This International Women’s Day, Partners of the Americas is excited to share one of its newest U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL)-funded projects in Mexico. This project will be the Child Protection Unit’s third project in Mexico promoting labor rights and acceptable conditions of work and will be implemented from December 2021 through June 2026. In addition to the U.S. Department of State-funded Mexico United 2026 project, and the USDOL-funded Mexico Awareness-Raising Project, this new project will support actions to increase the number of women in union leadership, strengthen protections, reduce workplace discrimination and harassment, and increase wages for women.
This project, which will take a worker-centered approach and engage a range of stakeholders to empower women, serves to further USDOL’s commitment to promoting labor rights in Mexico, in cooperation with the Government of Mexico. Mexico has a well-developed legal and regulatory system related to labor law and gender discrimination, including at the workplace. However, A 2016 survey conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) found that 3.5 million women (21%) in Mexico reported having experienced gender discrimination at work. Women’s labor force participation rate in the country remains low, at just under 41% of women over 15, according to the World Bank. Among working women, union leadership rates are low, presenting a challenge to the recognition of women’s needs and rights in the collective bargaining agreement and in the workplace.
This project will engage both working women and men, employers and employer associations, unions and worker organizations, and other key stakeholders to promote women’s empowerment and leadership, and prevent harassment and discrimination in the workplace. The project has been designed by Partners, in collaboration with local implementing partners and a dedicated team of gender experts, to accomplish two main objectives: 1. Worker organizations advance issues pertaining to women’s empowerment, including gender proportionality in leadership and participation in key activities, within their institutions; and 2. Worker organizations undertake sustained action to promote women’s empowerment in the workplace.
The project will work in the Valle de Mexico Metropolitan Area (ZMVM) and the states of Chihuahua and Jalisco. Within these regions, the project will focus primarily on the call center and electronic manufacturing sectors, which are also sectors prioritized in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
In addition to workers, Partners’ efforts will also target employers and worker organizations. The project will engage unions from the target sectors, as well as other worker organizations of varying sizes to increase the reach of project activities and objectives.
For over 18 consecutive years, Partners has implemented projects funded by USDOL’s International Labor Affairs Bureaus (ILAB). Partners supports ILAB’s mission to strengthen global labor standards, enforce trading partners’ labor commitments, and combat child labor abuses, forced labor, and human trafficking.
Funding is provided by the USDOL under cooperative agreement number IL-37953-21-75-K-. One-hundred percent of the total costs of the project or program is financed with federal funds, for a total of $10,000,000.00 U.S. dollars.