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**AUGUST 20, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

A Big Win for Mexican Workers-and a Model for the U.S.

****

Earlier this week, I reported

on how the Rapid Response mechanism under the successor to NAFTA was
putting the U.S. government on the side of labor rather than capital in
trade agreements. The first of the complaints under the new
U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement was actually initiated by the
U.S. government.

The complaint concerned a rigged election at a GM plant in Silao,
Mexico, where workers were trying to kick out a fake union in favor of a
real one. After it was discovered that the pro-employer Confederation of
Mexican Workers (CTM) had destroyed ballots in the original vote, the
remedy under Rapid Response was a new election supervised by
international monitors.

Now the other shoe has dropped. Yesterday, the Mexican Labor Ministry
certified that workers voted this week to nullify their
collective-bargaining contract with the factory's fake union. The
company union lost by a vote of 3,214 to 2,613. This now clears the way
for workers to affiliate with a real union.

This win is doubly significant because the Silao truck factory is not
run by some subcontractor. The plant is owned and operated by GM. Under
the Rapid Response mechanism in USMCA, if GM or the fake union tries to
play cute, the exports of this factory to the U.S. can be hit with
tariffs or blocked at the border by U.S. Customs.

It is the kind of hardball in trade deals that has long been used on
behalf of banks and multinational corporations-but this time for
workers and unions.

If you think about it, USMCA now provides to Mexican workers far
stronger rights to vote for the union of their choice, free from company
harassment or retaliation, than their U.S. brothers and sisters have
under current U.S. labor law. In principle, USMCA could be used that
way, but in practice most of the affected exports flow north.

Restoring those rights to U.S. workers will require enactment of the PRO
Act, which stands for Protecting the Right to Organize. The act has
passed the House. President Biden needs to make it a priority in the
Senate.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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