Emergency Briefing: Escalating Attacks on Mexican Labor Rights

Please join us for an emergency briefing to receive a real-time update from Mexican labor activists facing escalating threats as corporate bosses try to smash promised worker rights improvements.

The live online webinar will feature Susana Preito Terrazas, a leading labor lawyer for maquiladora workers just released after imprisonment on trumped-up charges and currently under threat of re-arrest, and Oscar Alzaga, a legal advisor to the independent Los Mineros union, which has long been subject to brutal oppression.

Emergency Briefing: Escalating Attacks on Mexican Labor Rights
What Trade Justice Activists Need to Know and How We Can Help

Thursday, July 16, 2020
12pm Eastern / 11am Central / 10am Mountain / 9am Pacific

>>> RSVP ONLINE HERE <<<

Speakers Include:

Susana Prieto, 20/32 Movement

Oscar Alzaga, Los Mineros

Cemelli de Aztlan, La Mujer Obrera

These attacks on Mexican labor rights coincide with the Trump administration’s heralding of the recently-revised North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA’s) new labor provisions — giving us a unique opportunity to draw attention to these cases and help make a difference.

In a frontal assault on maquiladora workers’ demands for better pay and for workplace safety in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, labor advocate Susana Prieto was arrested last month on trumped-up charges.

Though eventually released — an outcome aided by growing pressure from Mexican and U.S. activists like you — she now faces a new arrest warrant and harsh legal impositions designed to prevent her from supporting independent labor unions and to send a message to anyone else who might try.

What was Prieto’s alleged crime?  Attempting to register an independent union to replace a bogus “protection” union that was locking-in low wages at a U.S. factory in Mexico.

In recent years, at least five people associated with Oscar Alzaga’s union, Los Mineros, have been assassinated or disappeared for their organizing work at Torex Gold’s Media Luna mine in Guerrero.

Despite this extreme violence, Los Mineros continues to organize throughout Mexico. The union won a big victory against the Grupo Mexico corporation last year over profit-sharing payments to workers, and they continue to fight the company for adequate health and safety conditions at several of its mines.

Grupo Mexico’s U.S. subsidiary, Asarco, has also been the target of a contract-negotiation dispute with several U.S. unions. This led to a nine-month strike in Texas and Arizona that just ended earlier this month. The company’s CEO was among the corporate representatives invited to wine-and-dine with Presents Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the White House last week.

During a press conference last Thursday, President Trump boasted that the revised NAFTA deal “includes groundbreaking labor protections for workers.”  But those new standards won’t mean a thing for working people in Mexico, the United States or Canada unless they’re actually enforced.

Let’s use our grassroots power to hold elected officials accountable to their promise of improved labor standards for working people.

Please join us to get the latest on some of the most historic struggles for worker rights in North America — and learn how we can raise the heat on politicians and corporations to ensure that worker rights are respected.

RSVP for the briefing now.