I (woefully) spent almost 3 years overseeing a sales/engineering team in Latin America. I’ll try to avoid descending into a political rant here.
In a nutshell, there is a direct analog to OSHA in Mexico, in charge of worker safety and adherence to safety standards. They also, just like OSHA, suggest NFPA 70E as a reference standard for electrical safety. In ADDITION, their equivalent to our Social Security Administration is also tasked with workplace health issues and has a separate team looking at adherence to safe workplace standards. So you would think it could actually be more stringent and if you ask for an official stance, it will actually sound as though it can be harder for employers to meet safety standards there than it is here.
But in what basically boils down to being a kleptocracy governmental system, how the standards are enforced is generally dictated by the size of the wheelbarrow carrying cash... I can’t count the number of times I was in a meeting room discussing a large project and was asked, by my local reps, to wait out in the hall while they did the “final negotiations” between the contractors, owners and government reps so that my company could maintain “plasible deniability” of what it took to get any project launched down there.
So I’ll put it this way. A RESPONSIBLE company in our country who is opening facilities there would be BEST SERVED by maintaining the same standards for worker safety in all of their facilities. Besides the morality issue a compelling economic reason is that should there be an accident and it is investigated by someone, like the press or a political opponent, and it is discovered that the Mexican facility was using lower standards for worker safety than their US counterparts in the same company, then the US company can quickly get pulled into a huge mess and lose a lot more than they may have thought they were saving.
