Our partner, Jorge Arredondo, commented on the Labor Directorate’s new interpretation regarding collective bargaining.
The Labor Directorate has once again changed its interpretation. On Tuesday, the agency ruled that employees who transfer from one union to another may not join the collective bargaining process initiated by their new union until the current collective bargaining agreement has expired.
This is a significant change, particularly considering that the previous interpretation, issued in 2023, established that an employee who resigns from the union with which they are covered by a valid collective bargaining agreement and joins another union may participate in the collective bargaining process initiated by the new union, enjoying all the rights, guarantees, and prerogatives inherent to that status.
However, the collective bargaining agreement executed through that process—and the benefits arising from it—would only become applicable once the collective agreement or contract entered into by the employee’s former union had expired.
Through the opinion issued on Tuesday, the Labor Directorate established that an employee who resigns from one union and joins another remains subject to the collective bargaining agreement executed by the former union and is therefore not part of the collective bargaining process initiated by the new union.
In addition, the employee must continue paying the full amount of the ordinary monthly union dues to their former union throughout the duration of the applicable collective bargaining agreement.
In explaining the change, the agency stated that the practical application of the previous doctrine created “operational difficulties and interpretative uncertainty,” particularly because it allowed the possibility of the same employee exercising rights associated with two different unions before the same employer.
According to Jorge Arredondo, partner at az, this new opinion “prevents what we once referred to as the ‘musical chairs’ scenario, where employees could potentially move from one union to another in order to obtain, in some way, the benefits of each collective bargaining process.”
View the full publication here.
Source: Diario Financiero, June 24, 2026.
