It will take the JFCA eight years to overcome the backlog of 500,000 cases

jared laurels

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, October 2, 2022, p. 8

On the eve of its disappearance to give way to the new model of labor justice, the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration (JFCA) accumulates more than 500,000 files that it must unburden, which in the opinion of lawyers specialized in the matter will take at least eight years, mainly due to budget and infrastructure abandonment.

Alberto Ramírez García, an expert in labor law from the Universidad Obrera de México, and Óscar Alzaga, a lawyer in the field, considered that there is chiaroscuro and a crisis of labor justice in Mexico due to the thousands of lawsuits pending resolution and because the new law does not fully apply.

The JFCA, which reached 95 years of existence, is the most important of the country, since it concentrates the cases of large consortiums and the mining, oil, textile, automotive, metallurgical, steel, glass, hydrocarbon and cement industries, among others, they stressed.

With a budget for this year of 744 million pesos, its headquarters building is almost in the abandoned, without maintenance or furniture and insufficient staff to resolve the thousands of cases, trial lawyers interviewed agreed.

This Monday the third and last stage of the labor reform begins in 11 states of the country – which are added to the 21 where it already operates -, which implies that the conciliation boards will stop receiving new cases, and will be the conciliation centers and labor courts, which will be in charge of trials.

The labor authorities have warned that this is the phase more complexsince they are entities that register greater economic and industrial activity and, therefore, more labor conflict, concentrating nearly 60 percent of the litigations, among them Mexico City, Nuevo León, Jalisco and Tamaulipas.

The trials that will continue they are inevitably doomed to delay, because although they are no longer going to receive new cases, the infrastructure and personnel deficit is terrifying, and the cases will be dealt with just as slowlyRamirez Garcia commented.

According to official data, from September 2021 to June 2022, 64,000 individual cases were resolved in the JFCA that were lagging.

Established in 1927, this body it has been distinguished by corruption, with some exceptions: in most cases money is required to obtain copies of the files; promote hearings, proceedings, agreements and make notificationsthe lawyers with experience in labor law for more than two decades agreed.

In the local board of Mexico City there is officially a backlog of 130 thousand documents. However, there are 20,000 more that were sent to the archive because neither party promoted their affairs, official sources from that organization maintained.

He assured that he calculates that this instance requires eight years to resolve 80 percent of the trials, and five more years to conclude the rest.

Labor activists criticized that the official discourse don’t be judgmental and requested the labor authorities be objectivebecause only in the conciliation centers of the state of Mexico, the picture is not flattering, as it begins to register saturation.