The Trump Administration is Investigating Workers’ Rights in Mexico While Demolishing Them At Home

Just one minute before the White House distributed via email a new executive order further dismantling collective bargaining protections for U.S. federal workers, President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor made another, somewhat surprising announcement.

The DOL in a Thursday press release sent at 4:01 p.m. announced it would be investigating whether workers at a slaughterhouse and meat distribution plant in Mexico “are being denied the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining” under a trade agreement labor provision. By 4:02 p.m., another administration email came: The White House was sharing Trump’s just-signed executive order adding six more agencies to the list of federal departments whose workers were being forced to terminate their unions.

When Trump in his first term sent the NAFTA-replacing U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, or USMCA, to Congress, the administration got bipartisan support only after it agreed to include a labor provision pushed by House Democrats that lets the DOL investigate labor violations and enforce collective bargaining rights established under Mexican law. Members of Congress cast the provision as solving two problems at once: it helps address the humanitarian issue of workers’ rights and it’s a way to equalize trade between Mexico and the U.S. by decreasing Mexico’s competitive advantage of cheap labor. 

The second Trump administration has continued to enforce that provision — a fact that comes with a healthy dose of irony for anyone who has followed Trump’s attacks on organized labor in the U.S. during his second term.

The Thursday executive order targeted six agencies, including the National Weather Service and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, ordering them to end union representation for their employees. The administration had previously moved to end collective bargaining for nearly 400,000 civil servants, more than 2.6% of all unionized workers in the U.S.

“This latest executive order is another clear example of retaliation against federal employee union members who have bravely stood up against his anti-worker, anti-American plan to dismantle the federal government,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement on Thursday.

It’s not just the federal workforce. Nine months into his second presidency, Trump has hammered away at domestic labor protections. The president has hobbled the National Labor Relations Board, responsible for enforcing private sector labor law, when he fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic board member and the first Black woman to serve in the role. (A federal judge ruled Wilcox’s firing illegal but the Supreme Court issued a stay pending a decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.) Trump rolled back an anti-discrimination order for federal government contractors, and tried to gutcivil rights enforcement through layoffs at the DOL. And his administration has proposed exempting many home health care workers from minimum wage requirements and eliminating overtime pay for many live-in domestic workers.

“I think contradictory approach is a good way to put it,” said Josh Boxerman, government affairs manager at the National Employment Law Project. “There’s a lot of bluster coming from [Trump] about how much he cares about workers, but when you actually look at the actions of his administration, it’s exactly the opposite.”

The White House referred TPM questions for this article to the DOL, which did not respond to TPM requests for comment.

The Trump administration’s leverage of ‘democratic power’ 

The U.S. can look into allegations of a denial of rights in Mexico thanks to a USMCA labor provision called the Rapid Response Mechanism, or RRM. Basically, the provision allows individuals and organizations in Mexico to issue a complaint if they believe a facility is violating workers’ collective bargaining rights. If the U.S. takes up the complaint, a division of the DOL launches a facility-specific investigation, determines whether it violated relevant labor laws, and gives Mexico time to respond before escalating and taking further steps. Since 2021, more than 30 RRMs have been initiated. The largest proportion have been invoked in the auto manufacturing industry, including at facilities operated by U.S.-based firms like General Motors.

While the DOL called its most recent RRM invocation “part of ongoing efforts by the Trump Administration to ensure our trade partners play by the rules,” the mechanism exists because of Democrats, Kathleen Claussen, a Georgetown University research professor and professor of law, pointed out in an interview.

“The USMCA was a Trump I achievement, but this topic and the RRM itself only came into the conversation when Democrats took the House,” Claussen said. “You see this resurgence of Democratic power that pushed these things over the finish line.”

When the USMCA was being negotiated in 2019, House Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, urging the administration to strengthen labor requirements and the trade agreement’s “dispute settlement mechanism.” 

The provision was passed by a bipartisan coalition at the time. And the Trump administration, for its part, has continued to rely on the RRM as part of its broader trade policies. 

“You could imagine that they would say, ‘You know what? We don’t care about labor. Let’s wrap this stuff up and put our attention into tariffs,’” Claussen said. “But they didn’t.”

Rep. John B. Larson (D-CT) was one of the lawmakers who signed on to that letter and was involved in USMCA negotiations.

“President Trump doesn’t actually care about workers,” he said in an email to TPM. “He’s consistently attacked labor here at home, including trying to end collective bargaining rights for federal employees across the government.”

In 2019, the UAW was encouraged to see an emphasis on labor in the trade agreement, said Jason Wade, top advisor to the president of the United Auto Workers and an expert on the USMCA. But to him, Trump’s landmark trade deal doesn’t go far enough.

“We didn’t think on a whole the USMCA was going to materially change trade between the two countries, and disappointingly we were correct,” he told TPM.

Further complicating labor law enforcement is the Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce. While highlighting labor rights enforcement in Mexico, the administration put more stress on already deficient DOL sectors charged with enforcing the trade agreement.

Trump “essentially shutdown the Bureau of International Labor Affairs,” said Larson, “potentially allowing American jobs to be outsourced to countries that use exploitative practices like forced and child labor to gain an unfair advantage.”  

The slashing of funds for international labor initiatives mirrors the way Trump and his allies have defunded the NLRB, responsible for administering workers rights domestically, Wade said.

“In implementation, we do have stronger labor laws [than Mexico],” said Wade, “but, disappointingly, they’re becoming closer and closer everyday, and not in a good way.”