E
he federal government issued the decree that formalizes the lifetime compensation program to provide support to former workers of Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LFC) whose retirement was cut short when former President Felipe Calderón disappeared the state company in 2009. The purpose to compensate the electricians, finalized this Thursday, had already been announced by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his morning press conference on February 10.
In its first year of operation, the plan will cost 1,458 million pesos, which will be contributed by the Institute to Return the Stolen to the People (Indep). This amount will be distributed among 9,000 former workers, so, on average, they will receive 162,000 pesos per year or 13,500 per month; the amount received by each will be determined according to their seniority and what was called Compensatory integrated daily salary
. It is pertinent to present these figures to stop any version of an alleged waste in these compensations by those who denounce as privileges
workers’ rights, but shamelessly justify the canonries enjoyed by the elites.
In effect, the compensation program is nothing less than an act of labor justice and of vindication of the human rights of thousands of workers who lost their sources of employment and their access to social security due to the arbitrary, authoritarian and illegal coup inflicted by Calderón, not only to the 44,000 workers of the defunct public company, but to the national heritage. It should be remembered that on October 10, 2009, thousands of agents of the Federal Police, then commanded by the now imprisoned Genaro García Luna, stormed the main stations and substations of Luz y Fuerza del Centro in what was the final blow of the former president and his Secretary of Labor, Javier Lozano Alarcón, against the Mexican Union of Electricians, a union that fought for its independence and refused to bow to the designs of the last government emanating from the National Action Party.
Almost 13 years after those events, the country continues to pay the consequences of the fundamentalist application of the neoliberal creed, with its animosity towards organized workers and its determination to annihilate everything public. For this reason, in addition to saluting the initiative to support electricians, it is worth praying that such unreason does not hit Mexico again.