This is from Lance Compa of Cornell Law School:
... a more than two-months-long strike provoked by a multibillionaire Mexican business tycoon has cast a cloud over the new trade pact’s provisions to strengthen workers’ rights. Citing management’s bad-faith bargaining, nearly 2,000 workers have walked picket lines since early October at Asarco, the Tucson-based subsidiary of the giant Mexican conglomerate Grupo México.
Now, the company has begun hiring strikebreakers. This move defies the new trade agreement’s requirement of adherence “in law and practice” to the International Labour Organization’s core labor standards. The labor chapter in the new NAFTA declares that “the right to strike is linked to the right to freedom of association, which cannot be realized without protecting the right to strike.”
Here is the relevant USMCA provision (some footnotes omitted):
Article 23.3: Labor Rights
1. Each Party shall adopt and maintain in its statutes and regulations, and practices thereunder, the following rights, as stated in the ILO Declaration on Rights at Work: (a) freedom of association6 and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
6 For greater certainty, the right to strike is linked to the right to freedom of association, which cannot be realized without protecting the right to strike.
Does hiring replacement workers violate the right to strike? My instinct is that it does not, but my only experience with this issue comes from the sports world, and I'm sure there has been an extensive debate about this somewhere.