Sean Rayford/AP Photo
On the factory floor at the Samsung washing machine facility in Newberry, South Carolina
This week, our friend Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio took the Senate floor to explain how the Brown-Wyden amendment to the new NAFTA deal strengthens rights of workers in Mexico. As Brown explained:
A worker in Mexico will be able to report a company violating their rights, and within months … We can apply punitive damages when corporations stop workers from organizing, and if they keep doing it, we can stop their goods from coming into the U.S. at all.
When Mexican workers have the power to form real unions and negotiate for higher wages, it helps American workers. Right now, Mexican workers can be paid as little as $6.50 a day—not an hour, a day. And we’ve been asking American workers to compete with that.
This is real progress, and heaven knows our brother and sister workers in Mexico, whose nominal right to form independent unions has never been respected, need these protections. And good on Brown and Senator Ron Wyden for demanding that these improvements be included in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal (USMCA) that replaces NAFTA.
At the same time, there is something a little weird about the Trump administration agreeing to provisions protecting workers in Mexico—that walled-off land of rapists and criminals—while his Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board have been doubling down on the project of destroying unions and collective bargaining at home. The new USMCA doesn’t touch that.
The law requires the labor board to have members from both parties. But with the expiration of Democrat Lauren McFerran’s term in mid-December, the board for the first time in its 85-year history is comprised of three Republicans, all of whom happen to be white men—and not a single Democrat. The other Democratic seat on the five-member board has been vacant since last August, but the Trump administration has not moved to fill it.
The board has taken its agenda directly from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has proposed ten measures to weaken worker protections. All ten have either been enacted by the NLRB or are in process.
These include overturning Obama-era rules that made it harder for management to delay union representation elections; increasing management’s ability to require workers with grievances to use compulsory arbitration typically rigged in the company’s favor; making it easier for management to impose disciplinary penalties on workers without bargaining with the union; allowing management to prohibit employees from using the company email system to discuss workplace issues with other employees; and a great deal more.
For a full summary of Trump anti-worker NLRB actions, check out this report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Thanks to the clear bias of the labor board, which is supposed to be a neutral referee and upholder of the law, union busting by management has reached new heights. According to another EPI research report, in more than half of all NLRB-supervised elections in bargaining units with 60 or more employees in 2016 and 2017, management was charged with violations of law. One pro-union worker in five was fired, and nearly one in three was disciplined, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Trump NLRB has also changed the rules to make it easier for employers to treat workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Meanwhile, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has several proposed or pending rules, including rules governing permissible noise levels in construction, safety rules in welding, and permissible chemical exposure levels.
In short, it’s open season on workers and unions, with the federal government openly working to help enable the corporate anti-union and anti-worker agenda.
When the labor provisions of the revised NAFTA were first proposed, some hoped that it would provide a basis not just for Mexican workers to challenge unfair labor practices in their country, but for American workers to do likewise. That never happened.
It is more than a little ironic that Donald Trump, probably the most viciously union-busting president ever, as well as a demonizer of all things Mexican, should get some credit for being pro-worker because the revised NAFTA modestly enhances enforceable rights for Mexican workers.
Whatever happened to Make America Great Again? What’s good enough for Mexican workers should be good north of the border, too.
