Democrats React to Mexican Labor Reforms
A NAFTA ratification advocate and a senior House Ways and Means Committee member who voted against CAFTA, the Korea and the Colombia free trade treaties agree -- the Mexican labor reform that passed earlier this week is a major advance for Mexican workers.
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Rep. Henry Cuellar, a San Antonio-area Democrat who is lobbying his colleagues to ratify the new NAFTA, said he talked extensively about the labor reform law when he met with top government officials in Mexico City, as well as union and business leaders. "We have to give the Mexicans credit for what they did. It’s a big change for them. It’s a culture change, it’s a legal change, it’s a historic change," he said in a hallway interview May 2 at the Capitol.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., issued a statement after the vote that said, "Mexico has taken a major step toward advancing the rights of workers to be treated with dignity and paid a fair wage. Improvement of labor rights could reduce one incentive for American companies to outsource jobs -- a central problem in the old NAFTA. We now must see implementation and meaningful enforcement of these reforms."
Cuellar said he doesn't know if the labor law's passage will get other Democrats on board to ratify the NAFTA rewrite. "I’m sure the next question they’ll ask is, ‘Well, how they gonna enforce it?’" He said that Mexico is working to get judges trained for its new legal structure to enforce labor rights, and Cuellar said he asked leaders there, "What can we help you with?" Cuellar was joined on the trip by Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., and staff from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, from the Ways and Means Committee, and from the AFL-CIO.
He noted that Mexico's president said that it's now Congress' job to ratify the new NAFTA, given that Mexico did its part by passing the labor reform. "Now they’re looking at the U.S. Congress and saying, ‘Now what?’"
Cuellar said he's trying to educate fellow Democrats on how the Mexican labor law fulfills the commitments to labor reform agreed to in the new NAFTA, but he said there are other issues -- the environment, enforcement and biologics. He said he doesn't know what Democrats who aren't ready to endorse the rewrite mean when they say there needs to be enforcement -- do they mean that Mexico has to enforce its new law, or that the U.S. ability to enforce the agreement needs to be stronger?