The weekly newsletter of the México Solidarity Project

May 25, 2022/ This week's issue/ Meizhu Lui, for the editorial team

Stop in the Name of the Law!

Skepticism came easy at the 2018 unveiling of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the USMCA, the successor to the NAFTA trade agreement. What worker wanted a son of Frankenstein?

NAFTA and similar agreements for other parts of the world put the frosting on the cake that Ronald Reagan had started baking in 1981. Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers that year when they struck over working conditions dangerous both to them and airline passengers. That move signaled an end to federal respect for US labor rights. NAFTA dealt a further blow to worker power, giving US corporations an open invitation to exploit low wages and weak unions overseas.

Given that history, American workers had no reason to expect anything good from the “new” NAFTA signed by the wildly unpopular and corrupt Mexican President Enrique Peña-Nieto, now under investigation for bribery, and US President Donald Trump, who viewed unions with almost as much contempt as he showed Mexicans. Overall, hardly a feel-good moment.

But the new agreement did have a saving grace. The AFL-CIO and its Democratic congressional allies had insisted on inserting into the new USMCA a chapter on protecting worker rights in México, giving workers half a chance to organize for decent living standards. As with any law, of course, words mean nothing without adequate enforcement. But, to our surprise and delight, these words have been working, as we relate in our recap this week of the just-conducted Global Trade Watch webinar on how the USMCA’s Rapid Response Mechanism is actually holding individual corporations accountable.

But what would we be seeing if Peña Nieto and Trump were still exercising power? Would they be using the Rapid Response Mechanism against their cozy corporate buddies? Hmmm. In the next elections to come on both sides of the border, the Morena party in Mexico and the Democrats in the US will be key to continued enforcement of the new USMCA’s labor rights provisions. And, as US Rep. Chuy Garcia reminds us, the protections now in the USMCA must be the floor for future agreements, not the ceiling.

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Independent Unionism and the ‘Rapid Response Mechanism’

Melinda St. Louis: Chuy Garcia, as a US congressional representative from Illinois, you championed labor rights during the USMCA negotiations.  What was the result?

Now that the USMCA is in effect, I want it enforced. I organized 100 Congresspeople to petition AMLO to get the state government leaders who had jailed Susana to comply with the worker protections in the USMCA and drop the charges against her. I believe that the rules in the USMCA should be the floor, not the ceiling, for any new trade agreements.

MS-L: Eric Gottwald, you’re the AFL-CIO specialist on trade and economic globalization. Can you explain the Rapid Response Mechanism — the RRM — in the USMCA?

Eric Gottwald: The AFL-CIO knew that NAFTA and other similar trade agreements left workers unprotected because the labor rules were not enforceable against companies, just against countries. For example, we filed a complaint about violations in Honduras ten years ago. The companies in question have yet to be punished. The RRM represents a big leap forward. Anyone can file a complaint against an Individual company, and the company can be called on the carpet and held accountable in a timely way.       

MS-L: Daniel Rangel, you wrote the first complaint using the RRM, against Tridonex, when you were research director here at Global Trade Watch. You’re now at the American Liberties Project’s Rethink Trade program. What are your takeaways?

Daniel Rangel: Success in an RRM complaint depends on three things: US agencies willing to enforce the labor provisions — and the Biden appointees stepped up; a Mexican government that supports workers — and Secretary of Labor Luisa Maria Alcalde did so; and, most importantly, independent worker-organizers and supporters willing to file complaints. Some corporations and some conservative states will keep trying to skirt their obligations, so more complaints will be needed. Binational coalitions are critical to keep the pressure on.

MS-L: Susana Prieto Terrazas, your courage and tenacity are incredible. You were imprisoned for your advocacy for independent unionism, and now you are now an elected congressional representative! What advances have been made?

Thousands of workers in Matamoros disgusted with the CTM union went on a wildcat strike in 2019 to demand payment of wages they were entitled to under federal wage laws. They won, but then many activists organizing a new independent union, SNITIS, were harassed and fired. Thanks to the RRM challenge charging that the right to free association had been violated at Tridonex, workers there finally got a fair, secret-ballot union representation election. But some of our supporters were beaten by CTM thugs. Many were fired and blacklisted. In spite of this, on March 1, our independent union SNITIS won 85 percent of the vote.

MS-L: Jeffery Hermanson, the Solidarity Center has worked closely with the independent auto workers union SINTTIA at GM Silao. They’ve been negotiating their first contract, right?

Jeffery Hermanson: In the case of GM Silao, the US trade representative filed an RRM complaint without an official complaint from the workers or anyone else, after finding obvious fraud in the first contract certification vote now required by Mexican labor law. The workers rejected that CTM contract, went on to vote in SINTTIA as their union representative, and on May 10 reached agreement on a tentative contract. It includes an 8.5 percent wage hike, seniority bonuses, vacation schedules not assigned by management, bathroom breaks when needed — and more. This is a big win.

MS-L: Ben Davis, US Steelworkers international affairs director, you’ve had ties with Mexican labor for a very long time. What’s coming?

Ben Davis: I’m afraid that Mexican worker demands for justice exceed the supply! If the three cases so far are an indication, when workers finally get a free vote, they vote by a massive percentage for an independent union. But there are 80,000 collective bargaining agreements that are supposed to be ratified, and only 4,000 have been done. Elections will continue to be marred by beatings, bribes, blacklisting, and not enough independent poll watchers. In many places, workers will not get a fair vote.

The companies want to delay, hoping that someone more anti-union will replace AMLO in México and Biden in the US. Political and economic support from US labor is coming, but it is not nearly enough. Rising real wages will be the measure of success, since wages in México have gone down both in terms of worker buying power and in relationship to US workers for three decades.

MS-L: Any concluding thoughts?

Ben Davis: The RRM is not a panacea. It’s a tool that can take some of the pressure off the employer’s thumb weighing on the scale of justice.

Jeffery Hermanson: These victories are a hopeful sign that US and Mexican labor can raise the bottom, rather than race to the bottom.

Crazy Times: La Locura en La Frontera

Things are getting crazier and crazier en la frontera between the US and Mexico.

In Eagle Pass, Tejas, law enforcement green-lighted a white militia called “Patriots for America” to roam the border area, fully armed, to intimidate migrantes, mostly familias from México and Centro America. The violence and poverty they’re seeking to escape grows largely out of the pendejada the US called “The War on Drugs." Now these gentes must face not only a notoriously racist US Border Patrol, but armed white gangs that are encouraged by La Trompa and Texas Republican politicos to turn their guns and thuggery on peaceful asylum seekers.

But that’s not the worst of the locura that swirls around La Frontera. Tens of thousands of migrantes/refugees thought they were finally going to be allowed to cross the border because the Biden Administration had indicated that it would no longer enforce Title 42. This Trump policy, continued by Biden, denied them entry because of the alleged risk of Covid spread, even though every major US health agency assessed that no such health risk existed. In fact, by squeezing these populations into unsafe encampments, Title 42 increased their health risk. Well, now a Trump-appointed US federal judge has blocked the Biden Administration from ending Title 42.

As if that’s not enough, on May 10, the Los Angeles Times reported that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — ICE — has created a surveillance system to spy on most people living the United States, without legal warrants or attention to privacy laws. A report by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology shows that ICE has collected data on hundreds of millions of US residents largely without oversight or accountability. So any fool who thought that ICE only endangered Brown migrantes should know that ICE is watching them too. They could potentially be rounded up for any perceived threat to “domestic tranquility.”

For real now, the tail wags the dog in El Norte, where ICE has become the country’s largest spy agency and the Border Patrol its largest armed police agency, bigger even than the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.  Talk about crazy politics in Los Estados Unidos . . . Tanta locura y más!

Recent news reports and commentaries, from progressive and mainstream media,
on life and struggles on both sides of the US-México border

Daniella Burgi-Palomino and Yadira Sánchez-Esparza, #HastaEncontrarles: The Uphill Battle to Justice for Mexico’s Disappeared, Latin America Working Group.  The Movement for the Disappeared in México, a group of over 80 family collectives across the country, believe the actual number of disappearances runs much higher than the 100,000 officially registered cases.

Avatar Jorge Antonio Rocha, México surpasses 100,000 people disappeared, becoming nationwide humanitarian crisis, Aztec Reports. The number comes from a new report, Fragmentos de la Desaparición, that encompasses data from the last 50 years.

Benito Jiménez and Claudia Guerrero, ‘To hell, critics of Cuban doctors’: AMLO, Reforma Agency. The Mexican president is blasting those who have criticized his administration’s decision to hire 500 Cuban doctors to treat patients in México’s most marginalized communities.

Normales rurales: solución, no problema, La Jornada. Se cumplió este domingo un siglo del establecimiento de las escuelas normales rurales en México, un modelo institucional llamado a incidir de manera positiva en múltiples aspectos de la problemática nacional: el educativo, desde luego, pero también el agrario, el social e incluso el de la opresión de género.

The Mexico Solidarity Project brings together activists from various socialist and left organizations and individuals committed to worker and global justice who see the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of México as a watershed moment. AMLO and his progressive Morena party aim to end generations of corruption, impoverishment, and subservience to US interests. Our Project supports not just Morena, but all Mexicans struggling for basic rights, and opposes US efforts to undermine organizing and México’s national sovereignty. 

Editorial committee: Meizhu Lui, Bruce Hobson, Bill Gallegos, Sam Pizzigati, Courtney Childs, Victoria Hamlin, Agatha Hinman, Steven Hollis. To give feedback or get involved yourself, please email us!

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