ILPC 2026

This presentation addresses issues related to workplace resistance, collective action and trade union practices taking place in the automotive industry in Mexico. I will focus on autoworkers’ everyday lives in factories owned by Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles and Honda to point out strategies and discourses framing the recent wave of wildcat strikes occurring in the Mexican manufacturing industry. Based on ethnographic research, I will show how the experiences of conflict shape the construction of workers’ political subjectivity and the relation with trade unions and the State.

The automotive industry has grown exponentially in Mexico the last ten years, making it the third largest global exporter of cars. It provides more than one million jobs, of which 68% go to workers on the assembly line. Despite this extraordinary growth, actual wages have decreased consistently since the 1980s, classifying Mexican salaries among the five lowest in the world in 2014. At the center of this increasing disparity, unions play a significant and controversial role. The rising rate of unionization that has accompanied industrial restructuring since late 1970s is the result of the adaptation of trade unions to corporate demands. Mexican scholars refer to these organizations as “employer protection unions.” These organizations are known for colluding with corporations unconditionally, defending private investments from workers’ demands, combatting legitimate independent unions and labor movements through illegal means, and engaging in corruption, intimidation, and other violent practices. The protection relation between corporations and unions is institutionalized by Official Labor Boards through the recognition of “protection contracts” signed without the knowledge of the workers, typically before the inauguration of the factories.

Despite fierce repression, Mexican auto workers organize in autonomous and clandestine movements to fight against employer protection unions and to resist precarious working conditions.  Wildcat strikes are considered privileged instruments of struggle since they avoid the institutional protocol that gives control to the union and the labor board. To sustain the struggle beyond the stage of the wildcat strike the construction of international solidarity is a fundamental strategy. The participation of international unions and NGOs guarantees certain protections against threats and aggressions, as well as empowers local movements, allowing workers to face transnational corporations in different regions and territorial scales.

The experience of Mexican workers offers an opportunity to focus on the processes and conflicts through which workers’ political subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed daily in extremely undemocratic contexts. These conflicts are emblematic of workers’ reactions to the precariousness of working conditions in sectors that have traditionally been unionized and regulated by highly structured collective bargaining procedures. The case of Mexican workers is particularly relevant, as it shows these processes in a moment of profound transformation, highlighting the strategies and discourses that underlie workers’ appropriation of structural reforms and preside over the construction of antagonistic subjectivities in the context of the global supply chain