translated from Spanish: Pemex union groups fight for leadership

After the resignation of Carlos Romero Deschamps from the management of the oil union after 26 years, his second-in-command and secretary of the Interior, Manuel Limón Hernández, took his place and according to the organization’s bylaws could continue until 2024 without performing a new choice.
Meanwhile, leaders of at least three groups within the union fight before the Secretariat of Labor and courts taking note of the Petroleum Workers’ Union of the Mexican Republic, i.e. the official recognition of the organization, and the ownership of the Collective Labour Contract, both held by the acting leadership.
According to the committee, Romero Deschamps’ resignation on 16 October has not changed anything within the union because the leaders of the 36 trade union sections, as well as command officials in Pemex, including from the human resources area, are close to to the leader’s political group that retained power for more than two decades.
Find out: Deschamps says he resigns from the union when facing an ‘unfavourable scenario’
Without a radical legal change, things could stay the same in the union. According to labour lawyer Pablo Franco, trade union statutes provide that, in the absence of the Secretary-General, he is covered by the Secretary of the Interior and Actas, and they also have practically the same functions.
That is why Limón could remain in the post until the end of the current period of note, that is, official recognition as a trade union organization, which in this case expires until December 2024. In fact, Romero Deschamps also came to management covering a substitution, and then was elected as secretary general in 1993.
That is why, says Franco, there is not even a need to hold a new election to renew the secretary-general because the current National Executive Committee has representativeness until the next five years.
While noting that the note that the previous administration of the Secretariat of Labour delivered, in September 2018, even before the end of the previous period, “violates the Constitution and should not have given it”, because at that time it had to comply with the election based on the 123 Constitutional which provides for elections for “secret and direct vote”, and not through sectional delegates, as has historically been.
Although the note-taking delivery could be challenged, the period for doing so has already ended last September, as it is only contemplated for up to one year.
On the other hand, the lawyer explains, in order for the current executive committee to be renewed, the statutes only provide for the resignation of all the current leaders that would annul that election “and then the General Surveillance Council would initiate a procedure for the new election, which I see very far because the council integrates with representatives of the 36 sections, but the sectional committees are the accomplices of Romero Deschamps.”
The struggle for power
Although there was always opposition to Deschamps’ leadership, none managed to undermine their power, but at the moment there are three groups seeking union representation from the courts and negotiations with the Labour Secretariat, on whom even the decision whether or not to revoke the noteing of the current leadership.
One of the groups is the Petroleum Union of Mexico (Petromex) which three years after starting to organize, on March 26 thy/day he was recognized by the Secretariat of Labor as a second Pemex union under the registration 70/16, and 86 years after the creation of the first union organization.
Petromex spokesman, Oscar Solórzano, says that next November they will file a lawsuit with the Federation Board of Conciliation and Arbitration to obtain ownership of the Collective Labor Agreement, so that they create a new representation option and unionists have the option of Petromex.
In an interview with Animal Político he says that this organization does not seek to supplement the leadership of the STPRM, but to apply an anti-corruption union model and end the “criminal structure that has functioned as a cartel” of the current union.
“The workers understand that Romero’s resignation is a strategy that he operated in the old prilist style, left a personero to a testafer and Romero wants to go to enjoy all the fortune he stole. That’s why it’s not enough to change characters, you have to change the union model.”
That’s why, the spokesman says, workers are seeing Petromex as an option and are affiliation “with more speed” than to date they add up to 500 thousand. With official recognition and support from new members, the union will go to Pemex headquarters on October 24 to request a hearing again with the holder, Octavio Oropeza who “has denied us the right to attend.”
Since March, Oropeza has not received the new group, “does not want to recognize us as a union representation”, and that is essential to be able to enter the facilities or do errands as a workers’ defender, insists Solórzano.
Meanwhile, another assault seeks to direct the STPRM. This is Mario Rubicel Coss García, who claims to have moresupport from Morena and is appointed “legitimate” leader, as he said at a press conference last Thursday.
He claims that the workers elected him as leader at a convention held on 16 December last, following the holding of 32 sectional assemblies, for the election of the new Sectional Executive Committee of 2019-2024, as marked by the statutes.
However, Deschamps was re-elected before December and therefore again requested the noteing before the Labour Secretariat that was delivered to him in September 2018, before the conclusion of Peña Nieto’s six-year period, which, Rubicel Ross said, is illegal.
Therefore, it requested the note to the Secretariat of Labour and having no resolution on it, it brought an appeal before the Eighth District Judge and that it would have to be resolved on 19 November and determine whether it gives it the reason.
His case even arrived in the Senate on May 29 in the voice of PT Senator Reginaldo Sandoval, who proposed a point of agreement for the Labour Secretariat to deliver the note to Rubicel Coss.
Omar Toledo is a trade unionist who since 2008 filed a lawsuit alleging the illegality of another period of leadership of Romero Deschamps and that in 2009 a collegiate court gave him the reason to declare it well founded and ordered the fifth district judge to annul the note to the STPRM issued by the Secretariat of Labour.
“We are not interested in Romero Deschamps renouncing, we need to do a widespread clean, we can no longer go on with the same thing. The same filth continues, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that the workers will decide who represents them and we no longer want the same and we will throw them out. If we have to take the union, we’re going to take it,” he says in an interview with Animal Político.
On August 29, Toledo presented a document to the Ministry of Labour so that, on the basis of the Court’s decision, the unit authorizes the legal personality to call election in “democratic and aforegoing to statutes” and to renew the leadership , as read in the office given to this medium.
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Original source in Spanish