Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Nancy Duran Rodriguez took several pairs of work gloves to Mexico in 2025, intending to hand them out as a goodwill gesture to fellow union workers she met there.
But Duran Rodriguez, a member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6787 in Burns Harbor, Indiana, discovered that some of her Mexican counterparts lacked even the most basic personal protective equipment to guard against heat, toxins, jagged objects, and other risks on the job.
Grateful workers there saw the gloves as a godsend, not souvenirs.
It’s a sobering reminder of how corporations continue to exploit Mexico’s low wages, poor working conditions, and lax enforcement of labor laws to oppress working families on both sides of the border.
Fortunately, we have an opportunity to change this. The USW, other unions, and our allies are pushing for meaningful improvements to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trade pact subject to “joint review” and modification by all three countries this summer.
The six-year-old USMCA replaced the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which emboldened greedy companies to abandon U.S. factories, shift hundreds of thousands of jobs to Mexico, and hollow out our manufacturing communities.
Although it represented a step forward, the USMCA has so far failed to end this race to the bottom. Employers keep ditching America and moving jobs to Mexico. Employers go right on victimizing Mexican workers, who still make a fraction of Americans’ wages and who still fight to form real, independent unions and stay safe on the job, even though the USMCA officially extended protections they never had before.
“They deserve the things we do,” said Duran Rodriguez, noting mill workers there make hundreds less per day doing the same jobs that Local 6787 members perform at the Cleveland-Cliffs complex in Burns Harbor.
“It’s not enough. They’re living day by day, just to be able to make it. It is definitely a struggle. It is something that needs to change,” she said, pointing out that lifting up Mexican workers, a key objective in the USMCA, remains the only way to end offshoring and bring prosperity to workers in all three countries.
Every April, the USW sends a delegation to Lázaro Cárdenas on Mexico’s Pacific coast to build on our decades-long alliance with Los Mineros, the Mexican mine and metal workers union.
After learning about shortages of personal protective equipment in 2025, Duran Rodriguez took only four outfits and filled the rest of her suitcase with gloves to distribute during her return trip with other USW members in April 2026.
These visits build cross-border solidarity, as Duran Rodriguez’s experience showed, and they include many inspiring moments, such as our annual march to remember two striking members of Los Mineros gunned down by police in 2006. Workers began the strike following a coal mine explosion that killed 65 coworkers and exposed the reprehensible disregard for safety in Mexican mines.
“It pumps you up,” Steven Minchuk, an assistant griever and safety trainer for Local 6787, said of the energy unleashed by the marches.
“They never forget,” Minchuk observed of the Mexican workers. “They keep fighting for their rights.”
The impact of worker exploitation touches many aspects of life in Mexico, depriving families not only of the means to support themselves but also to build healthier, more livable communities.
“It’s a whole different world,” observed Minchuk, a former firefighter and fire commissioner who once toured a Mexican fire station and walked away dismayed by what he saw. “The equipment that they had was comparable to ours in the 1960s and 1970s.”
The USMCA portended a hard break with all of this. That’s because the USW and our allies, such as then-U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, successfully fought to include pro-worker provisions in the final version of the agreement.
It required Mexico to pass a law affording workers the right to form the democratic, independent unions needed to negotiate better wages, win safer working conditions, and curb U.S. employers’ appetite for offshoring.
The USMCA also established a Rapid Response Labor Mechanism to investigate retaliation against union activists and punish violators. It set rules to keep other countries, such as China, from sneaking unfairly traded products into the U.S. via sham operations in Mexico.
But Mexico failed to hold up its end of the deal for political, financial, and logistical reasons. Just as disappointing, America and Canada failed to step into the breach and keep progress on track.
Now, as part of the USMCA review process, it’s essential to ramp up enforcement of labor laws in Mexico, to commit more resources to stamping out anti-union harassment and to deter would-be violators with swift, severe penalties.
But the review also needs to go beyond steps to safeguard rights and boost wages. It’s just as important to address Mexico’s lax environmental standards, which draw employers happy to do an end run around the more stringent regulations in America and Canada.
The USW and our allies will spend the next few months pushing officials in all three countries to adopt a more robust, effective USMCA.
Given the high stakes, there’s no breaking our will to see this through. It’s a battle that’s pumping all of us up.
“I believe every worker deserves the same protections, benefits, and dignity,” said Minchuk, noting he has a friend in Mexico who works three jobs to make ends meet. “No one should have to risk their well-being simply to provide for the people they love.”
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
