Ex-workers march against disappearance of Mexican state firm

Mexico City, Agency
Thousands of former workers for the state-run Luz y Fuerza firm, which provided electricity in central Mexico, marched Monday in different parts of the capital to show their opposition to the dissolution of the firm a year ago by presidential order, whereby 44,300 employees were laid off.

The union members staged marches and sit-ins at different spots in Mexico City, including a protest in front of the presidential residence at Los Pinos, causing traffic chaos in this automobile-jammed city.

On Oct. 11, 2009, President Felipe Calderon decreed the closure of the state-run firm with most of the laid-off workers represented by the Mexican Electricians Union, or SME, one of the most combative labor organizations in the country.

The SME leaders rejected the presidential order, which was backed up by soldiers and federal agents who took over the firm's installations, and they carried out a number of resistance measures including marches, lawsuits brought before the Supreme Court claiming that the order was unconstitutional and hunger strikes.

The federal government offered the union members indemnities above and beyond those required by law, and little by little many of the former workers began accepting the offer, but there are still about 16,000 who are resisting the closure of the firm.

Calderon argued that the reason he liquidated the firm was because it was "inefficient," and its operations in the capital and several central states passed into the hands of the Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE.

SME leader Martin Esparza complained on Monday in media outlets that the CFE "has not improved the supply of electricity and the ... charges are unfair" a year after the closure of Luz y Fuerza.

The union members have called upon the public not to pay their electricity bills, which they say are exorbitant and "unbelievable."

According to reporting by the daily Reforma, in its Sunday supplement Enfoque, the CFE over 11 months is said to have received in the central part of the country 326,000 complaints about power service, many of them for bills amounting to up to 35,000 pesos ($2,800) in middle and lower class homes.