Alexandre Meneghini/AP Photo
Miners clash with riot police in Mexico City, July 13, 2007. Hundreds of miners took to the streets demanding the recovery of the bodies of 65 miners killed during the previous year’s explosion at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in San Juan de Sabinas.
The Trump administration is celebrating a deal with Democrats on the new NAFTA trade agreement (also known as the USMCA), approved by the House of Representatives on December 19 and moving to the Senate in January. Democrats and worker advocates have hailed newly negotiated labor enforcement measures as strengthening the accord sufficiently for them to support it.
But a more than two-months-long strike provoked by a multibillionaire Mexican business tycoon has cast a cloud over the new trade pact’s provisions to strengthen workers’ rights. Citing management’s bad-faith bargaining, nearly 2,000 workers have walked picket lines since early October at Asarco, the Tucson-based subsidiary of the giant Mexican conglomerate Grupo México.
Now, the company has begun hiring strikebreakers. This move defies the new trade agreement’s requirement of adherence “in law and practice” to the International Labour Organization’s core labor standards. The labor chapter in the new NAFTA declares that “the right to strike is linked to the right to freedom of association, which cannot be realized without protecting the right to strike.”
The strike calls to mind that in Salt of the Earth, only this time it’s not against the New Jersey owners of the Empire Zinc mine, who inspired the great film of 1954, but against the Mexico City owner of copper mines and processing sites in Arizona and Texas. The company has refused to grant basic wage increases to employees for the past ten years. Workers struck in mid-October, provoked by what they see as management’s bad-faith bargaining amid even more takeaway demands. The company wants most workers to continue with frozen wages, give up their pension plan, and pay twice as much in health care premium contributions.
The fabulously wealthy Germán Larrea, second only to telecom magnate Carlos Slim on the list of Mexico’s richest, owns Asarco and several other mining firms in South America and Spain, along with railroads, port shipping terminals, and movie theater chains in the United States and Mexico. Larrea’s record suggests that no settlement can be reached soon unless both governments step in to make it happen.
A 2006 explosion at a Grupo México mine in Coahuila, just south of the border with Texas, buried 65 miners alive. Management recovered only two bodies and stopped there, saying it was too expensive to get the others out. In 2014, Grupo México’s Buenavista mine near the border spilled nearly 11 million gallons of heavy metals–laden waste into the Sonora River, fouling streams on both sides of the border. The spill quickly sickened residents, and longer-term aftereffects are starting to show up in chronic illnesses and cancers.
Mexican workers and communities have suffered most from Grupo México’s depredations, but Larrea’s company targets Americans, too. According to Good Jobs First’s “Violation Tracker,” Asarco has racked up nearly $400 million in environmental penalties and $2 million in workplace health and safety penalties in the United States.
In July 2017, a 320-ton haul truck crushed to death 41-year-old Gabriel Antonio Benitez inside his parked pickup truck at an open-pit copper mine near Tucson. According to mine safety regulators, “the accident occurred because mine management failed to ensure dump sites were adequately illuminated and failed to establish rules governing right-of-way and traffic control at dump sites.” Benitez’s was the third U.S. fatality in ten years, all attributed to management failure to take adequate safety measures.
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Asarco challenged and delayed payment of fines and penalties connected to these deaths and other MSHA violations. But legal challenges and delays are a way of life for the company. In 2014, an arbitrator ordered Asarco to restore withheld bonus pay to hundreds of Arizona workers under a 2011 labor agreement. Two federal district courts and a federal circuit court ruled in employees’ favor, but it took a Supreme Court decision just two months ago to force payment of more than $10 million to affected workers.
Germán Larrea’s record at Asarco and his other business interests should be placed under a harsh spotlight as the new trade agreement moves toward a Senate vote planned for January. Most of the pact’s labor focus has been on problems in Mexico, as it’s intended to raise wages and allow independent union formation there. But the new NAFTA is a reciprocal agreement for all three countries, committing each to high labor standards on health and safety, decent wages and conditions, and the right to strike.
The strengthened enforcement mechanism includes provisions making it possible to impose tariffs or even bar goods at the border if they are produced in violation of the trade agreement’s labor chapter. Failing a settlement of the Asarco strike, the first complaint under the new NAFTA’s labor chapter might seek sanctions on products made in the United States by a Mexican company.
The new labor chapter is a significant advance from the original NAFTA labor accord. But with strikebreakers now making Asarco products, lawmakers should insist that the U.S. and Mexican governments intervene to settle the dispute and resolve the jarring contradiction of a Mexican oligarch trampling on American workers’ rights in open violation of the trade agreement’s labor standards. Otherwise, the labor agreement might be seen as “toothless”—the favorite epithet of critics of the original NAFTA labor accord—before it even takes effect.
