US, Mexican unions to file NAFTA complaint over labour bill

MONTREAL: US and Mexican unions will formally complain to the US Labor Department that Mexico continues to violate NAFTA’s weak labour standards, a move that they hope will persuade US negotiators to push for stronger rules. The AFL-CIO told Reuters that it and Mexico’s UNT were filing the complaint with the US office that oversees the labour accord attached to the North American Free Trade Agreement as US, Canadian, and Mexican negotiators met in Montreal to try to modernize the 1994 trade pact.

The complaint, seen by Reuters, argues that Mexico’s proposed labor law amendments to implement constitutional reforms will violate the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC). It seeks efforts from the United States to prevent the measures from being implemented and to demand changes to bring Mexico into compliance.

“Simply by promoting this bill, which aims to undermine the constitutional reforms, the government of Mexico brazenly violates the central obligations of the NAALC – namely to ‘provide high labor standards’ and to ‘strive to improve those standards,’” the AFL-CIO and Mexico’s UNT National Workers Union said in the complaint.

Talks to overhaul the trade deal have been dogged by US threats to withdraw from the pact, but the foreign ministers of Mexico and Canada on Thursday struck an upbeat note on future negotiations.

A key complaint is that NAFTA has failed to lift chronically low Mexican wages that have steadily drawn US and Canadian factories and jobs to Mexico. The trade pact has also allowed lower health and safety standards in Mexican factories to persist, but violations of the NAFTA labour cooperation agreement are not enforceable through trade sanctions.

The US Trade Representative’s office has made steep demands on automotive content to reverse job migration, but its labour proposals have disappointed unions and many Democratic Party lawmakers. The proposals stuck largely to language that Mexico and Canada previously agreed to in the TransPacific Partnership, a trade deal the Trump administration has abandoned.

“What the USTR put on the table is not acceptable and won’t get the job done,” said Celeste Drake, the AFL-CIO’s trade and globalization policy specialist.

She said past complaints to the Labor Department regarding Mexico’s violation of the labour cooperation pact have not led to major change and this one may be no different, but it aims to influence the negotiations by drawing attention to Mexico’s weak record on worker rights as negotiators discuss labour issues in Montreal. — Reuters