United Auto Workers leaders are meeting with Mexico’s independent autoworker unions in Detroit on Thursday, as the groups work to strengthen ties and increase labor’s power across North American supply chains.

What You Need To Know

  • United Auto Workers leaders are meeting with Mexico's independent autoworker unions in Detroit on Thursday

  • The groups are working to strengthen ties and increase labor's power across North American supply chains

  • Autoworkers in Mexico have been organizing since the 2020 enaactment of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement

  • The auto industry in Mexico employs about 109,000 people

The meeting will be led by members of UAW Local 600, based in Southeast Michigan, which represents over 30,000 of the nearly 1 million active and retired autoworkers in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

The auto industry in Mexico employs about 109,000 people and is growing. The world’s seventh-largest maker of passenger vehicles, it produces about 3.5 million vehicles each year, 76% of which are exported to the United States, according to the International Trade Administration.

Mexican auto workers began organizing unions in 2020, after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement took effect to grow the North American economy and support high-paying jobs for Americans. For Mexican workers, the USMCA allowed them “to challenge 100 years of corrupt practices in the country’s trade unions,” the UAW said in a statement announcing Thursday’s meeting.

Since it was enacted in 2020, tens of thousands of Mexican auto industry workers have formed unions to bargain contracts that have yielded wage increases as high as 30%, the UAW said.

Thursday’s meeting with union leaders from both countries comes as the UAW is working to organize non-union auto factories in the United States, after winning record contracts with the Big Three automakers in Detroit last year.

Earlier this week, workers at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee filed a petition with the National Labor Relations board to hold a vote on joining the union. The NLRB petition comes about a month after more than 10,000 workers at the Tennessee factory signed union cards indicating they planned to join the autoworkers union.

Earlier in March, 30% of workers at a Toyota factory in Missouri said they had signed union authorization cards. In February, a majority of workers at the largest Mercedes-Benz factory in the U.S., in Vance, Ala., announced they had signed cards to join the union.