It was November 2018, and Arturo Alcalde, then an advisor to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s transition team, confirmed after a meeting with legislators that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was contingent, among other things, on compliance with the labor commitments outlined in the little-known Annex 23-A of the agreement.
Almost eight years after that warning, and following the agreement’s entry into force on July 1, 2020, the scope of that condition is more than evident.
The reality is that the USMCA became the most profound labor reform Mexico has experienced in decades. Its provisions accelerated and consolidated legal and operational changes that would hardly have occurred at the same pace without a commitment of that magnitude.
The new labor justice system, the creation of the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration, the rules for union democracy, the regulation of outsourcing, the policy for recovering the minimum wage, and the ongoing monitoring of rights through the Labor Rapid Response Mechanism (LRRM) are all part of a series of changes that would be difficult to understand without the pressure exerted by the United States through the agreement.
Under this scenario, compliance with the labor commitments made ceased to depend exclusively on the will of Mexican authorities and became subject to external monitoring mechanisms and trade consequences for violators in particular.
In the first six years of the agreement’s existence, and following the subsequent legislative reforms, various actors in the world of work have had to adapt to a new reality. Unions, companies, and federal and local authorities have had to reformulate processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
The LRRM is the clearest example. Before the USMCA, violations of labor and union rights could occur openly, but without consequences. Six years later, the mechanism has been activated 48 times and has changed how companies, unions, and authorities address labor disputes.
It is clear that labor has ceased to be an exclusively internal matter and has become a component of competitiveness and trade relations with the United States… and a headache for corrupt unions, companies with protectionist collective bargaining agreements, abusive employers, and passive authorities.
Therefore, although the initial meetings between Mexican and U.S. authorities to review the agreement have focused more on trade issues, it would be naive to think that the White House will not intensify its pressure on labor matters at some point, however asymmetrical and disproportionate the relationship between the two countries already is on this issue.
It has become clear that for the United States, the scope of the agreement’s labor component extends beyond trade. The Atento case (2024) provides the evidence, representing the first complaint filed through the MLRR for human rights violations in a non-exporting company with no ties to international supply chains.
The review of the USMCA will be a key opportunity to determine whether the labor chapter was merely a condition for implementing the agreement or whether it ultimately became a permanent mechanism for shaping labor policy in Mexico. Its first six years in effect seem to point toward the latter.
Source: eleconomista
