Title: A Worker-Centered Trade Policy and the False Assumptions of Worker Empowerment
Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
Description: The U.S. administration has adopted a “worker-centered” trade policy, claiming to empower workers in trade partner countries. U.S. politicians and bureaucrats cite the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s Rapid Response Mechanism as evidence of the policy’s empowering effects on workers in trade sectors. This talk will outline findings from our empirical project, which interviewed workers in Mexico’s auto sector, and discuss its implications for the worker-centered approach to trade.
Speakers:
- Desirée LeClercq, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law
- Nicolas Lamp, Associate Professor; Associate Academic Director, International Law Programs
Podcast:
Transcript:
[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
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Queens Law: Thank you very much for joining us for the Queen's Speaker Series. I'm delighted to welcome. Desiree lived clerk who joins us from the University of Georgia. Before I tell you a bit more about Desiree and her work, I wanted to acknowledge that we are, of course, here on the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
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Queens Law: and I always find it tricky to do this land acknowledgement because we tend to say that we're grateful for opportunity to to live and work on these lands, and that sounds
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Queens Law: sounds very positive. But of course we also have to keep in mind that the injustices that led to the situation where the indigenous peoples were displaced from this land are, of course, continuing, and as someone who teaches property, I'm very aware of the way in which the premises that allowed colonial England to kind of assert crown sovereignty over all these lands are still very much embodied in our law, and still manifest in the ways in which
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Queens Law: indigenous peoples have to fight to assert their original title, whereas the Crown just gets to assert it. And so I don't want to start us off on a negative note, but I think we have to to keep that in mind that as great as we are to be here. These injustices are still part of our of our law.
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Queens Law: but it's all the better that we have an Israeli clerk here whose work is very much focused on helping those who have been at the margins of the established legal systems to insert, assert their voice. And particularly in this paper, empowerment in international law.
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Queens Law: She's someone who is holding our Government's feet to the fire, right even, especially when they're clapping themselves on the back. For how aggressive they are and how much they've been done doing for workers in Mexico. Desiree is, I think, the foremost voice out there who is critical of and looks critically at, what what is actually happening on the ground. And there's really nobody is better positioned to do that because of her background, because most people who study labor provisions and trade agreements are trade lawyers.
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Queens Law: and they're just so happy that to see that things are being done for workers. And so they see these provisions, and they see just good settlement, and they see activity. And they they think, Oh, it's it's it's all so good.
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Queens Law: Desiree is by training is a labor lawyer. She has,
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Queens Law: incredible experience, having worked for 8 years at the international labor organization in Geneva.
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Queens Law: And that is so. What's so striking about her work is that a labor lawyer comes at these from a very, with a very different perspective, because they actually have a sense of how labor law functions which trade lawyers don't normally do. And so we are incredibly lucky in the trade law community that we have Desiree among us who's teaching us about labor law and providing this critical perspective on labor versions and trade agreements which have really moved to the center
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Queens Law: of the attentions, particularly in North America. In the context of of the Usmca. Or Kuzma, with between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. So, without further ado, thank you so much for coming all the way from from the University of Georgia and sharing your research with us.
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Queens Law: Thank you, I'd like to say, thanks to Professor Lamp and Natalie and the rest of the team for inviting me here and making this such a seamless trip. So I've really enjoyed already getting to see your campus
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Queens Law: and some of the beautiful atmosphere. I wouldn't say I love the weather. I'll just be honest. I told Nicholas the next time we do that it should be in the summertime, but that being noted. I am incredibly privileged to be here. So thank you.
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Queens Law: And it's my honor to be able to talk about this today, because this is mentioned by Professor Lamp. This is such a critical moment in time for us to be looking at the intersection of our trade relations and those whose work
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Queens Law: makes trade possible. We talk a lot in trade class about production methods and various costs of competition, but we often lose sight of the women and men who make that trade possible who deliver our goods.
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Queens Law: who are out there in the fields, who are manufacturing, who are thinking of new ideas. If it weren't for the workers. We wouldn't have trade, we wouldn't have our economy. We certainly wouldn't have profits or our standards of living that we do right now, and notwithstanding the critical position of workers. They're usually the last thought
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Queens Law: and our trade discussions. As Professor Lamp noted, I I worked at the Ilo for 8 years after working for the United States National Labor Relations Board. But then I left the Ilo to work for the office of the Us. Trade representative.
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Queens Law: and so I didn't just see the labor angle. I also saw the trade, and more specifically the political angle. So I was hired by the Obama administration, thinking that I was going to be working eventually for the 1st female President in the United States, and surprise I instead got to work for President Trump during his 1st administration for the 1st for his 4 years before I left to join Cornell University at that time.
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Queens Law: and I was a labor lawyer. I came at things from the position of helping workers, and I was working for an administration that, as we see now, shall we say, has other priorities in mind.
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Queens Law: But notwithstanding those other priorities workers took a center stage in the trade conversations and in our negotiations. When people hear that I worked for trump
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Queens Law: as well as Obama, they ask me. Well, what was it like working for trump, you know, after you worked for this wonderfully progressive President, you know, was that hard for you, and they're always really surprised when I tell them that as far as my job went, so this small niche, this protecting workers and trade, it was 10 times easier
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Queens Law: to work for President Trump than it was for Obama.
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Queens Law: I know it's not necessarily intuitive, but Obama cared about a lot of things, including workers. He also cared about our geopolitical relationships
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Queens Law: a lot he cared about maintaining trust, maintaining legitimacy, and he was loath to upset his trade partners.
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Queens Law: So when we, as negotiators were dealing with questions of trade and of labor commitments.
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Queens Law: the trade partner could violate their labor commitments, and under the Obama administration we still had to make the relationship work.
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Queens Law: and our trade partners knew it.
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Queens Law: so they didn't take as seriously some of their commitments.
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Queens Law: Under the trump administration it was the opposite. The Administration was looking for any excuse to get out of our arrangements and out of our commitments
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Queens Law: and worker rights were as good of an excuse as any. So all we had to do was sit down with our trade partners and suggest a question of compliance, and our trade partners would open their books.
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Queens Law: they would open their labor legislation, and they would effectively invite us in, because they knew that if we were not supportive of their efforts, that all it would do
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Queens Law: would be for us to identify that trade partner, that commitment
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Queens Law: and our President would be more than happy to pull us out of whatever commitments they had made.
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Queens Law: So this is all to suggest that the intersection of trade and labor geopolitics is complex.
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Queens Law: It's not always what we think it will be. You can't always see the President or the trade policymaker and think that you know what their position is going to be, because the intersection between trade economics and the workers that make trade policy is so interlinked
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Queens Law: that one effort for trade necessarily affects the other for labor, and vice versa. So with that bit of background. I'm now going to walk you through kind of a recent project that I did, and what the implications of that project are for the future.
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Queens Law: So here's a kind of a roadmap.
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Queens Law: I'm going to be discussing the Us. Worker centered trade policy, because that's what I know a lot about. But just to explain that it's not. This is not unique to the United States. So just as the United States in recent years has begun saying, its trade policy is designed to help workers. So, too, has Canada
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Queens Law: and many of the discussions around Kuzma. So, too, has the European Union. So, too, has Chile. So this narrative, this narrative around workers and this narrative around empowerment are actually becoming quite normalized. This isn't merely an example of us exceptionalism.
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Queens Law: So after discussing a bit what I mean by worker centered trade policy. I'll turn to Mexico. Hence the colors of my Powerpoint. I felt like they were missing from our Cuzma discussions. So Mexico is here through through colorful Powerpoint. So we're going to choose Mexico as kind of our case. Study to explain and to show what I mean by empowerment.
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Queens Law: and what the effects of this empowerment through trade has actually made on the lives of workers and Mexico's trade sectors stemming from a report that we just concluded. And then we can think about what the implications of those findings are for trade policy both today and for tomorrow. If we all agree, as I feel like we should, that workers are central to the trade agenda and should not merely be rhetoric
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Queens Law: of government trade policy.
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Queens Law: So first, st I just want to take a step back for some of us. This is intuitive, but for those of us who have kind of learned about trade from the trade rules and the Gat and the Wto. It's not always so obvious. So there are multiple reasons why policymakers, politicians, advocates, care about this link
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Queens Law: between trade and labor, and this role of kind of empowerment of workers. And just to note that this isn't exclusive, it's not as if you find yourself on one side. You don't also find yourself on the other.
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Queens Law: So many, and I would say the origins of the trade and labor link came from kind of domestic national concerns. So there were concerns that the labor conditions in other countries could hurt national workers owing to liberalized trade. So in the United States, for example, as we were discussing Nafta, and then later, what we call Usmca. There was this great concern about
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Queens Law: auto facilities and the like, leaving the United States and moving to Mexico, where the costs of production are cheaper, owing to a number of reasons, including lower wage costs, fewer unions, and the like, and so the concerns about Mexico's labor weren't necessarily because we cared about what was happening in Mexico. Many did, but not everybody. It was that we cared about keeping good jobs in the United States.
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Queens Law: There's also the concern that if we are competing with countries that have low labor costs
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Queens Law: and therefore low production costs that there will be pressure on us to reduce our wages and our working conditions in order to remain competitive.
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Queens Law: So this again, we're worried about the labor conditions in another country because we want to protect workers in our country, and we don't want to expose them to vulnerabilities by liberalizing our trade relationship. So this, I would say, was the predominant theory, and continues to be in a lot of policy kind of talking circles.
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Queens Law: More recently around the 19 nineties, at least in the United States, you see, kind of a transnational labor movement, where all of a sudden the discourse changes from we need to monitor labor standards in Mexico to protect workers in the United States and Canada from cheaper competition.
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Queens Law: 2. We need to care about and worry about the labor conditions in Mexico, because those workers also don't deserve to be mistreated. They also don't deserve to have to carry the burdens of trade on their shoulders, particularly because they are already so vulnerable by being in a country that still remains in economic development.
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Queens Law: So this more recent kind of trend is almost a cosmopolitan view of what it is to have solidarity in the labor movement. This notion that we're all in this together throughout the supply chain, and that we should leverage our trade policy. We should leverage our markets in order to ensure that workers around the world
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Queens Law: have some benefit, some level of protection, right? So these are kind of the predominant themes.
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Queens Law: And one thing that's striking about these different themes, notwithstanding the fact that one is national and one is a bit more global is, they tend to have the same solution.
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Queens Law: So whether it's because we care about workers in Canada, or whether we care about workers in Mexico.
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Queens Law: both concerns are somewhat assuaged. If we can come up with common labor standards that countries have to continue to respect
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Queens Law: if they hope to engage in trade.
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Queens Law: The way that we've tended to do that are with labor provisions and trade agreements. So often you learn about trade agreements as kind of a treaty or a contract between governments, and there's various commitments made, not just about tariff rates, but rules of origin, dispute, settlement, and the like. Well, just as you have these traditional
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Queens Law: trade agreement chapters since the 19 nineties. We've had labor chapters. Well, I shouldn't say since the 19 nineties, because Nafta was a side agreement. But definitely, since the 2 thousands.
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Queens Law: so these commitments, like any others, commit the trade partners to a common set of rules, and I'm not going to make this overly complicated by describing what those rules are and are not, but suffice it to say for our purposes that those rules have been government, to go so state, to state, just as anything else
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Queens Law: to ensure that workers and trade and trade sectors in a manner affecting trade, as some might say, have to follow that, or still get the same benefits. Right? So this is our way of making sure that Canada and the United States aren't losing good jobs to cheaper wages and Mexico. It's also our way of ensuring that Mexican workers aren't being vulnerable owing to the conditions of trade.
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Queens Law: Is everyone with me so far?
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Queens Law: Okay.
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Queens Law: so under the biden administration. Well, let me back up for just a second under the trump. One administration we began negotiating the Kuzma, as you guys call it. We call it the Usmca. Everyone thinks of it as kind of a nafta 2.0
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Queens Law: right. So for years there had been growing discontent about Nafta, what it was producing. The externalities of Nafta on workers and the like. So, at least in the United States and Congress, there was kind of a huge uproar about Nafta as being unfair trump being trump
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Queens Law: threatened to completely withdraw out of it unless the parties came to the negotiations table.
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Queens Law: Canada, the United States, and Mexico came together, and over a couple of years in 2020 they ratified this new trade agreement that did a number of really interesting things, particularly when it comes to labor.
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Queens Law: So, just as in previous agreements, Usmca has a labor chapter, right? That stipulates to certain common baseline rules, but it also has a really interesting new innovation called the Rapid response mechanism or the Rrm.
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Queens Law: The rapid response mechanism was designed by by Congressional Democrats to ensure that the United States not only could enforce certain Mexico Mexican laws which we'll talk about in a second.
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Queens Law: could enforce those laws and trade sectors, but also that the Us. Government could enforce those laws against private facilities in Mexico.
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Queens Law: So no longer this State to State dispute settlement, but rather the Us. Government and Canada has its own version of the rapid response mechanism I should mention.
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Queens Law: They can actually take enforcement action against a Mexican facility, because that Mexican facility will have violated the labor laws in Mexico.
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Queens Law: It's kind of surprising to many of us lawyers.
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Queens Law: One of the important features of the rapid response mechanism is that they can be instigated. These cases, begun by workers and local unions on the ground in Mexico.
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Queens Law: So I have a separate research project that's looking at this kind of through the lens of a whistleblower law. I don't know if you guys are familiar with whistleblower laws, but it's a way of saying, how do we inject some sunlight? And to these otherwise obscure global supply chains. Well, let's give the workers there a voice.
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Queens Law: Let's give the workers there a platform so that they can raise attention to the Us. Get. Wow the raise attention to the Us. Government
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Queens Law: in order to take enforcement.
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Queens Law: And this begins our narrative around empowerment.
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Queens Law: This notion that through our trade agreement we are empowering workers, and the Mexican supply sectors by giving them a platform by giving them a voice and the enforcement of their own labor rights.
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Queens Law: This was something that was unheard of. One of the big complaints under Nafta was that workers never had kind of the value. The power to bring a case to a panel that they there were misgivings, but those misgivings were always kind of handled through consultations, and that was there were never the teeth of economic sanctions.
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Queens Law: So under the trump administration, this empowerment notion began to unfold, not out of altruism, but pragmatics.
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Queens Law: This idea that if we give workers a platform to highlight their abuses. We in the United States will be better informed to take enforcement action and equalize the conditions of competition.
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Queens Law: The Biden Administration was effectively the trump administration when it came to a lot of trade issues. I mean, people worry about what are the differences between Biden and Trump, and we can talk about those. But in the small sphere of trade and labor they were basically the same person.
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Queens Law: The only difference is they use different rhetoric. So Trump would say, we're going to aggressively enforce Usmca's rapid response mechanism in Mexico because we care about American workers. The Biden Administration took the exact same mechanism, took the exact same modalities, took the exact same approach. But instead of saying, It's for American workers, they say, well, we're doing it for American workers and to empower workers in Mexico
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Queens Law: enter empowerment
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Queens Law: for. And we'll talk about this in a second. During the entire Biden administration. True to its word, the office of the Us. Trade representative aggressively used this tool dozens of times to enforce rights against Mexican facility owners in the name of the Mexican workers.
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Queens Law: Now Biden is left, and a lot of people question, well, is this kind of a moot point? Are we done with this discussion of empowerment and trying to uplift workers in the name of trade. But just last week, as you see here, trump, too. So the new ambassador for trade under the trump administration, Jameson Greer, who I worked with under the previous administration.
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Queens Law: reaffirmed his commitment to continue to use the rapid response mechanism aggressively in order to ensure that the conditions of competition remain. Even
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Queens Law: so this.
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Queens Law: I would argue, makes Mexico a very interesting case. Study for those of us interested in understanding better the relationship between trade and worker rights.
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Queens Law: This is a new initiative. So we can actually get data from the before and the after. Not necessarily a causal, but certainly a correlative effect. That's more difficult. In the year Priors.
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Queens Law: I got my degree originally in political science and international relations. So for me personally, it's very interesting to see how the geopolitical power dynamics between powerful countries and less powerful countries come to play. You've got the United States as the police of fair labor standards in Mexico, so we can see what that dynamic does.
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Queens Law: And again, this is all coming out of a promise.
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Queens Law: a promise to remedy the ailments of Nafta that failed to protect workers for decades. Right? So Mexico, to people like myself, is a very interesting case. Study to be able to kind of observe what the effects of all of these empowerment initiatives are doing to the actual lives of workers in Mexico.
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Queens Law: So let's talk about what's going on in Mexico
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Queens Law: before Nafta began really to be reproduced under Cusma Usmca. We had the trans-pacific partnership agreement.
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Queens Law: So this is well, I shouldn't say it's defunct. It's only defunct for us. It's still quite alive, and well for many countries, but the idea was the United States used as leverage under the trans-pacific partnership, the Tpp. To ask countries to do a whole lot of things.
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Queens Law: including asking Mexico to revise its labor laws. Mexico refused to do so publicly, but many of these conversations took place in parallel and behind closed doors, as do many trade negotiations today.
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Queens Law: As a result of those
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Queens Law: negotiations that then bled into Usmca, Mexico underwent a huge labor reform, beginning with in 2017, with a change to its constitution, and then more concretely in 2019, with a significant overhaul of its labor legislation. Now, according to the Mexican government. This overhaul kind of falls, as you can see, into 3 pillars.
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Queens Law: These pillars are designed to address the type of labor system that Mexico had before these negotiations began.
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Queens Law: Mexico was effectively the Wild West of labor relations. It had sham unions that ironically were called protection unions, because they were designed to protect the employers.
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Queens Law: So often the employers would kind of make deals with these unions even before it had hired any workers.
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Queens Law: even before it had begun production. And the idea was it would codify these collective bargaining agreements. So these are agreements that cover workers in a given sector, they stipulate wages and the like. They would create these collective bargaining agreements that suppressed the wages of workers that kept the cost of production incredibly low.
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Queens Law: guaranteeing kind of higher profits. The Government was in on this it was a whole sham.
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Queens Law: So what the Government needed to do in order to continue these trade talks with the United States, among others, was to promise to do away with this fake union system that was artificially suppressing wages and actually come up with a system of representation of workers.
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Queens Law: So one of the things that its law did was it completely did away with what they were called cabs. So they were basically these government and employer controlled labor arbitration systems that just always ruled in favor of employers. So they did away with that, with this idea of bringing in an independent adjudicatory body. But most importantly for our purposes is the second thing. So up until this point there was no worker empowerment in Mexico, because there was no independent representation of workers. They didn't have any voice.
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Queens Law: They were told what their wages were. They were told that they couldn't do anything about it, and there were no avenues for dispute. So the employer or the government did 2 things. First, st it introduced a new system where independent unions could get voted on.
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Queens Law: but it ran into a problem, which is that all of these workers were already covered under these sham, collective bargaining agreements the Government needed a way to get rid of those collective bargaining agreements, noting that as a contract, it wasn't really for the Government to make a decision as to whether the employers did or did not get rid of them. That was a question for the workers.
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Queens Law: So they introduced what was called a legitimization process. It's a terrible title, but we're stuck with it because the Government came up with it.
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Queens Law: That legitimization process ended in 2023. What it was is it was a rollout process where workers were given the opportunity to legitimate or reject their existing collective bargaining agreements when they legitimated it. That meant, basically, yeah, we want to stick with our sham collective bargaining agreement. And our sham union
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Queens Law: if they rejected it. That meant we don't want this agreement, and we don't necessarily want the Union which would open the doorway to independent Union elections. So this was the Government's way of kind of trying to wipe the slate clean, get rid of all the sham representations and give workers a voice in the sector. It sounds great, right? And so this is what Usmca was designed to do
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Queens Law: was to solidify this process, to give this process some enforcement teeth by making sure that these independent unions actually could come in making sure that got the the employers would not shoot them. There's actual violence in Mexico. As I was explaining Professor Lamp. When we went into Mexico we had to avoid people walking around the facilities with pistols
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Queens Law: openly carried at in their in their pants and their waist belts.
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Queens Law: So our investigators had to avoid this, and the workers knew that their actual lives were at risk if they spoke to us because of this nature, this nature in Mexico, where these unions, these sham unions, really controlled everything, and governments really prospered.
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Queens Law: So we had questions, as I I think many would. We had seen for years the Biden Administration use its trade agenda to empower these Mexican workers. Every time you, the Ustr, would go into a facility that Us. Department of labor would like. Bring the poor Mexican workers in front of their photographers and ask them to pose for pictures and talk about how happy they were with the Us. Government's interventions.
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Queens Law: All of this made at least labor rights advocates like myself, a little nervous, because, again, a trade agenda can do a lot. It's not necessarily designed for cosmopolitan reasons, and the United States Government kept telling us how happy Mexican workers were with the Us. Government, but no one had bothered to ask the workers. So we designed a pilot study to go into Mexico and ask them about their working conditions.
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Queens Law: At that time Ustr had used the rapid response mechanism 24 times 17 of those instances were in the auto sector, which is why we chose it to focus on.
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Queens Law: Of those 17 cases 4 of the cases had required new legitimation votes. Remember, that's when they were voting to legitimate or to reject their Union representatives and collective bargaining agreements. So in 4 of those cases the question of compliance had been around some shifty activities that had taken place during those elections
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Queens Law: 10 of the rapid response cases were resolved with new Union elections.
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Queens Law: and all of those were resolved in favor of bringing in new independent unions. And this is interesting, at least for my purposes. 9 of those rapid response mechanism cases were resolved upon a promise of worker level trainings.
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Queens Law: and the reason why that's important is because when Usmca was adopted, Congress allocated 200 million dollars to train workers in Mexico about their new labor rights, none of those projects that were funded by Congress were actually centered at workers.
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Queens Law: So they taught the employers about what the rules were they taught? The Government about the rules were, and they taught unions about what the rules were, but none of them actually taught the workers about their new rights.
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Queens Law: But part of the rapid response mechanism. Cases required such trainings. So already we were seeing some kind of questionable activities that were interesting to us, like what is going on in these rapid response mechanism cases, and perhaps more importantly, what is going on at the facilities that are not
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Queens Law: having these rapid response mechanism cases? Are those workers benefiting as well.
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Queens Law: notably. And I think I'll get to this.
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Queens Law: Well, okay, pause that I'll get to that in a second. So our project was exploratory. We reached 130 workers, which is the drop in a bucket when we talk about the tens of thousands of workers in the auto sector, but we nevertheless felt it was quite representative. We chose the 7 States of central importance
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Queens Law: to the Mexican auto sector. We did snowball sampling, and we really ensured to have kind of a sampling of all the types of workers that were involved. Some of these were really big facilities. Us owned, some were smaller, some were Mexican owned. Some had unions, some did not.
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Queens Law: and 3 of those facilities had been
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Queens Law: had gone through a rapid response mechanism case.
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Queens Law: So we really had kind of a good sampling of workers that had gone through the rapid response mechanism workers that did not, workers that were unionized workers that were not. And we were curious about what their knowledge was. Our view, at least, was that you cannot be empowered.
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Queens Law: Just as the Biden Administration kept saying, these workers were empowered. You cannot be empowered. If you don't know your rights.
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Queens Law: you cannot be empowered. If you do not have basic knowledge, you cannot be empowered. If you cannot compare what you are receiving to what you should be receiving. You are not empowered. We feel, if you are not aware that you have a platform upon which to exert your grievances.
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Queens Law: So all of these narratives, all of this discussion of empowerment, really turns on variables. The Government had never proven to us. It hadn't shown us whether workers knew about their rights. It hadn't shown us whether workers knew about the rapid response mechanism. It hadn't shown us whether or not workers were even using the rapid response mechanism.
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Queens Law: So once again, here's just like a layout of the methodology.
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Queens Law: So 3 of the 12 facilities weren't unionized. 3 had been subject. Rapid response, mechanism, proceedings 6 headquartered in the Us.
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Queens Law: So we really wanted to ensure. We were reaching both big facilities, small facilities, and the like to ensure as much as possible that we could be representative of what's going on in the Mexican sector.
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Queens Law: One notable fact that concerned us was that at the time
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Queens Law: of issuing this project every petition that had successfully ignited a rapid response. Mechanism case
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Queens Law: had been carried out with the assistance of the United States. So this shows the actual petitioner right? So it shows like a small margin, were Mexican workers.
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Queens Law: Nevertheless, in our discussions with the Us. Solidarity Center in Mexico, the Afl-CIO, and Mexican unions. We learned that each of these parties were able to carry out the petitions that successfully galvanized this enforcement action
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Queens Law: through the assistance of us stakeholders.
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Queens Law: So that is to say, they already had some kind of connections with the United States.
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Queens Law: All right. So this is what we found.
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Queens Law: and, just. Briefly speaking, we found significant disparities and the level of worker knowledge
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Queens Law: and confidence and legitimacy and trust between workers at facilities that had not participated in the rapid response mechanism and those that had.
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Queens Law: So I'm going to walk you through that and against the back. That backdrop. I want you to keep in mind that those that had participated in the rapid response mechanism all already benefited from connections with the United States.
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Queens Law: So, just briefly speaking, showing this graph
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Queens Law: a little bit over. Half of the workers knew that they that Mexico had undertaken these huge labor law reforms. And I actually think that's pretty good. If you go into the United States auto sector and you ask them about the National Labor Relations Act. You're not going to get a high level of awareness right. So some might look at that and feel discouraged, because here that said there had been this monumental labor reform. And here you only have a little over the half workers that are aware of it.
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Queens Law: But I would say, that's actually pretty good as a labor rights advocate. It shows that it's getting down at least to some workers. However.
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Queens Law: when you break it down further to see who are these 56% of the workers, it's it's actually quite different.
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Queens Law: They're the rapid response mechanism, facility workers.
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Queens Law: It's the workers that received the trainings.
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Queens Law: It's the workers that receive the help
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Queens Law: when you get to non rapid response mechanism, facility. So that is auto facility. Still in trade sector, still producing the same goods.
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Queens Law: Less than half are even aware that Mexico had just revised its labor laws to ensure that they were entitled to independent Union representation, they had no idea.
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Queens Law: So then I was also very curious about the legitimization process. So again, this is the process of legitimating or rejecting their collective bargaining agreement because of how important that process was.
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Queens Law: If workers chose to legitimate or didn't vote, that means that they're still strapped into this really substandard bargaining agreement where they don't get to try to fight for higher wages right? And they're stuck with these sham unions. So this legitimization process was brand new. No one had ever heard of it, and it was crucial to actually changing the conditions of work in Mexico.
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Queens Law: This was after the legitimation period ended.
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Queens Law: 60% of workers had no idea what a legitimization process was.
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Queens Law: They'd never heard of it.
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Queens Law: We then kind of kept going. We said, well, which ones of you actually participated in a legitimization process. And so from those from those of you who cast a vote.
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Queens Law: Who among you actually felt like you knew what you were voting on? And here we have 60% said, Okay, I know 40% said, I had no idea what I voted. But here's what's worse, of those 60%, we would say, Well, what did you vote? And they'd say, well, we voted to legitimate the contract.
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Queens Law: Well, why did you vote to legitimate the contract? Because we wanted to bargain for better working conditions?
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Queens Law: So we found that even those workers who felt that they could tell us with confidence that they understood the process that had voted already voted without understanding what the process was, and notably some 98% of these sham collective bargaining and agreements in Mexico were legitimated.
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Queens Law: Then we looked at the rapid response mechanism facilities to see okay. And and one thing to keep in mind just between us, between friends.
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Queens Law: All of the rapid response mechanism facilities that we interviewed had gone through new legitimization processes. Every single one of them, with the help of the United States Government, voted to reject their collective bargaining agreements and to vote in an independent Union. However, if you look at the outcome of our study.
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Queens Law: A quarter of the workers thought that their collective bargaining agreements had been legitimated.
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Queens Law: when, in fact, they were rejected.
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Queens Law: So even amongst those at the rapid response mechanism, case facilities, there was a striking lack of familiarity and understanding of these new kind of democratic processes that had been unrolled, hoping to be able to start over in this bargaining regime
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Queens Law: then, and only because we're a little ornery. We asked them about their views. This has nothing to do with empowerment and more to do with like, what do Mexican workers feel about like the big powerful, the Us. Government interfering in their labor relations.
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Queens Law: And actually, I felt like this was a real, like real politic moment, and my own investigation, and it suggested sort of a parochialism on my part. See here, I thought we were going to go into these facilities and find that Mexican workers really didn't like the presence of the Us. Government, and, in fact, what we found was a far greater savviness amongst Mexican workers than I had given them credit for. So that, like over half of them were like, Yeah.
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Queens Law: us governments interfering, you know, with the labor practices here to help us workers.
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Queens Law: I mean, it's probably also trying to help us. So like 50 50. It's probably trying to do both. Oh, yeah. And it's probably also trying to raise the costs of our production
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Queens Law: so that it can make more money at home. It's probably also trying to exercise power over the Mexican government. All of the above, like the Us. Government's probably achieving a lot later on. It's not a slide here, but later on we ask them, given this these like complicated feelings.
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Queens Law: what? What do you want the Us. Government to do like, should the Us. Government back off, you know, if it's acting out of self interest. And the the workers, the majority of the workers were like.
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Queens Law: I mean when they're here. We get paid more so they can keep like they want to exercise power over Mexico. They can exercise power over Mexico so long as you know, we end up making more money out of it. So this is really like radical view of yes, we understand. The Us. Government is trying to pull a lot of things, but it can keep doing so if it's going to give us greater rights.
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Queens Law: all right.
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Queens Law: So against this kind of complicated backdrop, as all surveys of human beings tend to be quite complicated. One of the questions that I'm asking myself now is, what what does this mean?
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Queens Law: So.
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Queens Law: at least for me. I find it quite troubling that we go into Mexico to help raise the standards of living of vulnerable workers. And what we're doing is, we're creating kind of 2 buckets of workers.
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Queens Law: On the one hand, we have the truly invisible workers.
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Queens Law: the workers that are in the trade sector and the auto sector that have no ties to us unions. They have no heroes in us Congress. They are therefore not interesting to Ustr, and they have received no attention under the rapid response mechanism, no worker level trainings, no new legitimization processes, no new union elections.
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Queens Law: In our other bucket.
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Queens Law: We have workers that are relatively relatively privileged.
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Queens Law: They're relatively privileged because they have stakeholders in the United States fighting for them. And I'm not suggesting that this is a bad thing. This is a great thing. This is why those workers are privileged because they have transnational solidarity working in their favor. They get extra money from the wages that end up. As a result of their independent collective bargaining agreement. They get actual representation, they have an actual voice, they are more empowered.
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Queens Law: But is that what we're trying to do?
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Queens Law: Are we trying to bifurcate and atomize workers
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Queens Law: across the world? Are we trying to help those that are important to us politically.
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Queens Law: while ignoring those who probably need the most help.
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Queens Law: I mean, maybe the answers would be different. But that's not where I come. When I think about empowerment and the global supply chain, particularly throughout developing countries.
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Queens Law: But this isn't new. Also, in the 19 nineties there was this huge initiative, an empowerment initiative. It was usually in the form of indigenous rights, empowerment and women's rights empowerment. So all of a sudden, in the context of financial development, banks and governments, and all of these really strong actors were going to empower the vulnerable of the world right?
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Queens Law: And that obviously didn't happen because none of these groups are actually empowered today. So Sen did a lot of research on this at his time, and he looked particularly at the way development institutions were seeking to empower feminist women workers and empower indigenous communities, and he found that they weren't actually empowering anybody.
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Queens Law: And the reason why is because these top down types of initiatives that were just kind of throwing resources at local communities had no idea
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Queens Law: what was going on in those local communities.
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Queens Law: They didn't understand what the cap capabilities were. They didn't understand where the deficiencies were, because there was nothing on the bottom. There was no investigation. There was no getting to know the actual vulnerable communities. There was just this real kind of parochial dismissal and throwing of resources that ended up exacerbating a lot of the power imbalances that started off.
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Queens Law: Nevertheless, as he's writing about empowerment development banks in particular, I guess they were suffering from a Pr problem really started embracing the empowerment ambition much the same way that the Biden administration did so all of a sudden. You have, like the Imf and the World Bank and Idb, all of these financial institutions, claiming to be empowering the recipients of their funds.
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Queens Law: But nevertheless, as we follow the development of those funds, we find, in fact, that inequalities increased.
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Queens Law: that the vulnerable became more vulnerable, not just because of the structural adjustment programs that were going on at the time, but because of the way that the resources were being utilized in recipient countries
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Queens Law: through sen feminist scholarship and other works, they started to kind of create a theory of empowerment and development.
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Queens Law: And there is this recognition that when institutions, when governments and trade agreements go into a local community. There's a lot already going on on the ground. There's already power plays. There's already different resource distributions among local communities. And if there's no recognition of that.
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Queens Law: then what ultimately ends up happening is that the privileged become more privileged. And I'll give you an example. There's a women's empowerment notion amongst many of the development banks that if they could create events that brought women to the events and got the women to participate. Then that meant that the women were empowered. What they failed to recognize, though, is that women didn't have the flexibility to attend all these events. Women were the caregivers.
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Queens Law: Women were at home trying to take care of their family on top of trying to work. The last thing these women needed was one more demand on their time.
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Queens Law: but they were being forced to participate in these these events so that the banks could kind of check these boxes. Ultimately, what happened is, the women who attended were the elite women who could afford childcare
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Queens Law: during these events, where the poor women, the most tasked women, were not there because they were busy caring for their family, and the powerful women were in attendance. Those powerful women got to decide how the resources were going to be allocated. And what type of regime do you think that they established?
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Queens Law: So again, the objectives were noble, right, laudable objectives of empowering women through these development resources? But without taking a snapshot of the pre-existing power, dynamics between the elite and the not elite, and the pre-existing demands on women's time by coming up with this outcome outcome being participation bodies and chairs.
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Queens Law: these initiatives ended up harming the vulnerable groups of women who couldn't make it to the meetings.
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Queens Law: So this has begun, some thinking around what type of antecedent, what type of ex ante types of measures need to be taken before top down policies can even pretend to be empowering local communities.
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Queens Law: That is to say, that before the resources roll out before enforcement begins to happen, some type of stock taking needs to be taken place, particularly even in labor.
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Queens Law: Oftentimes, if you go into a working factory.
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Queens Law: there are already informal ways to resolve disputes.
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Queens Law: The workers on the ground already know a lot
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Queens Law: about their working facility. If you don't take that into account. If you just throw money
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Queens Law: at different facilities, require one system of dispute settlement, you actually run the risk, as we did with women, of furthering these pre-existing power imbalances. And I think this is what our Usmca rapid response mechanism study captured when it showed that those workers already with links already with privileged, ended up benefiting significantly more when it came to factors of empowerment, such as knowledge and participation than those without such links.
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Queens Law: So this is making me think about the future trade and labor. That Link is not going to go away for a number of reasons, including the fact that you have strong trade partners, increasingly embracing the recognition
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Queens Law: that workers are the most critical aspect of trade, that without them you have no trade, and that if you don't treat them equitably, if you do not include them, if you do not allow their participation in their voice, your economy will suffer
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Queens Law: so because of that. I try and trying to think of how can we establish an empowerment framework in trade that actually responds to these local needs.
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Queens Law: and what I think it requires is a lot more of action before trade agreements are negotiated.
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Queens Law: when leverage is highest before enforcement comes out. And here, just like this is still kind of percolating. So I'm open to your thoughts as well. The 1st ex ante provisions that establish or think through training exercises and worker level approaches from the beginning to become part of that local community. The capacity building that we've seen under Usmca once again has all been top down.
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Queens Law: we administer it from the top, we throw it at employers, we throw it at unions, we throw it at the Government. We assume it's going to trickle down at some point to these workers who we claim empowerment. Instead, it has to start at the bottom. It has to actually start with the vulnerable recipients
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Queens Law: of this aid, so that they know what their rights are. There have to be further studies of the local communities. Mexican auto facilities are not going to be like other sectors in Mexico that are certainly not going to be like us. Auto facilities. These are all idiosyncratic types of entities with their own relationships and histories.
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Queens Law: There has to be a lot more work in this area before our trade agreements can purport to empower them.
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Queens Law: Those approaches necessarily will be different. They'll be pluralistic. One size does not always fit all particular, not not in labor relations. And finally, one of the things our report captured
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Queens Law: is, while the workers were happy to have their wages increased by the Mexican or the Us. Government. Excuse me, those workers did not trust the Us. Government, but if you don't trust the government you're supposed to blow the whistle to.
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Queens Law: you're not going to risk the pistols. You're not going to risk getting blacklisted. You're not going to risk not having food on your table
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Queens Law: by trusting that actor
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Queens Law: with showing violations. So all of this is a process is what I'm trying to get to before the actual enforcement sets in.
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Queens Law: All right. So that concludes, I'd like to turn it all over to you now for questions and comments. Thank you