The Office of the US Trade Representative has formally asked Mexico to review whether workers at Carolina Performance Fabrics are being denied their rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, invoking the rapid response labour mechanism of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
The mechanism is the sharpest tool in the pact: it allows complaints against individual facilities, sets Mexico a short clock to investigate and remediate, and ultimately permits the United States to suspend tariff preferences on the facility’s exports. It has been used repeatedly since 2021, most often in the auto supply chain, and its extension into textiles signals that no export sector is outside its reach.
Mexico must now decide whether to accept the review. Acceptance is the norm, and the findings will land in the middle of the two governments’ wider argument over trade, migration and cartel finance, which this week also brought US sanctions on a Cartel del Noreste racing enterprise.