Unsanitized: Labor Repression in Mexico and Dangers in the COVID Workplace [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

In a world without coronavirus, this would 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 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. She was put in jail because she represents one of the first independent labor unions in Mexico, not the sham “protection unions” that the USMCA was supposed to eliminate. Prieto helped workers in Matamoros win wage hikes last year, and therefore she must be punished.

The main thing that Prieto was organizing at the time of her arrest was workplace and wage protections due to COVID-19. Most of the border manufacturing sites, known as maquiladoras, have not shut down or even slowed down their assembly lines. Masks or other protective equipment were not distributed, and travel on packed buses to the factories continued. Prieto alleged that 25 percent of workers in the maquiladoras have fallen ill, and “death has begun in Matamoros.”

Read more: https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-labor-repression-in-mexico-and-dangers-in-the-co/
(American Prospect)