Tim Beaty’s union work began in Florida back in the 1980s as staff for low-income workers whose ranks included many immigrants from México, the Caribbean, and Central America. In the 1990s, Beaty worked as the Americas representative for Public Services International and helped unions across the Americas fighting privatization and assorted other neoliberal initiatives. He would later direct the Mexico City office of the Solidarity Center, work at the AFL-CIO International Department, and then, until last year, serve as the Teamsters global strategies director.
How did you happen to become so deeply internationalist in your labor orientation?
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That goes all the way back to my college days, when I lived for a year in Latin America. Then, in the 1980s, as one of many union activists who opposed the AFL-CIO’s “Cold War” international policies, I had a particular interest in El Salvador, where the AFL’s American Institute for Free Labor Development — AIFLD — was pushing an anti-communist agenda that intentionally created divisions between unions.
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Many of us would go on to support the “New Voice” slate that brought John Sweeney into the AFL-CIO’s top leadership. Sweeney, once in office as president, restructured the international policy and staff.
Now you serve on the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board. How did this board get created? Where do you get your info?
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The second free trade agreement between México, the US, and Canada — the USMCA that went into effect in 2020 — addressed labor’s critique of NAFTA and other trade agreements that had failed to meaningfully protect worker rights. The new USMCA contained provisions that put worker rights on an equal footing with commerce.
The pact includes a “rapid response labor mechanism” that lets workers lodge direct complaints against companies that violate their rights — and gives workers the right to an expedited answer from the US trade representative. México, meanwhile, had passed significant federal labor reforms in 2019 and started a four-year transition to end “protection contracts” and set up a new labor justice system.
The Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board the USMCA created operates as an advisory committee to the US Congress. The board has twelve members, four appointed by congressional Democrats, four by Republicans, and four by the United States trade representative’s Labor Advisory Committee. Ben Davis of the Steelworkers Union, an activist with a long history of labor internationalism, serves as our board chair.
In March 2023, just before the four-year deadline for México to make a full transition to a new labor system, you issued a report on México’s progress. What did you find?
We emphasized two major problems. As part of the transition, already existing collective bargaining agreements had to be “legitimated” — before May 1, 2023 — by a vote of all covered employees. But workers in many cases had never seen their contract or even known they had a union. And yet the Labor Ministry, despite that reality, decided to let incumbent unions organize the legitimization process.
In many cases, we strongly suspect that corrupt unions, often in coordination with management, manipulated the process. They deceived workers into voting to keep in place collective bargaining agreements not in the workers’ best interests.
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The second problem: Worker activists organizing a vote against the old contract or for a new union have been harassed, fired, and threatened with bodily harm — and not nearly enough has been done to stop the harassment.
The Labor Expert Board team recently visited México. How did México’s labor secretary react to the board’s report?
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Workers at GM’s Silao plant condemn the threats they faced. “Don’t be afraid” and “Vote with dignity,” their signs urge./Photo
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The secretary of labor, Luisa Alcalde, discounted most of our criticisms as not well informed. She emphasized the reforms the AMLO government has made that have benefited workers, moves like the doubling of the minimum wage and higher pensions for the elderly, as well as the important new law against the increasingly common practice we’re seeing in México —and in the US, too — of employers subcontracting core workers to third parties.
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Hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers, secretary of labor Alcalde emphasizes, are now back working on the payroll of their real employers and covered by social security, profit sharing, and other employment benefits.
These reforms that Alcalde points to are all making an important, pro-worker difference. But most Mexican workers in represented workplaces still have union leaderships that prioritize their own personal relationships with employers and politicians over the interests of their members.
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What about all the contracts not legitimated on time?
Many of the contracts not brought to a legitimization vote sit in some of the old corrupt system’s worst parts. But the reform process does seem to have rid the system of contracts that came into play as a result of extortion, situations where we had employers forced to sign bargaining agreements to enrich influential groups.
Workers didn’t know about these deals, and many of those who ended up controlling these fake unions now appear to have decided not to bring these so-called contracts to a legitimization vote. The contracts in these cases now stand voided.
In over 10,000 other cases, existing unions did file for legitimization just before the deadline. These votes will take place by the end of July. Looking at the size of the workplaces that have already had ratification votes, I would say that about 50 percent of workers with contracts have so far had a chance to vote.
Anti-NAFTA labor activists predicted that worker pay, working conditions, and power would diminish in all three NAFTA countries. Those predictions all came true. Yet we’ve seen an erosion of internationalism within the US labor movement, with a few notable exceptions. Do you see a chance that US unions will become more internationalist again, with the sort of internationalism you experienced as a young labor organizer?
In the wake of the pandemic, we’re now seeing shortening supply chains and growing strains with China, trends that make it clearer than ever, at least to me, that the futures of US and Mexican labor all tie in together. Today, some four decades after the Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet years, labor’s critique of neoliberal economic reform is finally breaking through.
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You see this breakthrough in the wave of folks choosing to form unions, choosing solidarity and respect, the values that explain why I opted to work in labor and on global issues.
AMLO’s labor law reforms in México are helping transform México’s old corporatist culture. Mexican workers today are opting to take an active role in their own futures. GM Silao, St.Gobain Morelos, SNITIS, la Liga, los Mineros — we have so many examples of Mexican workers uniting for a new future. We can learn from all of them.
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US Steelworkers delegation to México, March 2023
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