Francisco Hernandez Juarez

Francisco Hernandez Juarez turned telephone company workers into telephone company shareholders. He turned an eclectic group of small unions into a strong voice for skilled workers demanding reform in organized labor. Along the way, the bearded, bespectacled 43-year-old secretary general of the 50,000-member telephone workers union has become the personification of a new labor movement in Mexico.

Francisco Hernandez Juarez turned telephone company workers into telephone company shareholders. He turned an eclectic group of small unions into a strong voice for skilled workers demanding reform in organized labor. Along the way, the bearded, bespectacled 43-year-old secretary general of the 50,000-member telephone workers union has become the personification of a new labor movement in Mexico.

Leaders of a local janitors union will sign a formal partnership with Mexican union leaders Tuesday, a move that reflects the growing level of international cooperation in the labor movement. "With the advancement of globalization, and the wealth shifting into fewer hands, it's good to have those alliances," said Mike Garcia, president of the Service Employees International Union, Local 1877, which represents 22,000 California janitors and other service workers.

Shares of Telefonos de Mexico took a beating Wednesday after rumors, later denied, that its union may sell its stake in the Mexican telephone company. The company, which is also known as Telmex, was the most active stock on the New York Stock Exchange. It closed $2.375 lower at $51.875. In an auction of Telmex stock in December, 1990, the union bought 467 million shares, or 4.4%.

Workers at Volkswagen's only North American assembly plant agreed Wednesday to a federal order to end their five-day strike. But the walkout sent a strong signal that Mexican labor won't be as docile in the years ahead as it was under the thumb of past governments. A Labor Ministry arbitration board late Tuesday declared the strike illegal on technical grounds and ordered the 12,600-strong work force to return their jobs by midnight Wednesday and to abandon their strike for higher wages.

The formation last week of a breakaway coalition of Mexican unions signals the profound changes here assailing organized labor, which up to now has been a monolithic but docile pillar of the nation's ruling party.

He shuffles with an old man's frailty, his face glistening with drool, his clothes dusted with a confetti of cigar ash. But don't try telling Fidel Velazquez that he should give up his half-century-long reign over Mexican unions. "Every part of me is working fine--including the one you're thinking about," the ribald 95-year-old declared to journalists recently. "And don't ask me about my heart," he growled. "I don't have one."

President Ernesto Zedillo's economic stabilization plan got rave reviews Friday from financial markets and international lenders that have offered nearly $50 billion to stabilize the peso. But ordinary Mexicans were furious about the program that politicians on both the left and right are calling Draconian and that the labor minister said will cost 250,000 jobs over the next six months.