Mexico’s populist president is trying to reshape the country into an economy with strong worker protections that is driven by oil growth. Yet hundreds of workers at state oil firm Pemex have gone unpaid for months, current and former employees told Quartz.
Even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Pemex has not paid many of the employees it hired on temporary contracts in 2019 and hasn’t provided them with the health insurance, vacation, or other benefits it normally does, the sources said. The contractors work in a division that builds and renovates refineries—and many are assigned to the controversial $8 billion Dos Bocas refinery project in Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s home state of Tabasco. While most of the unpaid contractors are now working remotely, sources said some are still working at the construction site.
Lopez Obrador, a resource nationalist who wants Pemex to drive the Mexican economy as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, has made Dos Bocas central to his bid (paywall) to revive the firm, which is Latin America’s second-biggest company by revenue. But Pemex is also the world’s most indebted oil company. It lost $35 billion last year and Fitch downgraded the firm’s credit rating even further into “junk” territory earlier this month.
Although the failure to pay workers began long before Lopez Obrador took power, the problem is antithetical to his plans for a “fourth transformation” of Mexico into a worker-friendly country, a former Pemex board member said. “Unfortunately, the current administration’s attitude towards workers is not what I would have hoped from a leftist government,” they said. “It’s a huge level of uncertainty for these people.”
As Mexico’s economy reels from the pandemic, Lopez Obrador has refused to take on more debt to stop it shrinking as much as 10% this year. He also ignored suggestions that he fund an economic stimulus by rerouting money from non-urgent projects like the Dos Bocas refinery. Even before the coronavirus crisis, many analysts said it would be cheaper to import foreign oil than refine it via the costly project, while pointing out that Mexico’s six existing refineries work at less than 30% capacity. “There’s so much cognitive dissonance it makes you dizzy,” said Jeremy Martin, vice president for energy and sustainability at the Institute of the Americas think tank. The president’s coronavirus response plan isn’t “a stimulus as much as a doubling down on commitments he’d made as a candidate and in the early part of his presidency—including Dos Bocas,” Martin said.
Amid plunging prices, global oil producers sought an agreement to cut production last week. But Lopez Obrador—banking his political future on the state oil industry—fought hard against those cuts, and on Sunday struck a deal that allows Mexico to cut production far less than other producers. That could end up costing Pemex, however, if it keeps working on unprofitable oil fields.
For several years, issues with Pemex’s funding and its labyrinthine human resources system have forced contract workers to go months at a time without pay. When their contracts lapse, managers informally ask them to continue working in the hope they will be later remunerated and given a full-time contract, sources said. “As far as the human resources system goes, [they] don’t exist,” said one current Pemex employee, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of losing their job. While the problem predates Lopez Obrador’s administration, the situation has since become “critical” in part due to coronavirus, the source said.
Pemex hasn’t taken adequate measures to protect those working onsite, another employee told Quartz. The firm provides hand sanitizer and a doctor checks people’s temperatures when they enter, but they don’t have masks or gloves and social distancing measures aren’t in place. “There was a certain disdain [toward the virus] in the early days of the pandemic,” the former Pemex board member said. “They have started taking stricter measures…but they’re missing a lot.”
En el avance de #DosBocas pic.twitter.com/LZoHrEAV5q
— Rocío Nahle (@rocionahle) April 5, 2020
Energy secretary Rocio Nahle tweeted an image from the Dos Bocas site last week, which showed workers without masks who seemingly weren’t keeping to government guidelines of standing 1.5 meters (5 feet) apart.
