NAFTA
North America Free Trade Agreement
Mexico’s government said progress was being made toward revising a new North American trade pact that will sharply reduce protections for biologic drugs.
Mexico is willing to allow panels with US and Mexican judges to resolve labor disputes at specific factories but rejected requests to allow international inspectors to enter Mexican factories.
Generic versions of biologic drugs could come to market faster.
Adjustments could be made to how labor disputes are handled in the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement trade deal to help push through its ratification in the United States.
Progressive politicians need to not just react to the neoliberal trade agenda and its right-wing disruptors, but radically transform the rules governing North American trade.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cast doubt on the possibility of passing an updated North American trade deal by the end of 2019.
The head of the largest US union confederation urged House Democrats to withhold support for the stalled USMCA until the Trump administration makes more changes to the enforcement provisions.
Democrats say a deal to update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is close, but not “imminent,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said earlier.
Trump’s new United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement repeats the disasters of the original agreement.
AFL-CIO President met with House Speaker and Ways and Means Chairman to hash out labor’s concerns in ongoing discussions over President Donald Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA deal.
The new NAFTA must win approval in a divided Congress where Democrats control the House and have said they have concerns over the agreement, including its labor and enforcement provisions.
The signing of NAFTA in 1994 expanded the viability of the maquiladora industry. More importantly, it served to deepen uneven economic and political relationships between Mexico and the United States.
The US administration’s push is the latest salvo in a global fight over who sets the rules for the Internet.
The long-awaited response from US Trade Representative sets the stage for weeks of intense negotiations before a congressional vote on the agreement.
The National Farmers Union says the new deal’s extended patent protection for new pharmaceuticals must be reduced so that less expensive generic versions of new drugs can be available to consumers sooner.
Democrats’ key concerns are labor standards, prescription drug prices, environmental protections and concrete enforcement mechanisms.
We see the revision of NAFTA – rebranded as the USMCA (or T-MEC) – as another failure to respect the dignity of farmworkers, family farmers, Indigenous people, and the communities and territories in which we live.
Congressional Democrats appear to be moving from “no way” to “maybe” on President Donald Trump’s rewrite of a trade pact with Canada and Mexico.
We urge you to reject the USMCA and instead insist on new trade rules that would serve the interests of family farmers, ranchers, indigenous communities, farm and food chain workers, consumers and our environment in all three nations.
What Americans need is trade between the US and Mexico that benefits people in both countries. To do that, labor rights need to be harmonized to the best standards in North America, not slide to the lowest.
