Public sector workers experience particular challenges from the state when they organize and take collective action. Accountable to administrators as well as parents, teachers are embedded within complex power relations at scales from the classroom to the district and the state or nation. This article draws on labor geography’s understandings of how worker agency is socially situated, to explore how the capacities for protest of dissident elementary and secondary teachers in Mexico City have been limited. These obstacles are found within their workplaces governed by the local Secretary of Public Education, in broader political dynamics within the city and in a centralization of governance over education policy to the national level. As a result, between 2013 and 2016 , teachers here were less likely to join protests against policies initiated by President Enrique Peña Nieto that were widely deemed harmful to their professional autonomy, and which drew strong resistance in other regions of the country. This article concludes by briefly assessing how, as Peña Nieto’s term concluded, dissident teachers turned towards the national election and an equivocal relationship with the center-left Morena party.
Mexican teachers experienced an intensification of neoliberal education policy during the sexenio of President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party from 2013 to 2018. Many tenaciously resisted, led by the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE), a dissident movement within the National Union of Education Workers, whose official leadership aligned itself with the government. This article situates the Mexican teachers' movement within the global context of neoliberal policy which despite setbacks has gradually transformed significant aspects of teachers' work and education. Despite undermining the standardized teacher exam mandated by the Ley de Servicio Profesional Docente of 2013, in other areas the neoliberalization of education advances, particularly the undermining of teachers' professional training, the “datafication” of their work and increasingly hierarchical workplace relations. These policies have the potential to undermine teachers' professional autonomy, and facilitate the degradation of their work, with consequences for their ability to meet the diverse needs of their students. Meanwhile, the movement has struggled to consolidate beyond its stronghold in southern Mexico. The survival and limited victories of the CNTE owe much to drawing on the socially embedded nature of teachers' work, and its capacity to build alliances with communities and popular movements.
Focusing on a case study of a union organizing effort at the La Platosa mine from 2009 to 2012, this article studies the challenges facing labor activism in Canadian mining companies in Mexico within the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The relative strengths and weaknesses exhibited during labor organizing at the La Platosa mine are evaluated to find both locally specific and more broadly applicable strategies that could be applied to union renewal, both by workers employed under NAFTA's transnational sector and by the general labor movement.
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