The Politics of Informal Domestic and Construction Worker Organizing: Mexican Cases in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The growing recognition that informal workers can organize successfully has generated debate over the determinants of effectiveness in such organizing. We contribute to this discussion by examining the cases of domestic and construction worker organizations in Mexico, using a power resources framework. Profiling these movements, the key obstacles they face, and their achievements, we undertake a threefold comparison. Within Mexico, we compare organizing both across the two sectors and over time. Additionally, we cross-nationally compare Mexican organizing in these sectors with U.S. comparators. We explain the disparate outcomes through changes in institutional opportunities and access to societal power (allies).

Keywords

domestic work construction work informal workers labor organizing power resources Mexico

—The “unorganizable”—it's always informal workers, it's always women. And here you had all those unorganizable women, raising hell, being very organized, and unexpected allies.

(Dan Gallin, interviewed by Fish 2017, 35)

Introduction

Despite earlier notions that informal workers cannot successfully organize until their status becomes formalized (Bairoch 1973; Geertz 1963), a growing literature documents and analyzes informal worker organizing (see Chun and Agarwala [2015] for a recent review). The debate has shifted from whether informal workers can organize to what determines their effectiveness. In this article, we apply comparative analysis to informal worker mobilization in Mexico to investigate determinants of its effectiveness, using a power resources framework (Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018). Within Mexico, we compare organizing both across two sectors, domestic work and construction, and over time (since the 1960s). To test the patterns we find, we then conduct a preliminary cross-national comparison of organizing in these sectors in Mexico with that in the United States.

This comparative analysis builds on a literal explosion of research on informal worker organizing in the last decade or so (e.g., Agarwala 2013; Chun and Agarwala 2015; Eaton, Schurman, and Chen 2017; Kabeer, Sudarshan, and Milward 2013; Webster, Britwum, and Bhowmik 2017). Chun and Agarwala (2015) summarize a number of striking patterns in the informal workers organizing literature: informal worker struggles mobilize new subjects (women, migrants, and ethnic minorities) who utilize broadened collective action repertoires and organizational forms, often organize via communities and shared, intersectional identities rather than workplaces and class identities, and direct their demands at new targets, especially the state. These findings are rich, but most research on informal worker organizing consists of single-country, single-sector, single-organization, and single time-period case studies (often selecting successful cases for study). In particular, most research on Mexican informal worker organizing has considered only one sector at a time (Cross 1998; De la Garza Toledo 2011; Goldsmith 2007). Cross-national comparisons of Mexican informal worker organizations with those elsewhere in the world are likewise rare, though with important exceptions, such as Blofield and Jokela (2018). A natural next step, then, is to gain additional analytical leverage through comparisons.

Most of the sparse literature comparing informal worker mobilization cross-nationally examines relatively similar countries (e.g., works by Blofield and Jokela [2018] and Pereyra and Poblete [2018] comparing domestic worker organizing across Latin American countries). We compare Mexico and the United States, two neighboring countries that differ dramatically in economies, polities, and institutions. Mexico and the United States also represent contrasting experiences regarding organizing informal workers in both construction and domestic work sectors.

In this project, we study domestic and construction workers because both sectors are predominantly informal, but the former is primarily gendered female and rendered informal by exclusion from many standard labor laws (Fish 2017), whereas the latter is mainly gendered male and formally included in labor laws but rendered informal by non-enforcement or evasion of those laws. The original design of the project did not include a historical component, but our search for organizations of informal construction workers in Mexico found essentially none existing currently. The fieldwork revealed that some strong organizations existed in the mid-twentieth century (more on this below). Consequently, we have extended our research on domestic worker organizations earlier as well and added a historical comparison of organizing in the two sectors. In order to address multiple comparisons in one relatively compact article, we adopt a strategy proposed by Mukhija (2010), comparing more developed Mexican cases with relatively constrained cases in the United States.

The question we pose is: what determines the effectiveness of informal worker organizing? We define effectiveness in terms of establishing enduring organizations, attracting large numbers of members, delivering benefits to members, and winning public policy reforms. We anchor our analysis in case studies of the construction and domestic labor in Mexico. After profiling the obstacles faced by informal worker organizations in these sectors and their accomplishments, we compare informal worker organizing and power-building across the two sectors, seeking to identify determinants of these efforts’ degrees of effectiveness.

Blofield and Jokela (2018) propose a set of four determinants of organizational effectiveness in informal worker organizing. They attribute the rising tide of reforms bolstering household workers’ rights in Latin America, and differences in reforms across countries, to a combination of the organizations’ capacity to self-organize and attract allies, the presence or absence of sympathetic governments, and spillover effects of the global mobilization to win Convention 189. We define success in self-organization as an effectiveness outcome, but incorporate the other three factors they suggest into our explanatory framework. However, we adopt a framework from power resources theory (Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018), and subsume these factors into broader categories of structural power (power stemming from strategic locations in the production process), associational power (the power of organized workers to act together strategically), institutional power (power gained by dint of institutionalized roles of labor organizations within the political economy), and societal power (support from other organizations and social groups). Intersectionality, a way of framing overlapping systems of subordination (Crenshaw 1993), notably race, gender, and class, also informs our study, given the interwoven set of subordinate identities in play in these two highly gendered jobs. As Viveros-Vigoya (2016 quoting Kergoat 2009) states, a domination relationship is not static and thus is historically determined.

In brief, our cross-sectoral comparison reveals that though organizing by Mexican domestic and informal construction workers has remained modest in scale and scope due to obdurate conjunction of structural, associational, and institutional obstacles, organizations in the two sectors have experienced differing trajectories. In construction, though a small number of genuine, representative trade unions briefly flourished during the 1960s-1970s, they disappeared in the 1980s. In contrast, new domestic worker organizations appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, and organizations with roots in this organizational wave have persisted and deepened their institutionalization. We attribute this contrast to differing institutional power (shifting dispositions of the Mexican state and its subunits), and societal power (construction unions lost societal support, whereas domestic worker organizations gained). Cross-nationally, the effectiveness of Mexican organizations during our study period fell behind their U.S. counterparts due to a combination of institutional and societal sources of power. It is important to underline that our Mexican research precedes the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President (and the U.S. fieldwork was completed in 2016, before the elections of Presidents Trump and Biden); we review significant subsequent changes in Mexico at the end of the article.

In the remainder of this paper, we first outline our research methods. We then summarize key obstacles facing informal worker organizing in Mexico, report findings from the two sectors in Mexico, and draw lessons from the cross-sectoral comparison. Next, we present cross-national comparative findings. We close with a reprise of the main findings plus a brief discussion of very recent shifts in power resources in Mexico and their possible implications for informal worker organizing.

Methods

The main source of information regarding Mexican domestic work has been built through an ethnographic approach and thus has been gathered on the ground. We basically rely on case studies, developed with three organizations during 2015 and 2016. We conducted one in-depth case study of the Center for Support and Training of Household Employees (CACEH, a non-profit organization) and its offshoot the Union of Women and Men Household Workers (SINACTRAHO, a trade union), both in Mexico City. Rojas-García mostly observed the group's training meetings first-hand and carried out in-depth interviews with the leader Marcelina Bautista and some members of the National Union's Steering Committee. Rojas-García also attended some of the outreach activities they displayed in public spaces (like parks). Both, their training meetings and the outreach activities used to be carried out every other Sunday. Due to the length of the observation period and a fortunate coincidence, Rojas-García witnessed the birth of the national union SINACTRAHO.

Less extensive fieldwork was carried out with the also Mexico City-based Collective of Indigenous Women Household Workers (COLMITH, with whom the fieldwork research was carried out for nine months, since they did not meet as regularly as CACEH-SINACTRAHO and announced a recess in December 2016, ending the fieldwork). Rojas-García also observed this group's meetings on Saturdays (after the household workers’ working day had finished) and interviewed COLMITH's leader Lorenza Gutiérrez. Both COLMITH and CACEH-SINACTRAHO are located in Mexico City. The third household workers’ organization is the Network of Women Household Employees (RMEHO), which we visited three times in their office in Chilpancingo, the capital city of the violence-ridden southern state of Guerrero. Their office is located in an actual house that they call a “supportive house” (casa solidaria) where recent migrants arriving in Chilpancingo looking for work stay for a few weeks while being trained and RMEHO finds a job for them. Rojas-García had some informal talks with its current leader Justina Hermillo and interviewed RMEHO's historic leader Petra Hermillo. Our information includes a total of twenty seven interviews with activists and nine with unaffiliated domestic workers.

To simplify further reference to the three organizations in this paper we will use the respective acronyms or labels identifying distinctive characteristics of each group: we label CACEH-SINACTRAHO “the unionists,” since creating a union was a goal from the time CACEH was founded by Marcelina Bautista in 2000. COLMITH will be distinguished as the “cultural rights-oriented” group, given that defending migrant indigenous people's identities and customs, has been COLMITH's cause. And RMEHO will also be called a “community involvement-oriented” organization because they function through municipal-level committees.

The research on Mexican construction proceeded over several years, including 18 interviews with organizational representatives and four with builders and unaffiliated construction workers. Initial research was conducted in 2013-2015, including interviews at three organizations and with two construction workers. In 2017, we carried out 14 new interviews and one site observation. We also reached out via email to a total of twenty other experts on labor in Mexico to ask if they knew of any organizations of informal construction workers other than “ghost unions” that fail to actually defend worker rights. All of these experts answered a simple “no.” However, later 2017 interviews did surface two past independent unions and one very small present organization in construction.

For the United States, we draw in part on a report by McBride et al. (2021) based on fieldwork and secondary sources on both the domestic work and construction cases; regarding day laborers in construction we also draw on research by Tilly with co-authors (Sarmiento et al. 2016) and regarding U.S. domestic workers we draw on Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore (2019).

Comparing Mexico's Informal Construction Worker and Domestic Worker Organizations

Construction Workers: A Wealth of Organizations but a Poverty of Organizing

Mexico's 604,000 construction workers (2019 figure; INEGI 2021a, 2021b) are overwhelmingly male and informal: 89 percent of the construction workers lacked social security, including 60 percent of those employed in formal construction enterprises (de la Garza Toledo 2012a; Negrete Prieto 2012). Three quarters earn less than three times Mexico's minimum wage (a minimum wage that falls below the poverty line), compared to 67 percent of the population as a whole (INEGI 2017). As of 2010 (the most recent published estimate available), only 1.3 percent were union members (de la Garza Toledo 2012b).

The nature of the work also poses obstacles to building associational power. As in most of the world, the vast majority of construction workers toil on small, short-duration projects, building or remodeling a single house or small structure through informal working relationships. They tend to come from the hinterlands of Mexico's rapidly growing cities, many only working seasonally, during agricultural off-seasons. Workers travel to job sites 3-4 h from their homes, often sleeping on-site. Most major cities have locations where day laborers congregate looking for work, an atomized hiring process not conducive to building solidarity. But even when hiring is more socially embedded, it is personalized. Workers are personally affiliated with subcontractors, who operate work crews at the bottom of elaborate subcontracting chains, and hiring agreements are typically oral. Such conditions cut against demanding better working conditions, let alone organizing.

Limits in associational, institutional, and societal power for Mexican workers also arise from a political context rooted in the post-revolutionary era. For construction workers, those roots lie in labor corporatism. After the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution, the political elite reconfigured and the long-governing ruling party (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI) was born in 1929. The party's corporatist structure incorporated unions in basic industry and some public services, along with organizations in other social sectors. The corporatist pact, yielding a modicum of institutional power, helped unions flourish from the 1940s through the 1980s, but at the cost of the tight party and state control. Corrupt and authoritarian leadership came to characterize the “official,” pro-government unions, and degrading associational power. In the 1980s, when Mexico shifted to an open economy regime and workers’ unhappiness with stagnating incomes became a less reliable voting bloc, corporatism became less useful as an instrument of control and over the next two decades, the state dramatically downsized unions’ institutional power (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2013; Tilly 2014).

Another, smaller segment of unions, the “independent” unions, have contested corporatism for decades and sought to build associational strength. However, throughout the century since the Mexican Revolution and across both official and independent unions, with only a small number of exceptions, union organization in Mexico has been a prerogative accessible only to formal workers registered in the social security systems. Consequently, the share of workers belonging to a union was never high and has decreased in recent years. In 1984, 28.5 percent of the total working population were unionized; but the figure dropped to 12 percent in 2018 (Badillo 2019).

The PRI, during its decades of dominance, promoted organizing among some informal groups such as transit drivers and street vendors, with resulting organizations incorporated into the Confederation of National Popular Organizations, another locus of (limited) institutional power. In Mexico City, when the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) won the mayoralty in 1997, similar corporatist policies were adopted by this leftist-oriented party (Castro Nieto 1990).

Although Mexico's predominant political culture cannot solely be attributed to the imprint of seventy years of PRI rule, the corporatist legacy has indeed dimmed prospects for more independent unions. Spillovers from this legacy have undermined possibilities for building societal power by attracting allies and popular support: perceptions of unions and their leaders in the collective imaginary lock in the negative stereotype—accurate for most unions—of corrupt, patronage-based organizations.

Mexico's construction sector is characterized by a wealth of organizations, but poverty of organizing. The predominant form of formal organization in the construction sector is trade unions. According to most observers, at the time of our fieldwork construction unions were without exception corporatist “ghost unions” that do little to defend workers’ rights; we describe their functioning below. Interviewees stated that there are thousands of local construction unions (one interviewee estimated over 1000 in Mexico City alone) and thirty-forty national unions (Mexico's local unions are not part of national unions by sector, so these are distinct organizations), all of which are sector-wide rather than organized by craft as in some other countries. The estimate of “thousands” is clearly hyperbolic, but it is difficult to come up with a more reliable figure since Mexico does not maintain a national registry nor even a national count of unions. Generating a full count of construction unions would require reviewing tens of thousands of union contracts on file at scores of Local Mediation and Arbitration Councils scattered across Mexico. We instead take advantage of the fact that Mexico City's Council, which is the designated filing place for contracts of national unions as well as Mexico City's local unions, posts current contracts online by month (Junta Local 2021). We reviewed the twelve most recent months for which contracts are available, counted unions that list construction activities in their names or have contracts with construction firms, and extrapolated this count nationwide.¹ Our estimate is that Mexico has at least 129 national and 246 local unions with contracts covering construction workers.

However, Mexico's construction unions do little for their members, instead adopting strategies that fail to build associational power. Interviewees described them as “ghost unions,” a standard Mexican appellation for unions that fail to defend their members (Bensusán and Middlebrook 2013; Rubio Campos 2017), as opposed to true, representative unions. According to the interviewees (see also Aragón Martínez 2012), the unions mobilize armies of plaqueros (“sign people”), who walk the streets searching for construction job sites. The plaquero demands that the proprietor signs a contract with the union, which requires a substantial fee, in return for a sign (placa) announcing the project is covered by a union contract. The plaqueros back up their demand with the threat of a picket line or an attack by thugs. Larger builders reportedly conclude an agreement with a union in advance to avoid disruption. At smaller jobs, workers receive no benefit from the union contract (not even social security contributions), and often have no contact with the union at all. On larger projects, the union, like construction unions elsewhere in the world, will typically insist that beyond the contractor's core workforce, its members be hired first, so union affiliation can provide workers access to jobs. In return, however, they are expected to attack nonunion job sites as needed. Thus, construction unions develop and deploy structural power in a form that, perversely, largely negates the possibility of democratically based associational power.

Our research did unearth two past independent unions that did build associational and societal strength and fight for construction worker rights. The Welders League (SNILS) represented construction trades at government-owned production facilities. SNILS was founded in 1934, but in the early 1960s Communists assumed the leadership and activated the union for over a decade (Ibarra Chávez 2012). The May First Construction Union (S1M) in the western state of Guanajuato, founded by the independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in 1964, bargained with employers into the 1980s. We were only able to discover one current legitimate organization of construction workers. Comprehensive Remodeling and Construction Services (SIRC) is a tiny cooperative launched out of the Authentic Labor Front's cooperative division in 2007. SIRC started with eight members, but as of 2018 stood at 5-6.

The SNILS and S1M construction unions broke with the typical construction union model. The Welders League counted as many as 30,000 members at its peak (Castellanos Jiménez 2015), and used the power of association to wield structural power in the workplace, engaging in hard-fought strikes from 1966-1977 (Ibarra Chávez 2012)—part of a broader milieu that included some strikes by “official” construction unions as well (Trejo Delarbre 1990, 287). But by the late 1970s, employer opposition grew harsher and Mexico's main union federation, the CTM, attacked SNILS and succeeded in marginalizing it. Unlike the Welders League, the S1M remained quite small—one interviewee recalled a maximum of fifty five, and another said membership was typically 20-30. S1M relied heavily on societal power: the union was able to secure collective bargaining contracts with employers whom interviewees described as “conscious” and therefore supportive. Similar to the story of the Welders League, the fortunes of S1M began to decline with Mexico's conservative and later neoliberal turn in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The current small SIRC cooperative, in addition to acting as a construction contractor, organizes educational events on cooperatives and the solidarity economy and joins in activities with other organizations in the FAT's network of cooperatives. Whereas SNILS and S1M functioned as traditional trade unions, bargaining with employers, SIRC's appeal to its small membership is to provide employment aligned with cooperative ideals; it lacks access to any significant power resources.

Domestic Worker Organizations: Overcoming Formidable Obstacles

As in most of the world, domestic work in Mexico—paid and unpaid—is performed by women. Paid domestic work employs 2.2 million people (INEGI 2021b), which represents 4 percent of the total workforce and 9 percent of employed women. Defined as “the activity in which labor is bought and sold for the tasks of daily reproduction in the domestic setting” (Rojas-García and Toledo-González 2018, 147),² we focus on the paid tasks of cleaning, feeding, and the general maintenance of the home. The bulk of workers in these activities is women (95%, [INEGI 2015]) and almost all work informally. Just over three-quarters of domestic workers earn less than twice the very low minimum wage (Moreno-Brid, Garry, and Monroy-Gómez-Franco 2014). The percentage of unionized is very low (0.7%) taking into account that SINACTRAHO, the only union in Mexico, claims fifteen thousand members out of 2.2 million domestic workers in the country.

As with construction, multiple structural factors characterizing domestic work in Mexico (and elsewhere) make organizing difficult. The isolated, unique nature of each employer-employee relationship makes collective action hard to achieve (Goldsmith 2007; Rojas-García and Toledo González 2019). Even more universally than construction workers, hiring involves an oral agreement. Each worker negotiates hours, salary, and duties separately with her employer, leaving working conditions to the employer's willingness (Toledo-González 2014). The work has been historically undervalued, lacking the recognition of a “real” job and thus a claim on worker rights (Acciari 2021; Agarwala 2013; Casanova 2019; Goldsmith 1992; Tizziani 2011). Given the intimate and constant relationship with the employer's family, the resulting affective bonds inhibit suing a former employer (Brites 2013; Toledo-González 2014). Lack of money and time to devote to regular meetings also discourages activism, as does fear of losing the job should the employer realize the worker attends meetings (Rojas-García and Contreras 2018). In general, household workers have very limited education and little time to devote to their political formation since they all have a regular job and a family. Building their ability to speak in public, answer the press, negotiate with authorities, or carry out strategic analysis—and thus constructing associational power—is no easy task.

The challenges posed by institutional exclusion—a common experience among domestic workers globally—are arguably even more daunting. Up to very recently (2019), the federal labor law (LFT) assigned paid household work a “special” status primarily designed for live-in domestics (now a small minority of 6.5%), holding the employer responsible for paying health expenses if the worker is sick or dies and allowing domestic worker unionization, but requiring neither an employment contract nor social security registration (Goldsmith 2007). Moreover, even the law's limited terms had not been enforced (Toledo-González 2014). According to Goldsmith (2007), the patriarchal character of labor law has been a lasting obstacle for household workers. Indeed, the ideologies of the home have historically impacted labor law in two ways: One, as Patton (2019, 525) has suggested, “housework was divorced from the concept of labor” and thus has been conceptualized as “unproductive” from the nineteenth century onward. Additionally, in Latin America, as indeed elsewhere, the legacy of colonialism has been: “the reluctance of the state to interfere in work done in the home [which] gave the employers substantial power over the lives of the domestic servants” (Kuznesof 1993, 31).

The history of defending and organizing domestic or household workers (trabajadoras del hogar) in Mexico, based on mobilizing shifting intersectional identities, can be traced back to over a century ago. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, domestic workers’ identity as the largest group of women workers led revolutionary factions, prodded by middle-class labor feminists (feminists committed to ensuring that working women's rights were equal to men's), to include domestic workers in the 1917 Constitution's set of labor protections. This impulse continued with the inclusion of protection for household workers in 1931's Federal Labor Law—though these legal provisions were never enforced (Goldsmith 1992).

From the 1920s to the 1940s, domestic workers themselves moved to the forefront by forming unions, activating their identity as workers. Across the country, at least thirty active domestic worker unions included hotel, guesthouse, and restaurant employees, who organized to press for higher wages (Goldsmith 1992).

A common characteristic with construction workers is the link to the ruling PRI party, beginning in the 1950s. Unions created previously by domestic workers died out and the remaining attempts to organize were brought under the party's corporatist tutelage in the National Association of Domestic Workers (ANTD). Goldsmith (1989) argues that ANTD was never a membership organization but rather it primarily functioned as a placement agency serving employers. Domestic workers’ new role became one of PRI clients, as opposed to social movement activists, and organizing activity abated for decades.

Today's organizations of household workers in Mexico trace their roots back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when liberation theology activists launched organizations, an extension of the liberation theology surge that created the Autonomous Labor Front, creator of the May 1st construction worker union. The three organizations we studied, CACEH (the unionists), COLMITH (the cultural rights-oriented group), and RMEHO (the community involvement-oriented organization), were founded in the 2000s as membership organizations, mobilizing domestic workers based on an identity of excluded and oppressed women workers. All have been registered as NGOs (asociaciones civiles) because, at some point in their activist careers, leaders understood it was a way to seek grants and secure funds. They only admit household employees as members and jealously defend their principle of organizing for and by the household workers (Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore 2019).

What have these organizations been able to accomplish for their members? The household worker organizations cumulatively have built an impressive track record. The unionist CACEH, for years a Mexico City organization, was able to launch a national union, SINACTRAHO. That union in 2020 reported fifteen thousand members from all around the country and—prior to the pandemic—its Sunday training workshops in Mexico City were regularly attended by 60-80 household workers. The community involvement-oriented RMEHO, limited to Guerrero state, has established committees in five municipalities in different regions of the state. They have registered 400 household workers, and their statewide educational and training meetings attract about thirty members. During the months of fieldwork with Mexico City-based COLMITH (the cultural rights-oriented group) in 2016, on the other hand, only six to eight women attended the meetings. COLMITH announced a recess in December 2016.

All three domestic worker organizations combine advocacy and services. Though the advocacy is most visible to the public, the services are most important to current and prospective members. The main demand all three groups have directed at the state and employers is for household workers to be recognized as “real” workers deserving of rights like others—a very basic level of institutional standing (Acciari 2021; Agarwala 2013; Carré 2013). Back in 2000 several household worker organizations participated in a campaign called “for a dignifying name” (Por un nombre digno), in which they surveyed domestic workers about what they preferred to be called. Most voted for “household workers,” and the organizations now promote that term in Mexico. More recently the organizations have called for an enforceable minimum wage for domestic workers and a requirement for written employment contracts. SINACTRAHO, the national union, has also drawn up a model collective bargaining agreement and has been able to get the first contracts signed by household employers.

The groups’ portfolio of services helps sustain loyalty and participation, undergirding associational muscle. The unionist CACEH/SINACTRAHO manages a placement program, matching workers and employers. Employers pay a modest fee and sign an employment contract. In exchange, the worker must attend the organization's workshops, keeping her informed and connected. RMEHO, the community involvement-oriented organization, provides short-term lodging for workers who migrate to Chilpancingo seeking jobs, and a placement and training program. COLMITH's watchword was the defense of cultural rights. For all three organizations, the predominant activities are educational workshops that impart skills and inform workers about their rights, but even more importantly affirm household workers’ identity and create a space of mutual support (Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore 2019).

Even though organizational efficiency is still underdeveloped, Mexico's domestic worker organizations, and the unionists in particular, have indeed managed to gain critical state support and attract allies. As noted above, liberation theology and feminist activists supported the founding of the organizations, and labor-oriented feminists in particular have been steadfast allies over the decades. CACEH was able to launch the SINACTRAHO union due to a supportive Mexico City government (controlled at the time by the leftist PRD). Due to a timely change in law, national unions can be chartered in Mexico City, as long as they prove to have members from different states. This institutional niche allowed launching a national union. On the societal power front, Rosario Ortiz—a leader of the National Union of Telephone Workers (STRM), former head of the Women Trade Unionists Network, and former House of Representatives member for the PRD—has mediated between CACEH/SINACTRAHO and her own union. Since 2015 CACEH (and later the union) has borrowed office space and the auditorium for their Sunday workshops from the STRM; STRM leader Ortiz herself was a main advisor in launching SINACTRAHO. In turn, the STRM linked SINACTRAHO to the National Workers Network (UNT), the largest federation of independent unions. And CACEH/SINACTRAHO outreach and media strategies have attracted some broader public attention and sympathy. The three organizations, especially CACEH, have had some important successes in attracting grant or government funding, from Mexican, U.S., and UN-linked sources³.

Formalizing a national union of household (domestic) workers has been a major accomplishment of recent years, giving its members collective access to the institutional levers accruing to formal unions. In 2015, after fifteen years of pursuing this goal, creating a union meant the possibility of setting and negotiating a collective contract and, thus, demanding the regulation of working conditions for the sector.

Despite these achievements, significant associational challenges remain for Mexico's household worker organizations. Leadership has so far been “dominated by a small cadre of highly committed women willing to cycle between volunteering and paid staff positions” (Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore 2019, 137). This poses two challenges: leadership development and the interaction among household workers’ organizations. First, regarding leadership, the fact that the very existence of these organizations rests on the shoulders of three highly committed women is not only exhausting for them but also constraining for the organizations. Though some of the training CACEH/SINACTRAHO provides is aimed at leadership development (Rojas-García and Contreras 2018), in practice its effect is modest. One positive indicator is that when the SINACTRAHO union's inaugural steering committee—in which Marcelina Bautista was one out of three general secretaries—ended its term in 2018, the organization was able to appoint an entirely new group. Nonetheless, it is hard to maintain continuous and active member participation. Leaders have struggled finding members “willing to pay” (fees) and “willing to act” (Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018).

Second, it is striking that the three organizations’ leaders and the organizations themselves basically do not interact, signaling a personalistic leadership model (fieldwork observation). The leaders know each other, but do not communicate, and thus are not even aware of what the other organizations are working on. Indeed, it appears that though they share the same general goals, they do not see themselves as part of the same social movement. For instance, as transformational as the birth of a national union among household workers might be, COLMITH and RMEHO members show no interest in joining SINACTRAHO, the national union. This disjuncture results mainly from leaders’ personal differences.

Additionally, building bridges between SINACTRAHO and larger unions that could support it is still a work in progress. Some members of SINACTRAHO's Steering Committee have attended meetings at the National Workers Network (UNT), to which SINACTRAHO and the STRM are affiliated, and have started learning how to handle such meetings and to interact with leaders from different sectors. Though they have not felt any discrimination at the personal level, they do report that so far, traditional unions typically don't view domestic worker associations as kindred organizations. As Fine (2007, 341) puts it: “Unions are often alienated by worker centres’ [organizations like CACEH] non-connection to industry and employer, broad and blunt internal organizational structures, loose membership bases, and ad hoc and reactive organizational ways of operating.”

Comparing Mexico's Domestic Worker and Construction Organizations

In terms of structural power, Mexico's construction workers and domestic workers alike face challenging obstacles, mainly due to their informal status, like their counterparts around the world. In both cases, workplaces are predominantly small and scattered, and relations with employers tend to be personalized. Household workers face an even more extreme version of these obstacles—most are in workplaces that employ them alone, and relations with employers are not just personal but intimate—but neither group of workers has a strong structural base for building power.

Beyond this basic similarity, however, three important differences help explain the very dissimilar records of accomplishment of informal worker organizations in these two sectors. First, the two sectors’ organizations confronted very distinct sets of opponents in the form of rival non-representative organizations, impeding the formation of solidaristic associational strength. In construction, the hundreds of non-representative construction unions have a successful extortion-based business model, providing both motive and resources to drive out competitors. Mexican construction unions may do little for workers, but they continue to fill the organizational space that independent organizations might seek to enter. In contrast, activist domestic worker organizations formed from the 1970s forward entered organizational space empty except for the PRI's ANTD, essentially an employment agency (though the three organizations under study lack internal cohesion [Schmalz, Ludwig, and Webster 2018] within this space, falling short of their possible combined associational clout). Thus, ironically, the institutional standing of Mexico's construction unions impeded genuine construction worker organizing, whereas domestic work's relative institutional vacuum provided an opening for new organizations. This difference has been consistent from the 1970s forward, so it helps explain long-run differences in what household and construction worker organizations have achieved, but does not explain the seesaw in fortunes between organizations in the two sectors.

Second, shifts in both government attitudes (and thus institutional openings) and public opinion (and corresponding public support bolstering societal power) shifted over time. As Mexico's developmental model struggled in the 1970s, blue-collar unions including construction unions became more militant and engaged in numerous strikes (Tilly 2014), winning substantial public sympathy. But government resistance, abetted in many cases by loyal “official unions” hardened from the 1980s forward as Mexico turned to neoliberalism; the resulting restructuring particularly weakened independent unions (Bensusán and Cook 2003). Governments continued to use the residual structures of corporatism to control and discipline unions while withdrawing the inclusion and access that had earlier been part of the package. Inflation soared, lending credence to neoliberal discourses linking unions’ demands to a rising cost of living. In 2007, only 32 percent of Mexicans viewed unions favorably, whereas 30 percent viewed them unfavorably (León 2007, cited in Bensusán and Middlebrook 2013, 180-181); a 2019 survey showed 44 percent didn't trust unions to hold free and fair elections, and 38 percent of those with an opinion expected that unions will not give any accounting of their finances (with another 49% expecting a “partial accounting”; Centro de Opinión Pública 2019). Though these negative views could in principle extend to unions of domestic workers, the perception and indeed reality is that Mexico's “union structures are essentially masculine” (González Nicolás 2003, 144).

Meanwhile, support for women's rights grew. In 2020, 95 percent of Mexican women and 91 percent of men described gender equality as “very” or “somewhat” important to them personally; 82 percent of adults agreed that the Mexican Government should do more to promote gender equality; and 59 percent believed that the government should reform laws to promote equality (“Women Deliver and Focus 2030” 2021).

Third, and also bearing on access to societal power, availability of allies and sources of technical assistance and, in the case of household worker organizations, funding, diverged across the sectors. As public opinion turned against unions and militant unions were suppressed, potential allies for representative, militant construction worker organizations became sparse. On the contrary, current household workers leaders—notably the most famous and visible one, Marcelina Bautista—were politically formed in the 1980s by liberation theology activists and accompanied through the decades by feminists, and in recent years funders and trade unionists emerged as allies.

As a result of these divergences in access to institutional and especially societal power, what the organizations offer their members has followed differing trajectories. In the 1970s labor upsurge, genuine construction unions offered workers collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions. Domestic workers initially were only able to provide modest services and supportive space. In later decades, construction unions’ bargaining power declined sharply, while domestic workers’ organizations expanded their capacity and secured more funds, supportive allies, and public sympathy, though continuing to function at a relatively modest level. In the case of CACEH, Mexico's largest domestic worker group, NGO status ultimately provided a stable base upon which to build the SINACTRAHO trade union and to move toward collective bargaining—gaining them media attention that the formation of yet another construction union would never attain.

Mexico in Comparison with the United States

Thus, changes in the relative effectiveness of Mexico's informal worker organizations in the construction and household labor sector can be traced back to shifts in institutional and societal power, with particular emphasis on the latter. In addition, the dominant strategy of Mexican construction unions hobbles associational power for genuine representative worker organizations. Do these patterns persist in cross-national comparison? As a preliminary investigation of this question, we take a limited look at how organizing in these two sectors in the United States stacks up next to the track record in Mexico. Both are large and diverse countries, so any attempt to briefly summarize organizing outcomes and success factors at a national level must by default oversimplify.

In the United States, both domestic worker and informal construction organizations have flourished far more than in Mexico, at least until very recently. In the United States, these sectors are currently represented by two national networks, the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance (NDWA) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). NDWA's scale—thousands of members in over sixty organizations spanning more than twenty states—far exceeded Mexican levels, even taking into account the larger U.S. population, though in the last few years the rapid growth of the SINACTRAHO household worker union has shifted that balance. In 2011-2013, NDWA put 60 leaders from twenty five organizations in eleven states through an intensive leadership training (Ito et al. 2014). NDWA also maintains regular email contact with 80,000 domestic workers nationwide (Moore 2018). NDWA-affiliated organizations have won ten state- and two city-level laws protecting domestic workers’ rights (National Domestic Workers Alliance 2022) and have plans for additional campaigns, though the laws vary widely in scope and absent effective enforcement mechanisms mainly serve as bases for consciousness-raising and mobilization. Starting in 2011, NDWA has joined homecare unions and disabled and elderly advocacy groups in the Caring Across Generations coalition, a push to win added government funding and rights for homecare workers, which has achieved a number of successes at the state level. However, so far U.S. domestic worker organizations have not won significant national reforms—and are not likely to do so in a Congress that as we write has been closely divided and largely dysfunctional for some time—whereas in Mexico the current López Obrador administration has undertaken major national policy steps, as we discuss below.

On the informal construction side, NDLON represents day laborers, mostly undocumented immigrants, who wait on street corners and in parking lots for short construction jobs. NDLON includes fifty organizations in about twenty states. Beginning in the 1980s, day labor organizations began winning lawsuits overturning laws that barred public solicitation of work, securing their constituency's right to seek employment. In a number of cities, NDLON affiliates have obtained city funds to operate day labor centers, which typically serve as hiring halls but also offer services such as health screening (Sarmiento et al. 2016). Though the day labor centers only incorporate one portion of day laborers in any given location, they have been successful in achieving higher wage rates, lower incidence of wage theft, and lower frequency of on-the-job injuries (Theodore 2020). NDLON and its member organizations have also mounted strong campaigns advocating for immigrant rights.

Overall, U.S. organizations in both sectors were larger and more vibrant during the study period, though as we shall see Mexico has pulled ahead of the United States legislatively with dramatic recent reforms regulating household labor. The structural obstacles to organizing are consistent across the two countries. We attribute these differences to cross-national disparities in access to institutional and societal power.

In terms of institutional power, informal worker organizations do not have prescribed institutional roles in either country, but differences in state structure and disposition offer differing opportunities for institutional footholds. In brief, the U.S. state is more democratic (and therefore accountable to workers and their supporters) and more strongly federalist (offering more levels of government to pressure for reforms at various geographic scales) than is the case in Mexico. Thus, U.S. domestic workers and day laborers have been able to organize relatively free of anti-labor repression and have won favorable legal judgments and some supportive state and municipal laws.

On the other hand, as noted above, most Mexican unions were substantially tamed by corporatism, and there has been some state repression of independent unions and militant civil society organizations. Mexico's government is federalist, but in practice regional autonomy in labor policy is limited, though there are important exceptions: notably Mexico City's government, controlled since 1997 by left parties, has provided grants and contracts to CACEH and granted a charter to the SINACTRAHO union.

A second factor generating disparate informal worker organizing outcomes across the countries is the availability of powerful allies. In the United States, the NDWA domestic workers’ alliance and the NDLON coalition of day laborer organizations have received significant support—funding, technical assistance, lobbying, and other forms of political support—from, to varying degrees, trade unions, immigrant rights organizations, and feminist groups, all of which wield significant clout. Thus, these informal workers’ intersectional identities—domestic workers are mainly women of color, day laborers are mainly Latino men, and both groups are predominantly immigrants—place them in subordinated and excluded groups, but also open the door to alliances. On the union front, the AFL-CIO has formal alliances with both informal worker networks (AFL-CIO 2022), homecare unions have united with NDWA in the Caring across Generations coalition, and the Laborers’ Union has a (thin) partnership with NDLON (Fine 2007). However, most active supporters of both hail from the immigrant rights movement, and to a lesser extent labor feminists in the case of NDWA (Sarmiento et al. 2016; Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore 2019).

Mexico lags behind the United States in terms of ally availability. Independent unions exist, but not at the same scale as in the United States where all unions are independent and at least somewhat accountable to members. As stated above, the telephone workers’ national union, a large independent union, has supported CACEH-SINACTRAHO, but that is the only union active on domestic work issues. The three household worker organizations do receive some support from funders, and leadership training from feminist associations like the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, which has committed to training on building leadership among household workers. However, support from other civil society groups is limited: for instance, other feminist groups have become far more active on issues like stopping femicide (Muñoz Lima 2020), but relatively few have taken a stand on domestic worker rights. Decades earlier when rural-to-urban migration was surging, Mexican mutual support and migrant advocacy organizations provided important support for these workers as migrants (embracing domestic workers, construction workers, and others, much as many immigrant worker centers in the United States do today [Fine 2006]). So as in the United States, the intersectional identities of these groups of workers both contribute to exclusion and potentiate alliances, but the latter effect is more muted in Mexico.

On the other hand, Mexican domestic worker organizations have received notable support from global organizations. The Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Household Workers (CONLACTRAHO) has been a very important ally for Mexican household workers. Founded in 1988, CONLACTRAHO, the world's first regional household worker organization (Fish 2017; Goldsmith 2013), has been a “school” for CACEH and SINACTRAHO leader Marcelina Bautista, one of the two Mexican delegates at CONLACTRAHO's foundation. Bautista made CONLACTRAHO's principles her own: “advocate for household workers’ rights and promote the organizing of workers; and create a union that will be a tool for workers” (Rojas-García's interview, October 12, 2015). Within CONLACTRAHO's Steering Committee, Bautista has served in different offices, in such a way that has learnt “how leadership works in each member organization and in different countries” (author's interview, October 12, 2015). Bautista's experience led her to become the regional representative at ILO conferences when Convention 189, affirming the rights of domestic workers, was negotiated (Fish 2017; Goldsmith 2013). Additionally, the International Domestic Worker Federation (IDWF) has provided important advice, political support, and some funds to support Mexico City-based CACEH and the SINACTRAHO union. The United States's NDWA has not relied as much on global support—in fact, as one of the more robust organizations globally, NDWA has provided significant technical and advisory support to the IDWF. Global support has not been a factor in the United States or Mexican informal construction worker organizing: the Building and Wood Workers International global union federation has only related to formal workers’ unions in the United States and has no affiliates in Mexico.

A third and final consequential cross-national difference is divergent funding ecosystems, another dimension of societal power. Liberal funders are numerous and well-endowed in the United States. February 2016 and June 2021 Google searches for “National Domestic Worker Alliance grantee” found more than thirty and more than twenty five foundations, respectively, that had recently funded NDWA, with individual grants ranging into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. NDLON has likewise received significant grant support. Mexico lacks sources of financial support on this scale. Organizations like Bautista's CACEH have been able to piece together small grants from Mexican and international funders. But no other domestic worker organization has duplicated that success.

In short, differences in institutional and societal power, key to explaining how Mexico's domestic worker organizations gained effectiveness as representative organizations of construction workers disappeared, also appear to explain these selected cross-national differences.

Conclusion

A comparative perspective, grounded in a power resources framework, has guided our analysis of informal worker organizing in this paper. First, we distinguished the relative position of household workers versus construction workers organizing within Mexico. Second, we examined the two sectors in the cross-national comparisons with peer organizations in the United States.

Among Mexican construction and household workers organizing has followed very different paths in recent decades. Grassroots organizing faded among construction workers, while it expanded among domestic workers. Institutionally, construction workers are constrained by the powerful, lasting legacy of a particularly pernicious form of corporatist unionism plus an increasingly hostile state. Though until recently Mexican labor laws explicitly or implicitly excluded domestic workers, the emergence of friendly regional state in Mexico City afforded funding support and the opportunity to establish a national union. Sources of societal power—allies and public support—have also diverged across the two sectors. Representative construction worker organizations, and construction workers in general, have lost public support and the few allies they once had. Meanwhile, new allies and funders have rallied to domestic workers’ organizations’ combination of service provision and advocacy, and public sympathy for women workers has grown.

A power resources perspective helps conceptualize this seesawing of organizations across the two sectors. From the 1970s forward, Mexico's domestic worker associations built increasing societal power in the form of a growing web of allies; eventually this yielded access to institutional power at the Mexico City level (and most recently at the national level as well). The organizations remain small relative to the number of household workers, so members’ associational power has so far been a minor factor. It is important to remember that the Mexican labor law did include the domestic work sector from the early twentieth century onward, but the “special” status given to the sector—informal and carried out in particular homes—and the general lack of enforcement, made the law virtually a dead letter. Thus, it is necessary not only to explicitly recognize the household workers’ rights, but to effectively implement that recognition. Associational power will be key to securing such implementation. As for construction, as Mexico's independent unions came under attack in the 1970s and 1980s, the associational power of independent construction unions like SNILS and S1M crumbled, as did societal power that had been rooted in sister unions and in public support that now waned. Independent unions in construction were pushed aside by the “ghost unions” that were—and remain—bolstered by Mexico's corporatist labor relations institutions.

Adding an international lens to this cross-sectoral comparison bolsters our arguments about the importance of institutional and societal power resources the two groups of informal workers dispose of. Comparatively, Mexican informal worker organizations found a less facilitative institutional environment, fewer allies, and more limited philanthropic potential than their U.S. counterparts (at least until very recently).

These cross-sectoral and cross-national findings align well both with Blofield and Jokela’s (2018) model of domestic workers’ mobilization outcomes and with our reformulation of their framework in terms of the four dimensions of power resources.

The years since our fieldwork finished have seen impressive advances for Mexican household workers. The López Obrador administration began on December 1, 2018, and only a few days later, the Supreme Court acknowledged the discriminatory treatment of household labor in the Federal Labor Law (LFT). Mexico's social security administration (IMSS) was ordered to start a pilot program to register domestic workers (April 2019) and the social security law was updated. Next, a reformed LFT was approved (July 2019), requiring that employers register household workers in social security. Finally, in December 2019 Mexico ratified the ILO Convention 189, effective July 2021.

Thus, the advent of a supportive left government—and the resultant dramatic expansion of institutional leverage—complemented household workers’ movement-building and alliance-bridging to bring about rapid change. This upturn in the fortunes of Mexico's domestic worker movement relative to its U.S. counterpart affirms the value of a power resources analysis. However, the struggle to get to this point was long and difficult. Marcelina Bautista founded CACEH in 2000 with several goals, notably unionization; CACEH was finally able to launch SINACTRAHO in 2015. CACEH, COLMITH, and RMEHO, the three household worker organizations in our study, share a history of organizing without resources for long periods. CACEH was about to shut down in the mid-2000s, RMEHO faces constant difficulties, and COLMITH has not functioned since 2016 (Tilly, Rojas-García, and Theodore 2019).

And for Mexico's informal construction workers, the structural obstacles have so far proven insurmountable. In 2019 Mexico reformed labor law provisions on unions, mandating the dismantling of certain corporatist union structures and democratization of unions—potentially an institutional opening as significant as that for household workers. However, it is not yet clear whether this mandate will be sufficiently vigorously enforced to empower construction workers to mobilize.

Despite CACEH/SINACTRAHO's achievements, household worker organizations continue to face daunting challenges: building bridges between leaders, increasing membership and maintaining their active participation; enforcement of the new laws; and further needed reforms including a minimum wage. The recent pandemic crisis added an obstacle to informal workers organizing, not only due to large-scale job loss, but also because as Norma, a member of the SINACTRAHO household workers union's current General Secretariat, recently said, the pandemic confronted them with: “Yet another emergency. You can keep saying we have to defend our rights, but our compañeras first need daily sustenance and good health.” Hopefully, a sympathetic government and new legislative and regulatory tools will help an invigorated movement and its allies tackle these challenges—and in the best scenario, will help informal workers in construction and other sectors begin to shed do-nothing unions, build independent organizations, attract allies, and replicate domestic workers’ arduous but ultimately successful model.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Ford Foundation, and especially to former Ford program officer Laine Romero-Alston, for funding and guidance.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Ford Foundation,

ORCID iD

Georgina Rojas-García

Notes

Author Biographies

Georgina Rojas-García, PhD in Sociology from UT Austin and Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), in Mexico City, studies economic restructuring in Mexico and regional changes in labor; working-class families; paid domestic work and informal workers organizing. She has co-edited the book El eclipse del sector energético en México. Repercusiones locales, organización y cultura obrera, (forthcoming, The eclipse of the energy sector in Mexico. Local repercussions, organization and worker culture); and La urdimbre doméstica. Textos en torno a la familia (2019, The domestic warp. Texts about the family).

Chris Tilly, professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, studies labor and inequality in the United States and global contexts, focusing on bad jobs and how to make them better. Tilly's books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market; Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America; The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market, Are Bad Jobs Inevitable?; and Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies. He has co-edited special journal issues on Precarious Labor and Informal Work Informalization Processes and Governance Mechanisms around the World.

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