Trump Has Unlikely Ally on Salaries: Mexico's Leftist Candidate
Trump Has Unlikely Ally on Salaries: Mexico's Leftist Candidate
(Bloomberg) -- One of Donald Trump’s most vocal opponents, Mexican presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said he sees eye to eye with the U.S. president on one point: raising wages of his nation’s workers.
"I hear President Donald Trump is proposing to improve salaries of Mexican workers. On that topic we can agree," Lopez Obrador said at an event of the American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico. Nafta "in as much as possible, should seek to level salaries, because wages in our country are very low."
Lopez Obrador, who’s slammed Trump for his "campaign of hatred" against Mexican immigrants, found common ground on a topic that the U.S. has tried to insert into Nafta talks. In contrast, Mexico’s current administration has resisted setting salaries at a certain level or lifting Mexico’s minimum wage for industries like car output as policy in Nafta talks, maintaining that such decisions should belong to companies and should be determined by the market.
Polling 13.5 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival in Bloomberg’s Poll Tracker, Lopez Obrador said he’d like to see a new Nafta accord signed after the July 1 election, and called on Mexico’s government to inform the public about how negotiations are advancing.
"There should be more information to prevent surprises with an accord that doesn’t benefit the productive sector of our country," Lopez Obrador said. He’s threatened to reopen negotiations if he concludes that an accord signed before the election doesn’t benefit Mexico.
--With assistance from Eric Martin
To contact the reporter on this story: Nacha Cattan in Mexico City at ncattan@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Vivianne Rodrigues at vrodrigues3@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson
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