Joseph Lenti advances the study of Mexican history by focusing attention on state–labour relations during an important period. The ‘official’, government-allied labour movement provided crucial support to the post-revolutionary regime during and after the massive Mexico City student and popular movement that convulsed Mexico in 1968. Lenti shows that, following the massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco in October, the government rewarded its labour allies as part of a more general package of material and symbolic measures intended to ‘redeem’ the promises of the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution.
Lenti highlights the rapid adoption of a revised federal labour law (submitted to the Congress as a legislative initiative in December 1968 and in effect from May 1970) as the principal government reward for labour movement support during the 1968 crisis. The government of President Luis Echeverría álvarez (1970–6) also responded to labour movement demands by establishing the Comisión Nacional Tripartita (National Tripartite Commission, CNT) that offered organised labour institutionalised representation in national economic and social policy deliberations; decreeing emergency wage hikes during a period of rising inflation; and creating the Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (National Worker Housing Institute, INFONAVIT) in 1972. In the ideological realm, Jesús Reyes Heroles, newly appointed president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), promoted procedural reforms that advanced ‘collectivism’ and reaffirmed the ruling party's commitment to its mass constituencies.
However, Lenti does not discuss several other government initiatives that also significantly benefited workers. These included a 1974 reform of federal labour law that permitted the annual renegotiation of both minimum wages and wages set by collective contract, a reduction in the workweek for government employees to 40 hours, and an increase in the share of enterprise profits going to workers under the national profit-sharing programme. Nor does Lenti examine in detail the Echeverría government's simultaneous – and outwardly contradictory – efforts to undercut the political position of Fidel Velázquez Sánchez, long-time leader of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers, CTM, the PRI's official labour sector).
Much of Lenti's book focuses on developments during the Echeverría administration, whose apertura democrática (‘democratic opening’) sought to address the post-Tlatelolco crisis of public confidence in the regime. The author devotes considerable attention to the Tendencia Democrática (Democratic Tendency, TD), a dissident movement of electrical power workers that contested ‘official’ union control over rank-and-file workers and formed part of a more general opposition challenge to the established regime. Yet Lenti says relatively little about the broader domestic and foreign policy initiatives that comprised the ‘democratic opening’ (or the ‘dirty war’ that Echeverría's government waged against armed leftist opposition groups). Nor does he explore in depth the larger insurgencia obrera (‘worker insurgence’) that occurred during these years. The interplay between worker-led struggles for union democracy and government attempts – especially actions by Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, head of the Secretaría del Trabajo y Previsión Social (Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, STPS) between 1972 and 1975 – both to stimulate and to control opposition labour movements remains a topic that merits careful historical investigation.
Lenti employs primary sources (archival records and contemporary accounts from national, regional and union newspapers) principally to document specific episodes that, he argues, illuminate broader patterns in state–labour relations during the early 1970s. These cases include: the 1970 May Day parade (pp. 62–6), the unveiling of Echeverría's presidential candidacy and his subsequent campaign (pp. 71–9), the 1973 murder of Monterrey industrialist Eugenio Garza Sada by urban guerrillas (pp. 148–54), the 1974 business–labour struggle over the unionisation of petrol stations in the state of Nuevo León (pp. 160–73), and contract disputes in 1973 involving temporary highway-repair workers in the state of Durango (pp. 194–8) and aluminium-manufacturing workers in the state of Veracruz (pp. 198–207).
The author's bibliography is at times surprisingly selective. It omits, for example, important works by Silvia Gómez Tagle on the Tendencia Democrática and Ian Roxborough on independent unionism in the automobile industry.
