Obrero Mundial station
Metrobús · 3 Line 3
Neighbouring stations
- 3Line 3Centro Médico Obrero Mundial Etiopía / Plaza de la Transparencia
The story behind the icon
The station icon represents a safety helmet. The station takes its name from a nearby avenue of the same name. The Casa del Obrero Mundial was a trade-union organisation in Mexico City founded in 1912 on the ideals of anarcho-syndicalism; the idea of founding it came from the Spanish leaders Juan Francisco Moncaleano and Eloy Armenta in response to the unsafe conditions in which workers operated. The group had the distinction of being a cultural body concerned with raising workers' level of education through rationalist schools, and it also served as an organising centre where many trade unions and workers' associations were formed and strengthened.
The combined efforts of Mexican workers, a handful of exiles from the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union, the National Confederation of Labour, and the spread of ideas through the pages of Acción Directa succeeded in making the Casa del Obrero Mundial the first union federation, the only workers' group with national representation, dominating the labour movement in Mexico until 1918. Its aims included creating a society based on self-management and on the coordination of production by the workers, resting on a union system of federated producers' associations.
They saw the State as a mechanism of repression and therefore proposed not to transform it but to abolish it. Their principal method of action was the call for a general strike, a union tool much used in the early twentieth century.
In its beginnings it was only a centre bringing together workers' unions and leagues; by 1915 its structure, functions and objectives — but above all its closeness to the leaders of the Revolution — gave it the character of a union corporation. This was set down in the historic pact signed with Venustiano Carranza on 17 February 1915, in which the Casa del Obrero Mundial undertook to hasten victory in the revolution, for which purpose workers' garrisons were created, known as the "Red Battalions", in exchange for being able to extend its presence into several states of the Republic.