Guillermo Gutiérrez/NurPhoto via AP
A protester holds a sign demanding the release of Mexican labor lawyer Susana Prieto Terrazas, June 13, 2020, in Mexico City.
In one tumultuous week in early July, we saw Donald Trump commute the sentence of his crony who has openly confessed to committing multiple felonies and celebrate the implementation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Meanwhile, under López Obrador’s watch,Mexican labor lawyer Susana Prieto Terrazas recently spent nearly a month in a dangerous Mexican jail during a global pandemic for the crime of helping workers organize an independent, democratic union. And she continues to fear for her life despite committing no crimes whatsoever.
More than the revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) connects the United States and Mexico. The rule of law in both of our countries is in crisis. Corporations and cronies are winning, and workers losing.
Last year, Mexico passed labor law reforms to replace corrupt “protection” unions aligned with maquiladora employers with independent unions, and to vote on collective-bargaining contracts so workers can finally win higher wages and standards of living. For U.S. workers, these reforms could help level the playing field and stop middle-class jobs from being outsourced. Unfortunately, there is no viable enforcement mechanism, not from the Mexican government, nor the USMCA.
How do I know this? Because the federal government in Mexico has done nothing to undo the corrupt decision that put Prieto Terrazas in jail on trumped-up charges, after filing proof of replacing a protection (read: corrupt) union with an independent one, influenced by two right-wing state governors working in lockstep with phony union bosses. In fact, the USMCA entered into effect on the same day extreme conditions were imposed in exchange for Prieto Terrazas’s release from jail. She has been forcibly removed from one of the states where she organizes, prohibited from visiting Labor Court, and required to pay reparations based on unjustified charges, claiming she caused emotional trauma during a protest at which she wasn’t even present!
The grim future of labor rights in Mexico will mean continued outsourcing of U.S. jobs across the border, where workers will continue to toil in poverty.
Barred from that state, Prieto Terrazas cannot represent thousands of her clients, where she serves an instrumental role in helping workers who are often unaware that they even have rights that are being violated, especially in a pandemic. Not only does her arrest hinder her own ability to help workers organize, bargain collectively, and know their basic rights, but it has a chilling effect on anyone who wants to exercise their own rights or help workers do the same.
While the situation sends a warning to workers in Mexico, it also extends an open invitation to multinationals looking for a market where they can exploit cheap labor. Consider U.S. auto firms’ announcements of plans to increase production in Mexico, like Ford’s decision to make its new Mustang electric SUV there, while GM has closed U.S. plants and moved many of its most popular vehicles’ lines to Mexico. Changes to Mexican autoworker wages were supposed to be one of the major advances of the USMCA. But as it stands, the grim future of labor rights in Mexico will mean continued outsourcing of U.S. jobs across the border, where workers will continue to toil in poverty. Sadly, there is no indication that the USMCA will restore hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, as Trump nonsensically claims.
If we want to give the USMCA the best shot at being effective, we must confront squarely the first problems that arise in its implementation—and this case represents a very, very big problem. We must address the ineffective legal system in Mexico that protects a corrupt, entrenched labor structure. The prospect of working with a U.S. administration hell-bent on protecting its own corruption seems dismal, but I will keep sounding the alarm until there is someone in power who will listen.
