The American Prospect: David Dayen
Throughout Mexico, workers and worker advocates trying to assert the rights given through USMCA and in the country’s new labor law are being harassed, fired, and arrested. And coronavirus is being used as a smokescreen to facilitate these subjugations. Manufacturing wages in Mexico are 40 percent lower than wages in China, according to Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, and the resistance from mostly U.S.-owned manufacturing sites along the border ensure that things will stay that way.
On Wednesday, Wallach hosted a remarkable event with Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL) and Susana Prieto Terrazas, whose story the Prospect has previously covered. Prieto, a labor attorney, was arrested and held for a month in a Matamoros prison for “leading a riot” at a labor court. In reality, it was a protest that Prieto didn’t attend. Read full story.
MV Note: This is written by a U.S. journalist, but is about--and includes an interview with--a Mexican lawyer and labor leader and her efforts to get the labor agreements of the new treaty implemented and her political and judicial persecution.This could have been a big week for Trump’s re-election. He had planned to host the leaders of Mexico and Canada to celebrate the updated NAFTA agreement coming into force on July 1. Instead, Justin Trudeau didn’t show up and few paid attention to Andrés Manuel López Obrador [President of Mexico] showing up. Even fewer have paid attention to the fact that the new NAFTA (the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA), designed to improve labor rights in Mexico and therefore create a more level playing field for North American workers, appears doomed to not accomplish that goal.
Throughout Mexico, workers and worker advocates trying to assert the rights given through USMCA and in the country’s new labor law are being harassed, fired, and arrested. And coronavirus is being used as a smokescreen to facilitate these subjugations. Manufacturing wages in Mexico are 40 percent lower than wages in China, according to Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, and the resistance from mostly U.S.-owned manufacturing sites along the border ensure that things will stay that way.
On Wednesday, Wallach hosted a remarkable event with Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL) and Susana Prieto Terrazas, whose story the Prospect has previously covered. Prieto, a labor attorney, was arrested and held for a month in a Matamoros prison for “leading a riot” at a labor court. In reality, it was a protest that Prieto didn’t attend. Read full story.