USMCA Technical Assistance

In support of Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative (W-GDP), focusing on women and adolescent girls, EQUAL will increase job quality and safety, create opportunities for economic participation, and address gaps in social programs to reach remote and impoverished families in Mexico.

Senderos is a project in Mexico that involves multiple stakeholders in government, the private sector, and civil society working together to improve adherence to international standards on child labor, forced labor, occupational safety and health (OSH), and other acceptable conditions of work in the sugarcane and tobacco sectors in Jalisco and Nayarit.

This project enhances governments’ capacity to create, implement, and monitor the application of labor laws by working with ministries of labor, labor judges, and other judicial labor authorities. It seeks to use data collected from labor inspections to identify gaps that facilitate violations and to support legal reforms to address them. The project also uses data analytics to identify and combat labor inspection corruption, waste and inefficiency, and identifies regional inspection units in need of training and capacity building.

The Improving Working Conditions in the Mexican Automotive Supply Chain project is working to improve the quality of inspections and inspection follow-ups conducted by labor inspectors; strengthen government administration and coordination of the labor inspectorate and other institutions involved in labor law enforcement; and  strengthen the ability of labor courts and other institutions to effectively conciliate and adjudicate labor cases, including administration and coordination of union representation challenges.

Workers and civil society organizations help to supplement and support government labor law enforcement efforts by proactively identifying potential labor violations and filing justiciable complaints with the appropriate authorities.  This project works in U.S. trade partner countries to improve labor law enforcement, as well as compliance with labor-related U.S. trade provisions, by improving the involvement of workers and civil society organizations in this process.

The United States supports the goal of bringing meaningful change to the lives of the 152 million child laborers and the 25 million adults and children in forced labor around the world by eradicating child labor, forced labor and human trafficking.

Campos de Esperanza (Fields of Hope) is a project in Mexico that involves multiple stakeholders in government, the private sector and civil society working together to reduce child labor in migrant agricultural communities, particularly in the coffee and sugarcane sectors in Veracruz and Oaxaca. The project will link children and youth to existing educational programs and refer vulnerable households to existing government programs to improve income and reduce the need for child labor.