Between labour control and worker empowerment: Authoritarian innovations and democratic reforms in Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses authoritarian innovations in the industrial relations arena in Mexico since 2018. Historically, corporatist ties with union elites allowed the government to control labour at the workplace level and resist substantive labour reforms at the national level through ‘ghost unions’ and ‘protection contracts’. Since the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-oriented MORENA party, the government has implemented labour reforms and a reformed trade and investment treaty with the US and Canada that includes stronger labour provisions. These changes opened new possibilities for independent, democratic, and strong unionism and thus the potential for worker empowerment. Yet authoritarian innovations embedded in the national and regional reforms have limited labour's power. These meso-level mechanisms include: state bureaucratic control over union formation, collective bargaining and the right to strike; 2 state support for incumbent union control over worker voting processes; and exclusion of sectors from access to redress under an inter-state trade and investment treaty (USMCA). The authors explore this argument through case studies involving agriculture, auto parts, and maquiladora workers in three regions of Mexico.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".