Career Biography

Carlos L. Cabrera Urbina is a Mexican labour and employment attorney with more than a decade of experience in collective labour relations, union negotiation and dispute resolution across the public and private sectors. He holds a law degree with honours from Universidad La Salle and completed a Master’s programme in Human Rights and Individual Guarantees at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), complemented by advanced studies in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University in Washington, D.C.

Carlos built the foundation of his career at Mexico’s Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, where he served during most of the 2012–2018 federal administration, a period that recorded one of the lowest numbers of federal strikes in Mexico’s modern history. In 2018, he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Undersecretary of Labour, where he coordinated a senior conciliation team dedicated to preventing strikes at some of the country’s most prominent companies. In that role, he served as a key interlocutor with Mexico’s most representative unions.

Since 2019, Carlos has applied this institutional experience to advising employers, both as outside counsel and in-house. As Senior Associate at Monsalvo Duclaud, he co-led the firm’s Collective Labour Law practice alongside the Senior Partner, designing negotiation strategies with unions and worker associations, preparing collective bargaining agreements, and structuring litigation defence and settlement schemes.

Prior to his current role, he served as Employment and Corporate Counsel at Rheem Manufacturing, managing company-wide collective labour disputes and overseeing collective bargaining across multiple manufacturing plants in Mexico. Today, as Legal Partner Director at MetLife Mexico, Carlos leads the company’s Labour and Employment function, advising all business lines on labour and social security matters and directing the company’s labour litigation.

Throughout this trajectory, Carlos has designed high-level strategies to prevent and resolve collective conflicts, including handling special collective proceedings under the labour justice framework introduced by Mexico’s 2019 labour reform. His work consistently combines regulatory compliance with business priorities, safeguarding operational continuity, mitigating legal and reputational risk, and strengthening long-term relationships with key stakeholders.