MEXICAN POLITICS AND ECONOMY 251
textile mills labored twelve to fi fteen hours daily
for a wage ranging from eleven cents for unskilled
women and children to seventy-fi ve cents for
highly skilled workers. Employers found ways of
reducing even these meager wages. Wages were
discounted for alleged “carelessness” in the use of
tools or machines or for “defective goods”; workers
were usually paid wholly or in part with vouchers
good only in company stores, the prices of which
were higher than in other stores. Federal and state
laws banned trade unions and strikes. Scores of
workers, both men and women, were shot down
by troops who broke the great textile strike in the
Orizaba (Veracruz) area in 1909, and scores were
killed or wounded in putting down the strike at the
U.S.-owned Consolidated Copper Company mine
at Cananea (Sonora) in 1906. Despite such repres-
sions, the trade union movement continued to
grow in the last years of the Díaz era, and socialist,
anarchist, and syndicalist ideas began to infl uence
the still-small urban working class.
The growing wave of strikes and agrarian un-
rest in the last, decadent phase of the Díaz era indi-
cated an increasingly rebellious mood among even
broader sections of the Mexican people. Alienation
spread among teachers, lawyers, journalists, and
other professionals, whose opportunities for ad-
vance ment were sharply limited by the monolithic
control of economic, political, and social life by the
Científi cos, their foreign allies, and regional oligar-
chies. In the United States in 1905, a group of middle-
class intellectuals, headed by Ricardo Flores Magón,
called for the overthrow of Díaz and advanced a
radical program of economic and social reforms.
Even members of the ruling class soon joined
the chorus of criticism. These upper-class dissidentsStriking workers at the Rio Blanco textile works in Mexico in 1909; the business was
controlled by French capital. Troops broke up the strike, and much blood was shed.
[Brown Brothers, Inc.]