US labor mechanism addresses alleged violation of freedom of association by maquiladora

HERMOSILLO, Sonora ( Proceso ).– An unjustified dismissal at one of the most important maquiladoras on the border of Nogales, Sonora, triggered a monitoring mechanism contemplated in the USMCA that put the spotlight on possible violations of union freedom in Mexico.

The mechanism remains in place while the trade agreement review is pending, meaning the company's customs process is frozen. Meanwhile, the Sonora Attorney General's Office and the judiciary are accused of intimidating the labor leader to benefit the company's interests.

The dismissal occurred in 2023 at Amphenol Optimize, a company that manufactures cables and other equipment and exports them for use in industries such as aerospace and the military in the United States. Francisco Cota, one of those dismissed, told Proceso that it happened because he reported mistreatment by management.

“They didn’t give me any information about the dismissal (which happened the day after I filed the complaint), so I understood it was a form of retaliation. They terminated my employment, paid me in settlement, and that was the end of it, but I filed a complaint against them for discrimination,” stated the affected party, who holds both Mexican and U.S. citizenship.

Following the complaint, filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the neighboring country (EEOC), a law firm in the United States contacted Francisco Cota to offer compensation in exchange for withdrawing the legal action.

The news reached Amphenol's headquarters in Nogales, which is partly located within the industrial buildings of the city's public industrial park (those of the Nogales Industrial Park Operating Trust, FOPIN), and numerous workers began contacting Francisco to discuss alleged violations of their rights within the company.

Thus began, in early November 2023, the formation of a movement under the name of the O&M Industrial Union, which expects to receive its official certification as a union at the end of October and has more than 300 pre-affiliated members, while the total workforce of the company is around 5,000 people.

A review of the USMCA and an arrest warrant

On November 13, 2023, just days after the union began forming, the company filed a complaint against Francisco Cota with the Sonora Attorney General's Office for alleged extortion. They based their complaint on a series of emails sent in the context of the lawsuit in the United States and the offer of compensation, which Proceso obtained. According to these emails, the accused refused to drop the legal proceedings in the United States in exchange for a sum of money offered by the company.

In the messages, which were presented to the public prosecutor by the company's legal representative in Mexico, Francisco Cota communicates via email that he is willing to withdraw the complaint under an indemnity of 200 thousand dollars, while the original amount requested was 300 thousand.

This communication is preceded by another in which Ali Khorsand, Amphenol's representative in the United States, asks about the amount Francisco Cota is demanding to drop the lawsuit. "Before the mediation with the EEOC, can you please provide me with your settlement request?"

As a result, on April 14, 2025, Judge Giancarla Karina Ramírez Félix issued an arrest warrant for Francisco Cota for “extortion and any other crimes committed against Amphenol Optimize,” and ordered his immediate capture. The defendant's legal team then filed an appeal against Ramírez Félix's decision, which was admitted on June 20 under suspension incident number 410/2025-IV.

At the time the arrest warrant was issued against Francisco Cota, he was in Washington to present his case before the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (RRLM) inaugurated within the framework of the USMCA; this avenue is intended to be an "unprecedented procedure for resolving disputes in trade agreements" and its purpose is to enforce the provisions of chapter 23 of the trade agreement.

On May 9 of this year, once the review period for the situation raised by the general secretary of the O&M Industrial Union had expired, the US authority made public a statement on the matter in which a first measure was established.

“The United States has suspended the clearance of uncleared merchandise from the Amphenol plant, which manufactures connectors, antennas, cable assemblies, harnesses and other products for a variety of end markets, including the automotive and aerospace sectors,” the statement said.

Later, the official statement details that after the review it was determined "that there is sufficient and credible evidence of a denial of rights that allows the good faith invocation of enforcement mechanisms," so the US side sent a delegation to verify the situation in Nogales, Sonora.

Following this, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, responsible for enforcing the MLRR in Mexico, began an investigation that was supposed to conclude 45 days later, although the results of this investigation are not public.

“All I can tell you is that the investigation is still active because the company has not stopped harassing workers who want to join the movement,” said Francisco Cota.

Workplace harassment

In November 2023, when the union organizing began, 26 people interested in participating were fired from the company, according to Francisco Cota. This continued until the MLRR (Labor Movement Reorganization) became involved, at which point the fired employees were offered their jobs back. Of the total, however, only 9 returned because some had left the city and others had found other employment.

The union's origins lie in a series of alleged violations of workers' rights that have been documented over the past two years. Among the most common are instances of sexual harassment by supervisors and managers.

“Sexual harassment of female workers is extremely common. We have a specific person at one of our plants who is constantly using vulgar language and has no respect for personal space. He spends his time staring at women, touching them inappropriately, and has been repeatedly accused, but human resources does nothing,” said the organization's general secretary.

In addition, there are complaints of workplace harassment, situations in which those working on the production line are prevented from requesting leave as stipulated in the regulations because, if they do, they often face reprisals from their superiors. Cota says:

If you request a permit and the supervisor is forced to grant it, then, because you disrupted their line or whatever, they start putting you in a corner, isolating you, moving you around, telling you to go work there, to go work there. They make you pay for it in the end, so to speak.

The situation reached an extreme when multiple people, according to testimonies collected by the union and commented on by Francisco Cota without breaking their anonymity, denounced that the company uses what they call "illegal deprivation of liberty"; that is, detaining them to make them sign documents, such as their resignation.

According to information provided to Proceso, this involves locking the person in question in rooms whose doors have security codes known only to trusted personnel and leaving them there until they agree to sign the requested papers.

A new irregularity occurred, according to Francisco Cota: on September 28, he was summoned by a group of workers who claimed to be interested in receiving information about the union. They were to meet at 11:00 a.m. at a café in Nogales, Sonora, but these individuals did not appear. Instead, agents from the Criminal Investigation Agency arrived, arrested him, and transferred him to the city's Social Reintegration Center.

According to the detainee's defense, Cota was illegally detained from 2:00 PM to 8:30 PM. He was later released thanks to the aforementioned injunction.

The union issued a statement on October 13: “The O&M Industrial Union strongly condemns these actions that seek to intimidate and hinder the legitimate exercise of freedom of association in Mexico. We demand an immediate end to the persecution, guarantees for the physical and legal integrity of our general secretary, and compliance with the resolutions issued under the USMCA.”

Workers' Committee, "company union"

The context for the emergence of SIO&M is broader, and includes the Amphenol Workers Committee, a previously existing organization in the maquiladora's warehouses, and certified before the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration, whose modes of operation place it in the category of the so-called "white unions".

“The staff are taken to vote on the collective bargaining agreement, but the staff never elect the union secretaries or delegates; that's done by the company, and they do it through applications, as if they were job applications,” explained Francisco Cota. This “job application,” according to reports, is collected by the union leadership, who then select candidates, interview them, and, once the process is complete, give them six months to fill the position.

The current collective bargaining agreement was signed in 2019 and the latest review establishes that 83.4% of the workers with the right to vote approved what was negotiated, which also means 91.63% of the 2,462 votes counted.

This is stated in the minutes validated by Darío García Cedillo, director of the State Office in Sinaloa of the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration, who was the subject of controversy this year after applying for the position of circuit magistrate and appearing in the "cheat sheets" distributed in Culiacán.