The Mexican Senate is poised to pass a package of legislative reforms meant to fulfill its requirements under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade negotiated by President Trump.
It remains unclear if those reforms will satisfy Democratic lawmakers who have called for far-reaching changes before they will set a House vote to approve Trump’s deal.
The upper house of the Mexican legislature, known as the Chamber of Deputies, received the reform legislation from its lower house on Monday, setting up a vote as early as this week. Key Mexican leaders argued the reforms would satisfy its obligations under the USMCA. Leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has endorsed the USMCA and the reform package.
That boosts the odds that the legislation will be approved before the April 30 deadline, when the current Mexican legislative session ends. Obrador and his allies are pushing to fast-track the reforms, noted Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Latin American policy analyst for the nonprofit Cato Institute.
“AMLO wants to move on from his end of the deal regarding USMCA and focus on his domestic agenda. On that, he enjoys the support of most of the Mexican establishment,” Hidalgo said. “However, it remains to be seen if Democrats will be satisfied with the reform.”
Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, president of the Senate committee that has jurisdiction over labor issues, praised the reform package Monday, according to the news site Político Mexico. Urrutia is the president of the Mexican Union of Miners and Metalworkers and an ally of Obrador. The reform package guarantees workers secret ballots in leadership elections and in approving union contracts. Critics argue the current system in Mexico allow businesses to corrupt the elections and install labor leaders beholden to the company, not the workers.
“I believe that this is a reform that will allow us to achieve and consolidate freedom, transparency and the possibility that workers can effectively elect their leaders and choose the union they wish to belong or stop belonging to, and to review collective bargaining contracts,” Urrutia said Monday.
However, last week Urrutia told El Financiero that additional reforms would be needed to end management’s influence over the arbitration boards that monitor the elections, indicating that the legislation was not as far-reaching as it could be.
Democrats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on down, have said that the USMCA cannot pass until Mexico adopts comprehensive labor reforms. Earlier this month, 84 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, warning that “previous versions of the (Mexican reform) bill failed to ensure” worker rights and reiterated that they would oppose the USMCA unless more far-reaching changes are passed.
Pelosi and other Democrats have not commented on whether the current Mexican reform package is sufficient. “Democrats will evaluate after the reforms become law. We remain committed to ensuring labor provisions are strong and fully enforceable in the USMCA,” Aaron White, spokesman for Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., a member of the Ways and Means Committee, told the Washington Examiner last week.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett express confidence Monday that the Trump administration could get congressional approval. “I think the vote counters are saying that we have got all of the votes we need. Speaker Pelosi needs to bring it to the floor so that the thing can be passed. And then in the Senate everything is fine,” Hassett told CNBC Monday.
