The Mexican government is failing to prosecute violent retaliation and threats against workers who organize, says a new report, putting Mexico out of compliance with its trade agreement with the United States and Canada.
The report lists nine separate organizing campaigns in which threats were made against workers: in each instance, the authors found “little evidence of investigation or prosecution by the authorities.”
The report was authored by the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board (IMLEB), set up by the US Congress under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) and tasked with reviewing the implementation of Mexico’s labor reforms.
The USMCA, signed into law in 2020, was modeled on and replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had gutted wages and pitted workers against each other while employers made out like bandits. In the first decade after NAFTA went into effect in 1994, 850,000 US jobs were lost to outsourcing. Mexico, meanwhile, has become one of the world’s top vehicle-producing countries, but its auto workers are among the lowest-paid.
But in an important improvement over NAFTA, the USMCA mandated labor law reforms in Mexico that independent union activists had fought for for decades, sparking hope that the new agreement would help workers in the country raise standards.
The reforms established labor courts, supplanting arbitration boards that had been notorious for colluding with employers and sham unions.
Votes were mandated on all existing collective bargaining agreements, in an effort to help workers rid themselves of pro-employer “protection contracts” that lock in low wages and lock out genuine unions. Mexico’s secretary of labor estimated that these accounted for 80 to 85 percent of all union contracts prior to the reform.
It also introduced a first-of-its-kind rapid-response mechanism, which allows unions and workers to bring complaints against employers who violate Mexican workers’…
Auteur: Natascha Elena Uhlmann
