The Mexican labor movement is in motion. After being stifled for decades by an undemocratic labor relations system — where genuine collective bargaining was denied by corrupt union officials in league with employers and the state — Mexican workers are finally able to freely vote for unions of their own choosing thanks to a major labor law reform implemented in 2019.

Last month, in a historic victory for rank-and-file democracy, over four thousand workers at a General Motors (GM) plant in the city of Silao put the new labor law in action by voting overwhelmingly to replace their old, employer-friendly union with an independent one that has pledged to fight for higher wages and better working conditions. The ousted union was an affiliate of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), the county’s “official” labor federation that is effectively an appendage of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the political party that dominated Mexican society for most of the twentieth century.

The CTM’s early history followed a similar trajectory as that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the United States. Both trade union federations were founded during the Great Depression, both achieved historic gains for the working class in the late 1930s by welcoming leftist organizers and allying with progressive presidents, both attempted to curb shop floor militancy during World War II through no-strike pledges (to the frustration of many rank-and-file workers), and both drifted to the right at the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s.