Abstract
Turning to the labor side agreement, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), which is its official name, became the NAFTA “black sheep.” It took a Mexican legislation, on November 13, 2012, which became the country’s first labor law in 42 years, to fully expose why this was so. This chapter’s four findings echo the legislation’s conclusions: (a) failure to subordinate corporatism—the type of interest intermediation in which a noncompetitive monolithic union works with the government to safeguard worker rights;1 (b) inability to level the North American playing feld—which disadvantaged Mexican workers from the very start by stigmatizing them as permanent less developed country (LDC) representatives, ostensibly exploiting economic opportunities of their northern developed neighbors; (c) side agreement subordination—by adopting too loose enforcements and not making any provisions binding; and (d) energizing societal actors more than state-led labor-reform action—a setting through which state institutions were bombarded with complaints when they had neither the interest nor the authority to do anything, a plight from which LDC Mexico was targeted disproportionately more than the developed countries (DCs) Canada and the United States by societal groups in all three of these countries.
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Notes
On corporatism, see Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the century of corporatism?” The Review of Politics 36, no. 1 (June 1974): 85–131.
The lawyer was Arturo Alcalde. From Robert A. Pastor, “Labor as center of integration process,” North American Free Trade: Assessing the Impact, eds., Nora Lustig, Barry P. Bosworth, and Robert Z. Lawrence (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1993), 188.
Effectively portrayed in NAALC, Commission of Labor Cooperation, North American labor markets: A graphical portrait (Washington, DC: CLC, 2004).
Ross Perot, Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must be Stopped—Now! (New York: Hyperion, 1993).
Barbara Hogenboom, Mexico and the NAFTA Environmental Debate: The Transnational Politics of Economic Integration (Utrecht, Netherlands: International Books, 1998.
From Joaquin F. Otero, “The North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation: An assessment of its first year’s implementation,” Columbia Journal of International Law 33 (1995): 637–62.
Isabel Studer, Scott Otterman, and Sharon Nuskey, Migrant Workers’ Rights in North America: Comparative Guides to Labor and Employment Laws in North America (Washington, DC: Commission for Labor Cooperation, 2010).
Marisa von Bülow, Building Transnational Networks: Civil Society and the Politics of Trade in the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 6.
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2005), 107;
and Kathryn J. Ready, “NAFTA: Labor, industry, and government perspectives,” The North American Free Trade Agreement: Labor, Industry, and Government Perspectives, eds., Mario F. Bognanno and Kathryn J. Ready (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1993), 14–17, but see ch. 1.
They were also relevant, for similar reasons, to Chile when it was being considered for NAFTA inclusion. See Alejandra Mizala and Pilar Romaguera, “Protection and labor standards,” Latin America and the Global Economy: Export Trade and the Threat of Protectionism, ed., R. Fischer (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), ch. 8.
Tamara Kay brings this out vividly in NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Lance A. Compa, “The first NAFTA labor cases: A new international labor rights regime takes place,” United States-Mexico Law Journal 3 (1999): 159. Also see his “NAFTA’s labor side accord: A three-year accounting,” NAFTA Law and Business Review of the Americas 3, no. 3 (1997): 6–23, from: http://digitalc-ommons.ilr.cornell.edu/articles/343, last accessed November 8, 2012, from Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations site; and “NAFTA side-agreement sidelines labor rights,” UE International, n.d., from: http:/&/ www.ueinternational.org/trade/nafta.php, last accessed November 8, 2012.
Clyde Summers, “NAFTA’s labor side agreement and international labor standards,” Journal of Small and Emerging Business Law 3 (1999): 173.
On this point, see D. Michael Dale, “NAFTA labor side agreement strategy begins to bear fruit,” Guild Notes 32, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 19.
Diana Chew and Richard A. Posthuma, “International employment dispute resolution under NAFTA’s side agreement on labor,” Labor Law Journal 53 (2002): 38–44.
Richard G. Harris and Nicolas Schmitt, “The consequence of increased labour mobility within an integrating North America,” North American Linkages: Opportunities and Challenges for Canada, ed., Richard G. Harris, The Industry Canada series (Calgary, AL: University of Calgary Press, 2003), 348–9, but see ch. 8.
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© 2015 Imtiaz Hussain and Roberto Dominguez
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Hussain, I., Dominguez, R. (2015). NAFTA’s Side Agreement on Labor: Sidelined Forever?. In: North American Regionalism and Global Spread. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493347_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493347_7
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