Confederation of Mexican Workers
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| Full name | Confederation of Mexican Workers |
|---|---|
| Native name | Confederación de Trabajadores de México |
| Founded | February 21, 1936 |
| Affiliation | ORIT |
| Key people | Joaquín Gamboa Pascoe, secretary general |
| Office location | México D.F. |
| Country | Mexico |
| Website | ctmoficial.org |
The Confederation of Mexican Workers (Spanish: Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM)) is the largest confederation of labor unions in Mexico. For many years, it was one of the essential pillars of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI), which ruled Mexico for more than seventy years. However, the CTM began to lose influence within the PRI structure in the late 1980s, as technocrats increasingly held power within the party. Eventually, the union found itself forced to deal with a new party in power after the PRI lost the 2000 general election, an event that drastically reduced the CTM's influence in Mexican politics.
Over the years the CTM has also lost much of its power within the workplace, increasingly being more agreeable to employers' moves aimed to increase productivity. Workers have usually received little benefit from these agreements, as real wages have generally fallen over the past several decades. Moreover, the CTM has become increasingly corrupt and conservative over the years, often serving to impede workers' efforts to organize independent unions.
The CTM was founded on February 21, 1936, during the term of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. Cárdenas's predecessors had relied heavily on the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, or CROM, in order to garner support from the working class. However, this support was withdrawn after the assassination of President Álvaro Obregón in 1928. Once this happened the CROM began to fragment as unions and their leaders defected from the organization. Cárdenas saw an organized labor sector as being essential to the goals of his government and pushed for the formation of a new umbrella labor organization.
One of the most important leaders who left CROM was Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Marxist intellectual who later developed close ties with the Soviet Union. Lombardo Toledano formed his own federation of disaffected CROM members, which he called the "Purified CROM".
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