The minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Luisa María Alcalde Luján, in a private meeting with human resources managers, asserted that the term that union organizations have to comply with the legitimacy of their collective bargaining agreements (which is carried out for a single occasion), expires on May 1, 2023. Therefore, they have just 11 months to fulfill this.

Luisa María Alcalde, called on the union organizations to comply with the legitimacy of their collective bargaining agreements, in accordance with the provisions of the transitory articles of the labor reform and a labor chapter of the T-MEC. She also commented that, according to data extracted from the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration, at the end of May 2022, only 0.8% of a total of 500,000 collective bargaining agreements that the labor authority had considered as existing had been legitimized. Therefore, the number turns out to be very low in relation to what was planned to be legitimized. If this trend continues, only 2% of the collective bargaining agreements in force would probably be legitimized when the indicated term expires. In this sense, we would have to analyze if this was really always the percentage of unionization, or if not all the existing collective bargaining agreements were legitimized, either because they were for protection or because the unions and the companies did not want to legitimize them. 

Likewise, the minister explained that in the future there will be greater union dynamism, given that all important decisions such as revisions of collective bargaining agreements, whether every year or every two years, among others, will have to be voted on by the employees at through free, secret and direct voting. Therefore, in those companies that do not have a union or have protection unions, employees could now decide to have a union in a formal way derived from free unionization.

Notwithstanding all of the above, we would have to reach May 2023 to have a clearer picture of what has been commented.

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