Photography/Internet
Mexico City.- With no sign of a close solution, this Sunday marks 500 days the strike of Workers of Notimex
This is the longest strike in a state agency and supported by 80 percent women, the workers said.
Those affected said that in the face of the refusal of the agency’s management, who violates the constitutional right to strike by illegally collecting their salary, they have been on the street for more than 16 months exposed to Covid-19, death threats and latent dangers.
With a demonstration in the Zócalo of Mexico City, the strikers demanded a solution to the problem that, despite the awards won in Conciliation and Arbitration, there is no positive dialogue with the management of the agency that allows a solution to the problem.
The workers also pointed to the government’s position of the “4th transformation,” which has turned a deaf ear by supporting and promoting a policy of cuts and layoffs.
While the workers demand the payment of overdue wages and their reinstatement, and while director Sanjuana Martínez accuses corruption and waste of the United Union of Workers of Notimex, the agency’s information work remains on hold after more than a year of strike action.
The conflict is not easy, journalists say; Notimex is and has functioned since its creation in 1968 as a state agency. Despite the reform of its statutes in 2006 – with which it ceased to be an appendage of the Interior Secretariat – its main and daily task has been to reproduce the pleasant information of the governmental exercise.
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To evade labor responsibilities, Sanjuana Martinez, director of the agency, points out the official character of the agency during the past six years. “In the last six years, they had turned it into a propaganda organ basically,” he said in mid-2019 at the president’s morning conference.
However, before the labour strike broke out, Notimex continued to broadcast official news. The headlines of the main published cables reported morena’s internal decisions and the number of beneficiaries of various social programs, while condemning the riots in the feminist demonstrations. Or they documented the transition of Senator Lily Tellez from the Morena caucus to the National Action Party caucus, highlighting her “zero experience” in politics.
Similarly, Martínez has justified the more than 300 dismissals by talking about austerity measures and fighting corruption, dismissing the charges she herself faces for diverting public resources.
“There is one element that is not being taken into account in the equation: the right of hearings,” explains journalist Ignacio Rodríguez Reyna, who for more than three decades has held management and editorial positions in national magazines and newspapers. Beyond its proximity to the State, Notimex was functional: the correspondent service in the states and abroad fed many media that could not hire these services, due to their financial weakness, for example.
Those involved point out that the Notimex crisis is more than a labor dispute: “we are talking about a violation of the right to information. He’s being denied that right to hearings.”
