Union vote in Mexico is a win for US workers

President Joe Biden is proving he won’t abandon workers anywhere just to guarantee cheap imported goods for U.S. consumers — and that’s good to protect American jobs.

At the request of his administration, Mexico looked into allegations of union vote tampering at a General Motors factory in the state of Guanajuato where, according to newspaper Reforma, some 339,000 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra tucks were produced in 2019.

The allegations point to members of a rival, pro-employer union meddling “through steps such as limiting voting hours and destroying unfavorable ballots,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Some Democratic lawmakers had been sounding the alarm in Washington about the union busting methods, prompting U.S.

Trade Representative Katherine Tai to intervene, using for the first time a tool called the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism that was included in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement known as USMCA.

She asked Mexico “to review whether workers at a General Motors facility are being denied the right of free association and collective bargaining.”

On Wednesday, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said during his daily press briefing that his government welcomed the action because the rule was established in the agreement that replaced NAFTA.

In turn, General Motors denied the claims but announced it had hired an independent consultant to review the issue.

By late Wednesday, the Mexican Labor Ministry invalidated the union vote and ordered a new one within 30 days.

“All workers — in Mexico, the United States, and around the world — deserve a genuine, democratic voice at work,”

U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement.

Indeed, they do. And folks in Mexico better believe they can no longer do whatever they want to trump workers’ rights and rig unionization efforts for the sake of cheap labor.

Everyone in the U.S. should welcome Biden’s move to intervene in labor disputes south of the border but especially those who’ve been clamoring to protect American jobs.

Just like other countries, Mexico’s cheap labor has been a magnet for American motor vehicle assembly plants and other manufacturing companies.

Trade between Mexico and the U.S. has grown exponentially since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994.

It’s basic economics, really. Build cheap and pass on the savings to U.S. consumers.

But American workers — backed by unions and otherwise — began balking at the hemorrhaging of jobs to cheap labor in foreign countries, including Mexico.

Remember former President Trump’s war on trade?

It centered on China but he also slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum of trade allies and threatened to end NAFTA.

He didn’t, of course.

Instead, NAFTA was replaced with the USMCA and all sorts of new rules, including the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism that the U.S. is invoking now.

It’s important to enforce the rules to ensure U.S. companies that choose to take jobs elsewhere don’t exploit foreign workers to avoid paying fair wages in America.

That, after all, is the rallying cry of those who want to protect American jobs, right?