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". . . IMHO if your still taking pay, you can't say your on strike. Paying "striking" workers just seems wrong."

And thus do we arrive at the recognition that Mexico is facing a terrifying transformation in its attempt to unravel the "Corporate State" which was put in place starting in the late 1930's and was finalized by the mid 1950's. It all sounds like a good idea at first; bring all the competing interests groups in society together -- capital, labor, business, industry, agriculture, bureaucracy -- and make sure that everyone gets a seat at the table and you can keep the peace. All you have to do is provide a protected market to guarantee that labor, business, and industry get along; see to it that agriculture gets a bone or two in the way of a country road or an agricultural school here and there; legalize labor union contracts as existing under government auspices; make the bureaucrats numerous enough to represent all these otherwise competing interests and everyone will be fine. The problem is that Corporate Statism kills innovation and competition, which are the true backbones of dynamic economic and social progress, something Mexico realized by the late 1980's.

The undoing of the Mexican Corporate State began with NAFTA in 1992 and has continued to this very day. They still have not undone a lot of what needs to be put in place, and this strike -- which depended upon the persistence of a paycheck since the national union negotiated the contract with the state government of Oaxaca, whose payments to the national union were guaranteed -- has brought some of those problems in the forefront. Among the many changes needed in Mexico, reform of its labor laws is near the top and I don't see anyone willing to take the problem on right now. The PAN Party comes closest in wanting to put the Oil and Electrical monopolies on a privatized footing, which would mean the loss of many "make work" jobs the unions are famous for keeping, but even that's not enough.

Maybe a conflict like this one will teach the country a lesson.