The
United Steelworkers (USW) welcomes the return to Mexico of Napoleón Gómez
Urrutia, the President and General Secretary of the National Union of Mine,
Metal, Steel and Related Workers of the Mexican Republic (Los Mineros) after
more than 12 years of exile.
In a
letter of congratulations, USW International President Leo W. Gerard said:
“With
your swearing-in to the Senate, a new world of possibilities begins for Los
Mineros and the working class of Mexico. For the first time in decades, there
is a real opportunity to transform the structures of worker representation,
industrial justice and economic decision-making to make democratic
representation, real collective bargaining, decent wages and pro-worker
policies available to Mexican workers. This transformation would benefit not
only workers in Mexico, but also their sisters and brothers in Canada and the
United States who have suffered the unfair competition resulting from wage
suppression in Mexico.”
Gómez
and his family were forced to leave Mexico and seek refuge in Canada in 2006
after the government of Mexican President Vicente Fox stripped him of his legal
certification as leader of the union and filed bogus criminal charges when he
protested the deaths of 65 workers in an explosion at Grupo Mexico’s Pasta de
Conchos mine.
The
Mexican Supreme Court ordered the certification to be restored in 2012, and all
of the criminal charges were dismissed in 2014. In 2011, Gómez received the
AFL-CIO’s George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award.
Gómez,
who was elected to the Mexican Senate on the Morena party ticket headed by
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, received his Senate credentials yesterday and will
take the oath of office tomorrow. A USW delegation headed by Ken Neumann,
National Director for Canada, will be in attendance.
The
USW represents 850,000 workers in North America employed in many industries
that include metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service and
public sectors.
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