MEXICO CITY, Mexico—The Mexican Senate has failed to pass a bill to weaken planned labor protections,
the head of the country’s largest labor union announced Apr. 23. “There will not be the labor reform that was hyped so much. Death to the labor reform!” said Carlos Aceves del Olmo, secretary-general of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers). The bill included drastic changes in Mexico’s Federal Labor Law affecting the right to strike, union registration, contracts, and benefits, and would have continued to allow company-union “protection contracts.” Aceves del Olmo said he hoped the two senators who sponsored the bill, fellow members of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, would not go out in the street, “because they will be shamed by what we are going to tell them.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the bill would have “further blocked Mexican working people’s freedom to organize democratic, independent unions and to negotiate a fair return on their work and adequate living conditions,” and its defeat “keeps open the possibility that a renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement can secure basic freedoms for all of North America’s workers.” Read more
