Mexico.- Authorities from Mexico and Guatemala have agreed on the creation of an intergovernmental group to exchange information and documents, and on the implementation of temporary employment program for Guatemalans looking for a job in Mexico and vice versa.

After an employment tour through several Latin American Countries, the Labour and Social Security Secretary, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, highlighted the strengthening of the new stage of Mexico’s multilateral cooperation relationships.

Navarrete Prida signed a labour cooperation agreement with the Guatemalan Labour and Social Security Minister, Carlos Contreras. The objective is to design together active policies of labour mobility research, in order to face share challenges on this matter. Furthermore, they aim to guarantee decent labour conditions for temporary migrant employees from both countries, established the Mexican Secretariat of Labour and Social Security (STPS).

Among other aspects, it plans to create a labour observatory to analyse the conditions faced by immigrant temporary workers and to strengthen the mechanism through which labour migration flows between Mexico and Guatemala are supervised.

With this observatory they aim to access a labour certification system so that temporary immigrant workers may have a certificate that guarantees the quality of their knowledge and skills and, therefore, may have a better salary.

This inspection program is directed to guarantee human, labour and civil rights of immigrant temporary workers.

The agreement includes developing a bi-national pattern to register and authorize operations of recruiting agencies, so that the recruitment process may be performed in a legal, organized, fair and transparent way.

The agreement might be broaden to Honduras and El Salvador, said Navarrete Prida.

The Secretary of Labour also travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he met the Regional Director of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Elizabeth Tinoco, and the Argentinian and Brasilian Labour Ministers, Carlos Tomada and Manoel Dias.

During the Special Consultation Meeting of Latin American G20’s Labour Ministries, they agreed on a “very clear and programmatic agenda of concrete issues that put once again in the centre of public policies the employment issue, which, throughout the world, is the XXI century’s great challenge”, stated the federal public servant.

Those who are responsible for labour policies in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil work in the construction of a solid proposal for common labour problems for the ILO’s 18^th American Regional Meeting, which will take place in October 2014 in Lima, Peru. To that, the Meeting of G20 Labour and Employment Ministers, which will take place in September 2014 in Melbourne, Australia, must be added.

“This is not about setting a common bilateral agenda about issues that have limitations on themselves. The objective is to set a common position of the three economies towards the hemisphere and towards a long term working program in the International Labour Organization”, said Navarrete Prida.

The public servant stated that the three countries will propose issues such as the access and formalization of employment, economic growth linked to productivity and its democratization, which’s benefits will generate a more egalitarian society.

Source: Notimex