This publication is a result of the collaboration between the Inter-American Dialogue’s Mexico Program and Grupo Estrategia Política (GEP) and presents key insights on the labor architecture of North America’s regional trade framework. It builds on the Program’s convening of five expert teams across labor law, industrial relations, public policy, and the perspectives of workers, employers, and government to assess the future of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) labor framework ahead of its 2026 review. It presents actionable policy recommendations to strengthen the agreement’s labor-related commitments and advance a more equitable, enforceable, and competitive North American labor regime. It was developed in collaboration with leaders and experts from the private sector, academia, think tanks, organized labor, and civil society across the three USMCA partner nations.
As North America approaches the 2026 review of the USMCA, the region faces both opportunity and urgency. Unlike its predecessor NAFTA, which relegated labor obligations to a side agreement without effective enforcement, the USMCA elevates labor rights to the main text in Chapter 23 and introduces unprecedented instruments—including the Facility-Specific Rapid Response Labor Mechanism in Annex 31-A, the worker representation commitments in Annex 23-A, and a forced labor import prohibition—that link market access directly to compliance. Yet as Mexico’s 2019 labor reform institutions face mounting budget, capacity, and security pressures, as RRM cases move increasingly from collaborative resolution to contested panel proceedings, as forced labor enforcement remains uneven across the three countries, and as recent unilateral trade actions raise questions about the durability of the agreement’s cooperative architecture, the labor disciplines must be clarified, recalibrated, and reinforced to ensure that worker rights, due process, and shared competitiveness continue to anchor regional integration.
This report outlines practical pathways for trilateral cooperation to help ensure that the labor commitments at the heart of the USMCA strengthen a more resilient and integrated North America.
