms for internal democracy and professional incentives for teachers who perform. It also means eliminating the privileges of the union’s bosses, and renegotiating the Alliance in a more democratic setting. Maybe this crisis will demonstrate that Elba has outlived her political usefulness, so Mexico can get on with educating its children. There’s always hope.
[...] Harvard International Review has an interesting item on Mexican teachers’ unions. As some readers may know the violence that began in Oaxaca two years ago begain a teachers’ [...]
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