The AFL-CIO said Thursday that it would oppose congressional passage of President Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade if Mexico doesn’t first change its labor laws to conform to the deal.
“[T]he current draft of the new NAFTA recognizes [that] Mexico must enact and fully and effectively implement reforms to its labor law … This must happen before Congress takes up any new NAFTA deal. But if the Administration insists on a premature vote on the new NAFTA in its current form, we will have no choice but to oppose it,” the AFL-CIO said in a statement posted Thursday.
The labor federation’s statement echoes complaints from Democratic lawmakers that the deal, which would replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, lacks strong enforcement mechanisms.
The Trump administration is currently trying to build congressional support for the deal, which it hopes to get passed by this summer. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer met privately with the House Democratic Caucus on Wednesday to answer questions about it. An individual with knowledge of the meeting said it was “largely positive” but that “a lot of questions remain, especially on the labor standards question.”
[Read more: Robert Lighthizer woos Democrats on USMCA]
A key provision of the deal requires Mexico to set the average wages for factory workers at the equivalent of $16 an hour, a move that would make locating factories in Mexico much less attractive to manufacturers. However it is unclear how many workers would be affected by the requirement, prompting concern from critics like the AFL-CIO that Mexico will wiggle out of it.
“As a threshold matter, any Congressional consideration of [USMCA] must wait until Mexico has enacted and fully and effectively implemented labor law reform,” the labor federation said.
Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S., Martha Barcena, said last month at a D.C. forum on USMCA that her country was “very and totally committed to amend the labor laws,” and that the current administration was just “waiting for the debate to take place” in Mexico’s legislature, the Congress of the Union. She did not indicate when that would happen.
The AFL-CIO also criticized the deal for preserving patent protections for drugmakers and lacking an effective monitoring system for its rules.
