The Office of the United States Trade Representative is looking at whether workers at a Mondelēz confectionery plant in Mexico are being denied the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining.
USTR has asked Mexico to review whether workers at the plant are indeed “being denied the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining.” The country has 10 days to agree to conduct the review and 45 days from Dec. 12 to complete it.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has “suspended liquidation of unliquidated entries of goods from the Mondelēz facility, which manufactures confectionery goods, beverages, and other food products,” USTR’s news release said.
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Liquidation refers to the “conclusive determination of duties, taxes, and fees owed on an entry,” according to the website legalclarity.org.
A labor committee co-chaired by USTR and the Labor Department received a petition from a Mexican union last month alleging ongoing denials of rights at the facility in Puebla.
“The petition alleges that Mondelēz and the incumbent union at the facility have violated workers’ rights by interfering in union activity and retaliating against workers because of their attempts to organize an independent union at the facility, including through threats, denial of access to the facility, discriminatory job reassignments, firings, and layoffs,” the news release said.
According to USTR, the labor committee "determined that there is sufficient, credible evidence of a denial of rights enabling the good-faith invocation of enforcement mechanisms.”
The request for review "encompasses all actions taken by the company or the incumbent union to intervene in, interfere with, or prevent workers from engaging in freedom of association and collective bargaining activities at the facility, including by misinforming workers about their union rights, threatening workers, pressuring or coercing workers to refrain from supporting their preferred union, disparaging and denying facility access to that union, and engaging in retaliatory firings and job reassignments," according to the request.
USTR is using the rapid response labor mechanism in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement to make the request.
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