Politics: Labor reform, at a snail’s pace, but bolstered by the USMCA

MEXICO - Report 06 Jul 2021 by Guillermo Valdes and Francisco González

Mexico’s 2019 labor reform is being implemented very slowly, but it is surely moving forward. The country’s moribund labor movement is indeed in need of a major overhaul. The majority of Mexican unions are company unions, with employer-worker relations underpinned by protection contracts. Union representation and membership are way down. The unions and their leaderships are notoriously corrupt and aloof from the rank-and-file. It is common that workers are not allowed to read, much less vote on their collective bargaining agreements (CCTs).

Thanks to both the new labor law and the adoption of the USMCA trade agreement, progress is now beginning to be made. The content of the new Labor law is largely paralleled in the major points covered in the USMCA Labor Chapter. These involve the adoption of labor standards recognized internationally by the ILO, including freedom of association, the right to strike, and the real capacity to enforce labor laws. In the case of Mexico, such standards require the reform of the labor justice system, the effective recognition of collective bargaining, real democracy in the unions through secret ballot and direct voting by workers not only to elect their leaders but also to ratify their CCTs, and improvements in workers’ real wages.

The pandemic has slowed progress in updating union bylaws and validating CCTs, with greater advances in the case of national unions as opposed to their local counterparts. For the past year the Conciliation and Arbitration Boards have been closed.

A major challenge is to resolve the huge backlog in labor dispute cases filed with the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board, a whopping 448,000 such cases. Simultaneously, legal challenges involving union democracy and representation are about to be played out as part of the USMCA’s Rapid Response Labor Mechanism. Two cases have been filed against U.S. companies with factories in Mexico, and the Canadian mining company Americas Gold and Silver could initiate international arbitration against the Mexican government due to the lack of response to the union’s illegal blocking of the San Rafael mine in Cosalá, Sinaloa.

The outcome of these cases could affect labor relations and be a sea change in the future of the trade union movement in Mexico, to say nothing of the future of North American companies in the country.

Now read on...

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