During the last eight years, a monumental transformation of the labour justice system in Mexico has taken place. New labour reform legislation went into effect in 2023, which guaranteed basic labour rights, including secret ballot votes during union elections. The new system is significantly more representative, impartial, transparent and democratic.
The profundity of the change in the Mexican labour law regime cannot be overstated. Although labour protections and standards in the U.S. and Canada leave much to be desired, workers' rights to organize and negotiate collective bargaining agreements have historically been limited in Mexico. “Ghost” unions aligned with the government and employers were ubiquitous. Independent and democratic unions have been thwarted by widespread state interference, voter intimidation and retaliation.
Low wages and exploitation by corporations, particularly in the maquiladora industry (low-wage factories that assemble goods for export to the U.S.), resulted in significantly lower standards of living and fewer labour rights and protections for Mexican workers. These widespread practices prevent workers in Mexico from organizing to improve low wages and dangerous working conditions, and they block the spread of democracy and the rule of law in Mexico.
Mexico’s dramatic shift in the way labour relations are governed came about as a result of both domestic and transnational forces. While U.S. and Canadian labour has played a useful role, their importance should not be exaggerated. Mexican democratic unions and their allies struggled for decades to reform the system of labour relations that dominated the country since the 1940s. For years they had little support from U.S. and Canadian unions.
This situation began to change with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations (1990-92) and the formation of tri national coalitions opposed to the North American deal. Prior to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to renegotiate NAFTA (in 2017), U.S. and Canadian labour activists played an important role in supporting their Mexican allies’ efforts to promote domestic labour law reform. The NAFTA re-negotiations provided these same unions a concrete mechanism through which they could engage with each other and with governments in shaping the successor agreement, now called USMCA—Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) in Canada.
From NAFTA to CUSMA
NAFTA—the concrete embodiment of globalization in North America—had the unanticipated consequence of catalyzing labour transnationalism, defined as ongoing cooperative and collaborative relationships among Mexican, U.S. and Canadian unions and union federations. As I argued in my 2011 book, NAFTA and the Politics of Labour Transnationalism, after years of struggle against free trade, North American labour unions—which, for decades, had been isolated and estranged across national boundaries—emerged with new ties of cooperation and networks of protest.
Labour union participation in anti-NAFTA coalitions that included organizations devoted to many different issues reflected a significant shift in the history of union relations in North America. For the first time, and practically overnight, North American labour unions engaged in an active struggle not only with environmental and other progressive organizations but also with their counterparts across the continent. Some unions even began to build formal relationships with their counterparts that transcended coalitional goals.
NAFTA’s effects on trinational coalitions and relationship-building were unprecedented even though the agreement itself, and activists' efforts to utilize the mechanisms in its labour side agreement, did little to actually improve labour rights in the region. As it became clear that complaints filed under the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation (NAALC) had little effect, transnational collaboration waned, only to be revived in efforts over the last eight years to transform labour justice in Mexico.
New labour reform legislation that went into effect in 2023 guarantees basic labour rights, including secret ballot votes during union elections. These changes, devised during the NAFTA renegotiations, were reinforced through the labour provisions in CUSMA, which also benefited from transnational cooperation.
What caused this shift in the Mexican labour law regime? The confluence of domestic and transnational forces created the conditions for the wholesale transformation of Mexico’s labour relations system. The leverage that allowed activists to apply pressure at both domestic and transnational levels had maximum impact on improving labour rights and protections in Mexico.
Domestic pressure for labour reform in Mexico
In Mexico, there has been a thriving, though marginalized, progressive movement for independent and democratic labour unions since the 1960s. Ongoing and intense pressure from domestic Mexican democratic unions, labour lawyers, academics and citizen organizations to implement labour reform has been reinforced in the transnational arena by more recent efforts to strengthen labour guarantees in free trade agreements—based, in part, on the clear limitations of the NAALC-the NAFTA labour side accord.
In 2016, prior to negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the United States Trade Representative (USTR) attempted to pressure Mexico to adopt international labour standards on freedom of association and collective bargaining, as laid out in International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions 87 on 98 (which the U.S. itself has not ratified). Mexico eschewed the USTR's efforts to change its labour laws, instead initiating a domestic reform process.
To modernize the labour justice system, the Mexican congress passed a reform to the labour articles of the Mexican constitution. After Mexico’s states ratified the constitutional reform, it went into force as federal law on February 24, 2017. But implementation of the reform still depended on the creation of secondary legislation at both the federal and state levels.
While the momentum to carry out the implementation of the reform stalled in congressional battles, Mexican labour activists continued to push the reform process. Within Mexico, the historic July 1, 2018 election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the formation of congressional majorities in both houses for his political party, Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA), brought labour advocates that had long been sidelined in Mexico’s dominant party structure into the forefront of the new administration.
This new opportunity spurred Mexican labour rights groups and their allies in national political parties to develop proposals for the secondary legislation that reflected the spirit and letter of the constitutional reform. They had been working on reform initiatives long before CUSMA was negotiated, but they did not have the political power to enact them.
Efforts to reform the Mexican labour regime were, therefore, well under way when the renegotiation of NAFTA began in August 2017.
Transnational pressure via the CUSMA negotiation
On May 18, 2017, Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s top trade official, notified the U.S. congress that NAFTA was to be renegotiated—a compromise for Trump, who campaigned on a promise to rip up the agreement. The first round of negotiations began on August 16, 2017, and during the intervening period, the USTR invited businesses and civil society organizations to offer comments on how to improve NAFTA.
Discussions on revising NAFTA's labour side agreement focused almost exclusively on Mexican labour practices, framing them as sources of unfair competition for U.S. workers. After more than a year of negotiations, U.S. and Mexican officials agreed to attach an annex on worker representation in collective bargaining in Mexico to the labour chapter of the new NAFTA. Independent Mexican and U.S. labour advocates endorsed the idea.
The annex provided guidelines on the content of Mexico’s secondary labour legislation and tied the entry into force of CUSMA to Mexico passing legislation that met those criteria. On May 1, 2019—May Day in Mexico—that secondary Mexican legislation was signed into law and came into effect in 2023.
In addition to guaranteeing basic labour rights, the Mexican labour reforms established independent labour courts to replace labour boards and impartial organizations to register union elections. It also required unions to ratify, by direct secret vote of each worker, all existing collective bargaining agreements before May 1, 2023.
The new NAFTA also included a rapid-response mechanism endorsed by labour activists in all three North American countries. It is arguably the strongest labour-related adjudicatory mechanism to have been incorporated into a free trade agreement ratified by the U.S.
The rapid-response labour mechanism
There are similarities and core differences between the labour rights standards and adjudicatory mechanisms in NAFTA and CUSMA.
Unlike NAFTA, labour rights are embedded in the body of CUSMA (in Chapter 23) rather than in a side accord. The new labour chapter also borrows language from Mexican drafts of labour law reform bills, reflecting communication and collaboration between Mexican labour lawyers and U.S. union officials.
While the NAALC required signatories to enforce their own labour laws and outlined 11 broad labour principles for signatory countries to adhere to, only the violations of child labour, minimum wage, and occupational health and safety could result in trade sanctions. During the 26 years that the NAALC was in force, no labour cases resulted in sanctions.
The violation of fundamental labour rights, including the right to strike and bargain collectively, could not rise to the highest level in the adjudicatory process under NAFTA. In contrast, the CUSMA labour chapter requires signatories to incorporate and enforce workers’ rights protections based on the International Labour Organization (ILO) 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
Enforcement of labour rights in CUSMA can occur through two mechanisms: a state-to-state dispute settlement process in Chapter 31 of the agreement, and a novel facility-specific Rapid Response Labour Mechanism (RRLM) outlined in Annexes 31-A (covering the U.S. and Mexico) and 31-B (covering Canada and Mexico).
The RRLM was an innovation that had not existed in previous free trade agreements. Because the annex creates more narrow criteria for filing claims against U.S. and Canadian companies, it is much easier to file claims against Mexican facilities, which are the primary target of RRLM processes (see Laura Macdonald’s article in this section).
The RRLM and labour transnationalism
The legislation implementing CUSMA in the U.S. and Canada included funding to support activities in Mexico to fulfil the new agreement’s labour provisions. This funding included money for ongoing transnational cooperation in relation to the promotion and support of labour rights.
Specifically, the United States offered $180 million for technical assistance projects in Mexico aimed at improving working conditions and labour protections as well as reducing and eliminating labour abuses. Canada also signed an RRLM with Mexico, copying the U.S.-Mexico provision, and committed about $10 million in funding for Canadian unions and NGOs.
So far, funded projects promote gender equity, workplace democracy, legal training, occupational safety and health in supply chains, worker education on Mexico's labour law reforms, and combat child labour, among other objectives. Beneficiaries of funding include the Mexican government at federal, state and local levels, labour unions, NGOs and other civil society organizations.
The process of invoking the RRLM to dispute labour violations in Mexican workplaces has also renewed and strengthened labour transnationalism among the continent's unions. As of this writing, since the USMCA went into effect in 2020, the RRLM process has been utilized 26 times. All but one of these investigations of labour violations in Mexico was submitted through the U.S. Multiple cases have been filed jointly between U.S. (or Canadian) and Mexican labour unions and NGOs.
The first RRLM case was filed in May 2021 by the AFL-CIO Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Sindicato Nacional Independiente de Trabajadores de Industrias y de Servicios Movimiento 20/32 (SNITIS) and Public Citizen, alleging violations of the right to organize and collective bargaining against Tridonex, an auto parts factory in Matamoros, Mexico.
It is important to emphasize that this RRLM case supported workers who, since 2019, had been engaged in an ongoing campaign to organize an independent union and demand a free and fair union election. Tridonex responded by firing workers, and state officials arrested the workers' lawyer, Susana Prieto Terrazas.
As a result of the CUSMA rapid-response labour case and workers' organizing, Tridonex agreed to reinstate fired workers, pay severance and back pay, to allow a free and fair union election and to strengthen COVID-19 safety protocols, among other concessions. In February 2022, workers at Tridonex voted for and won an independent union.
The first RRLM case was submitted in Canada in March 2023 by Unifor and a Mexican union, the Sindicato Independiente Nacional De Trabajadores Y Trabajadoras De La Industria Automotriz (SINTTIA), against a facility in Silao, Guanajuato for violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining. The Canadian government reviewed the case and the company agreed to a remediation plan that included neutrality in union activities, reinstatement of fired workers and compliance with international labour standards. In June 2023, workers chose SINTTIA to represent them in a union election.
In contrast to the NAALC process under NAFTA, a majority of RRLM cases have resulted in remediation plans that require employers to further labour rights, including holding free and fair elections, providing severance or back pay, reinstating workers, etc.
The general consensus among labour unions, labour advocates and scholars is that the RRLM is a significant improvement over the labour enforcement processes of the NAALC, in that the former has proven it can protect and further labour rights and improved working conditions in Mexico. According to Sandra Polaski of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, the process has promoted effectiveness, legitimacy and sovereignty.
It is also important to highlight that while public submissions under the NAALC took years to resolve and were often stymied by government and companies' efforts to thwart the process, the RRLM facilitates a fast and unimpeded process.
Conclusion
Both the content and timing of the recent Mexican labour law reform reflects the interplay of domestic and transnational events that shifted Mexican authorities’ interest from violating labour standards to protecting labour rights.
Ongoing and intense pressure from Mexican democratic unions, labour lawyers, academics and citizen organizations to implement labour reform was reinforced at the international level by the labour guarantees in free trade agreements. The negotiation of the TPP, and concerns on the part of the U.S. Congress over Mexican labour practices, triggered a labour reform process in Mexico that was then pushed forward by the renegotiated NAFTA.
New labour regulations tied to CUSMA mirror the path of labour reform in Mexico and provide new requirements that will potentially reinforce protections on freedom of association and collective bargaining in Mexico. The trade pressures from the TPP and then CUSMA provided critical support to Mexican actors to legitimize, reinforce and eventually reflect the positions of the democratic labour movement in Mexico.
