The lack of budget for the agencies that arose from the labor reform, like the Federal Center for Conciliation and the Courts hinders the proceedings for the cases and jeopardizes the progress made in this area.
Additionally, the reduction in the support provided by the United States government has made the insufficiency of resources to guarantee the proper and efficient operation of these agencies evident, affecting their capacity for addressing labor matters in a timely manner.
It is estimated that approximately 200 million dollars were distributed among different projects related to the implementation of the labor reform during the previous presidential term.
Humberto Huitrón, a lawyer and labor expert, pointed out that the implementation of the labor reform depends on the authorization of expenditures. Some officials have even had to put in money from their own pockets in order to operate, he said.
“There is no budget; it is a shame that the officials that work at these agencies have to provide funds themselves for travel expenses, when this should not be happening””, he said.
For his part, in the opinion of Jorge Sales, a labor lawyer, there is a crisis within labor institutions.
“We are seeing a crisis of both quantity and quality. The crisis of quantity is because there is less personnel available to perform tasks that are 100% operational, such as notifications or file purging in the courts and at the Federal Center. This was expected since last year’s judicial reform, when many officials left and their positions were not filled”; he explained.
He added that the crisis in quality lies in the type of rulings issued by the Courts and in the time that they take to be issued.
“ We are losing ground on the fruits of the 2019 labor reform; there were voices requesting that the judicial reform not be applied in the labor arena because they were still in the implementation process. New people arrive and they are being trained at the same time that they are imparting justice”, Sales stated.
On the other hand, Oscar de la Vega, of the De la Vega & Martínez Rojas Law Firm, considered that the Federal Center for Conciliation had a good start because all of its procedures are conducted online.
Nevertheless, he warned that a large volume of work is accumulating for the issuance of union certificates of representativeness, which are necessary for unions to be accredited before the workers and for making calls to strike.
“We are noticing the start of corruption, because they do not have the capacity or the interest to verify workers’ signatures, whether they are real or not. That is why we have detected certificates of representativeness that arise from an illegal or an improper procedure, and this generates the union extortion that we suffered before the reform”, he explained.
