Caterpillar Treading on Workers

From email.

Why is the Biden-Harris administration failing to enforce the labor provisions of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement?
A prime reason why progressive Democrats supported the Trump-era U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), as a bipartisan improvement on the old North American Free Trade Agreement, was that it added labor standards. Specifically, it added a Rapid Response Mechanism to help Mexican workers assert rights to organize and join unions. In extreme cases, the RRM even allowed U.S. customs officials to seize shipments of goods that had been shipped from Mexican factories that violated worker rights.

The mechanism was a splendid case of labor solidarity in action; by raising labor standards in Mexico, it would protect labor standards in the U.S. and slow down the global race to the bottom. That was the idea, anyway. And in a few notable cases, U.S. government complaints and threats of action have enabled Mexican workers to organize independent unions.

But in a high-profile case involving Caterpillar Tractor, which has some 20,000 workers in Latin America, the U.S. government has refused to proceed, despite documented evidence of company blacklists. After a worker is fired for trying to join a union, he or she is blacklisted from getting any other job with another company. A pro-union worker in the HR department of Caterpillar’s subsidiary even found a literal blacklist of names.

The UAW, United Steelworkers (USW), the AFL-CIO, their Mexican affiliates, and Rethink Trade have petitioned the U.S. government to proceed with complaints and remedies for Mexican workers. But the petitions, which provide extensive detail, have been rejected twice. Why, you might ask, does "the most pro-union administration in U.S. history" blow off a thoroughly documented complaint from some of its closest union allies?