Labor Transnationalism and Global Governance: The Impact of NAFTA on Transnational Labor Relationships in North America

NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism. By Tamara Kay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 310 pp., $31.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-13295-4). NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism by Tamara Kay contributes to the study of transnational movements, particularly labor transnationalism, and the impacts of transnational governance on their formation. The study covers primarily the period just before and during the first seven years of NAFTA (1994–2001). The author argues that despite their serious limitations, quite unexpectedly, the NAFTA process and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation nurtured labor transnationalism in North America. More specifically, “although the evidence supporting an economic explanation for NAFTA's effect is not terribly convincing, that for a political explanation is quite compelling” (p. 7). NAFTA “catalyzed labor transnationalism by creating two new transnational institutional arenas through which North American labor activists could engage each other” (p. 7). The first was the “transnational trade-negotiating field” (p. 8) and the second a “transnational legal field” (p. 10). Taking advantage of these fields, “unions with progressive leadership that granted key players the authority to direct and nurture relationships were more likely to engage in transnationalism than unions in which NAFTA was simply perceived as a threat” (p. 11). Transnational institutional fields are central to the explanatory scheme of the volume because they “create transnational opportunity structures by serving three constitutive functions: (1) constituting transnational actors and interests; (2) defining and recognizing transnational rights; and (3) adjudicating rights at the transnational level” (p. 16). In short, transnational fields allow for the bridging of the global and the local while the opportunity structures that emerge from them “create spaces where activists come together, mobilize, and develop their interests and identities in relationship to each other” (p. 21). However, the …

The article examines the responses of women's movements in Canada, the United States and Mexico to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from a comparative perspective. It argues that while some women's groups have raised important critiques of trade agreements from a feminist perspective, they have largely failed to make the gendered dimension of regionalization visible in public debate on NAFTA and have had virtually no impact on public policy. The nature of the women's movements in the three countries limited the possibilities of greater contestation of the form of economic liberalization at both the national and transnational levels. Drawing upon the literature on social movements, the article suggests that the ability of women's movements to respond to NAFTA was conditioned by: (1) the shifting universe of political discourse in each country - whether it permits the identification of macroeconomic policy as a gender issue - which is conditioned in part by the diverse forms of engagement with liberalism as a political philosophy in each country, and (2) the organizational structure of women's movements in each country, their relationships with their respective states, and their role within broader coalitions.

This article examines the compelling enigma of how the introduction of a new international law, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), helped stimulate labor cooperation and collaboration in the 1990s. It offers a theory of legal transnationalism—defined as processes by which international laws and legal mechanisms facilitate social movement building at the transnational level—that explains how nascent international legal institutions and mechanisms can help develop collective interests, build social movements, and, ultimately, stimulate cross‐border collaboration and cooperation. It identifies three primary dimensions of legal transnationalism that explain how international laws stimulate and constrain movement building through: (1) formation of collective identity and interests (constitutive effects), (2) facilitation of collective action (mobilization effects), and (3) adjudication and enforcement (redress effects).

More than a decade has now passed since the “Eurozone crisis.” Few words were more used than “populism” and “austerity” during this period. The former was weaponized by mainstream political forces to downgrade anyone who strived to express popular demands contra to the will of the supposedly independent markets.1 Austerity, for its part, was presented as a tough yet the only available medicine to reestablish market confidence and secure the viability and health of the financial system. The health of the markets and the financial system, however, has proved incompatible with both the health of democratic institutions and—literally—the health of citizens across Europe. The market constituency became superior to the original democratic constituency, the people.2Austerity pushed a growing number of people into poverty, especially in the peripheral countries—Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus—whereas European banks have been rescued and recapitalized. There have been major cuts to wages and pensions, social benefits, the health-care system coupled with an assault on labor rights and a massive rise in unemployment.3 The loss of prosperity and various rights produced mass anti-austerity mobilizations. The Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi are perhaps the most popular cases but the Portuguese Geração à Rasca, or the Irish Occupy in Cork and Dublin and the Right2Water protests, or, finally, the Cypriot Alliance Against the Memorandum, are not insignificant. These were some of the largest mobilizations in the histories of these countries, indicating that austerity policies suffered from a lack of consensus and legitimacy.The populist character of these movements and mobilizations is to be found in their basic claim that “the people had been betrayed by the political elites, which were held responsible for the socio-economic collapse and the hollowing out of democratic institutions.”4 The populist radical-left anti-austerity wave that emerged at this juncture expressed the demand to break with the austerity policies and offer an alternative vision. Their radicalism is located precisely in their aim to fundamentally challenge the neoliberal status quo and fight for a democratic renewal in the EU.5 In this context there have been various voices that saw in left populism a chance for the “democratic refoundation of Europe.”6My aim in this article is to explore the lessons that can be learnt for left-wing populism from the last decade of crises. Drawing upon the “Essex School,” populism is understood here as a political logic marked by the discursive construction of a popular subjectivity, a “we, the people” and its antagonistic other, a “they, the establishment.”7 “The people” in this schema is always the contingent product of a process of linking together a set of unsatisfied demands expressed by diverse groups through a shared opposition. When this populist logic is coupled with a desire to get to the roots8 of the problems of the existing system and transform it, we are faced with a more or less radical articulation of populism.9My main focus will be the case of Syriza and one of the key questions here is whether populism was responsible for the debacle of the Syriza-led government in the summer of 2015. Does Syriza's defeat prove the limitations of left-wing populism at the national level in fighting against policies that have been orchestrated and coordinated at the EU level? My hypothesis is that Syriza reflects a structural limit that all left populist forces on the national level are destined to confront. The article also reflects on the possibilities of expanding populism from the national to the transnational level.Few would deny that European democracy reached a dark moment during the Eurozone crisis. The overall management of the crisis has indeed produced an ever more postdemocratic union. One can understand postdemocracy as a “democracy after the demos,”10 a situation where “politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.”11 The European Union has always been marked by a governance without government, a lack of genuine European-level contestation over policy agendas and over executive office as well as a lack of real accountability.12During the epoch of the Troika, austerity, and the memoranda, all political energy was devoted to rescuing the banks, often at the expense of people's living standards, while democratic procedures have been repeatedly sidelined. Instead of the people, decisions have been taken as closely as possible to the markets.13 My argumentation here is twofold: on one level, the crisis opened the window for the introduction of a set of mechanisms and reforms to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), such as the Fiscal Compact and the European Semester.14 More sovereign decision-making powers have been handed to unelected bodies of the EU such as the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Stability Mechanism (ESM)/European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and the European Commission while new disciplinary and rescue mechanisms have been created. These measures have further reduced “the scope for national discretion over spending decisions regardless of electoral preferences.”15 On the second level, the operations of the Troika, that is the European Commission, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) responsible for the engineering, administration and monitoring of the aid packages, in the Programme Countries, namely Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus, and Spain, have been marked by a lack of transparency, to put it mildly.16 In the Programme Countries, then, a more authoritarian version of postdemocracy has developed whereas at the same time the whole Eurozone has undergone a process of strengthening and further institutionalizing postdemocracy.17What we have witnessed was a process of stripping away at democracy, a process that involved the disappearance of its basic component, “the people,” “both as an instance of symbolic legitimation and as an instance of real control.”18 It is precisely at this point that populism emerged with the aim to discursively construct a people in opposition to the power bloc—a technocratic postpolitical authority.19 Populism, in this sense, has been a response to the postdemocratic predicament and the subsequent legitimation crisis. It aspired to establish a rupture with the austerity consensus by demanding a recovery and expansion of democracy. Prodemocratic movements, such as the Indignados and Aganaktismenoi, under the slogans “they do not represent us,” “we, the people,” and “real democracy now!,” demanded the transfer of power from elites to the people.20 A left-wing, anti-austerity, populist wave was born in the wake of the economic and political crises.21 Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, both of which had strong presence in the aforementioned movements, with Podemos spawned from the Indignados, have been considered the most paradigmatic cases of left-wing populism emerging from this wave.22At this point a critical question needs to be raised: where does the power to resist austerity reside? And the answer that was given was the nation-state. Indeed, Cristina Flesher Fominaya indicates that the return of the nation-state as the main locus of mobilization is what characterizes the anti-austerity wave and what distinguishes it from previous ones, such as the Global Justice Movement.23 Given, for example, the supranational character of the Troika, this might be surprising especially in the domain of social movements. There have been exceptions, such as the Alter Summit and Blockupy, but in general, the popular dissent against austerity was expressed with the return of the nation as the principal arena of struggle.24 In the institutional realm, this appears more reasonable because representation on the transnational level does not really exist.25Syriza's electoral triumph in Greece in January 2015 represents the peak of this wave, at least in its institutional/electoral form, as it became the first populist radical-left party in government in Europe. This gave rise to the belief that positive developments for left populist parties in Europe and in particular for Podemos in Spain and Sinn Féin in Ireland were on the way. Both of these countries were about to hold elections in the upcoming year, in December 2015 and February 2016, respectively. A European “pink tide”—à la Latin America of the 2000s when left populist governments were united under a shared anti-neoliberal agenda—was in the making. The success of such a project, though, depended largely on the outcome of Syriza's endeavor.Populism was without a doubt a defining characteristic of Syriza's discourse when in opposition and it continued occupying center stage after winning the elections.26 Syriza formed a government with Anel (Independent Greeks), a right-wing anti-austerity party with strong nationalist and arguably populist elements. Apart from the fact that this coalition proved the strength of the pro- versus anti-austerity cleavage in that particular context, we also see that for Syriza this was an opportunity to expand its social base beyond their traditional left supporters. Populism was instrumental at this point. Although the discursive approach sees the equivalential logic of populism operating at the societal/grassroots level, one could apply it here to the coalition-building process at the level of political parties.27Now, one could argue that being in government and populist at the same time constitutes a paradox because coming to power makes a populist force part of “the establishment.” Yet things are more complicated, and we should note that being in government is not necessarily synonymous with being in power. A political party in government, therefore, can still utilize a populist antagonistic logic to form its discourse. This was played out in the case of Syriza with ministers reporting that their administration was being held hostage by domestic and European politico-economic elites.28 The first six months of Syriza's tenure were marked by a confrontation between a populist form of politics aiming to represent the voice of the people, and a more institutionalist form of politics bound to protect the rules of the political game and ensure that business will continue as usual.29The continuing deadlock in the negotiations was designed to exhaust and destabilize the Syriza-led government.30 The solution to the impasse came in June 2015 when the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras announced a snap referendum on the creditors’ demands, intending to put “an end to the blackmail.”31 A campaign of terrorization of the Greek people was put in place. The ECB stopped access to the Emergency Liquidity Assistance, leading to the shutdown of the banks and the imposition of capital controls.32 The president of the Commission urged the Greek people to support the new austerity package by stressing that “you mustn't commit suicide because you are afraid of death . . . You must vote yes, independently of the question asked.”33 Mainstream public discourse in Greece, from the media to former prime ministers and even pop stars, were all pushing for a Yes vote interpreting the question as a Yes or No to Grexit.34 Syriza, for its part, insisted that the referendum concerned the terms of the Troika's ultimatum and a No vote would strengthen the negotiating position of the Greek government.35On the 5 July 2015, the Oxi (No) camp won with a resounding 61.31 percent. This No could be construed as a denial of the postdemocratic austerity consensus in the EU, without, however, “any positive indication of the way forward.”36 In other words, the Greek citizens did not know with any certainty where this No could lead them, but they knew precisely and unambiguously after five years of brutal austerity what a Yes vote would entail.However, the No meant little to the EU. After a Euro Summit on 12 July, Greece was threatened with exit from the Eurozone and forced to accept a harsher bailout agreement.37 The rationale of this outcome can be summarized in the words of Slovakia's Finance Minister, Peter Kažimir: “tough for Athens because . . . of their ‘Greek Spring.’”38 Some commented that “the dark forces of the EU have subjected Greece to a coup.”39 The hashtag #ThisIsACoup was the second top trending topic worldwide and top in Greece and Germany.40 For the Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, however, rather than being a coup this was “a typical European arrangement.” The third bailout agreement included the signature of Syriza, forcing it to implement the failed austerity policies that it had been opposing for years. Neither the radical left party nor its leader took ownership of this bailout package.41For Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's finance minister until the night of the July referendum, what followed was a “curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people.”42 It is ironic that Syriza's rise was mostly due to its struggle to put “the people” on the stage again and during its first term in office there was indeed a strong desire of “the people” to participate and support its government on the streets. Put differently, “the people” that Syriza called upon aspired to control its historicity, understood in Alain Touraine's terms as society's capacity for self-production, that is to “act upon themselves and produce their future.”43 With the capitulation of Syriza, “the people” were left again with a hopeless and melancholic impression that they cannot contest the course of historicity.Some argue that this traumatic experience confirms the deterministic arguments that populism always fails when in government as “its own inability to live up to its promises” is revealed.44 Indeed, some scholars responded to the capitulation of Syriza by sounding the death knell of left-wing populism.45 For instance, Cas Mudde described Syriza's debacle as “the failure of the populist promise.”46 The formal approach to populism, however, allows us to escape reductionist views that attach this phenomenon to specific outcomes or make it synonymous with demagogy and overpromising. Populism from this point of view is defined as a discursive logic that links different demands and identities into a common chain producing a popular subject, “the people,” antagonistically to an elite. One could follow Giorgos Venizelos and Yannis Stavrakakis in wondering whether it was populism responsible for Syriza's devastating outcome. As they maintain, “Syriza's failure is not rooted in its populism.”47 In fact, populism in this case flourished, because Syriza proves, on the one hand, that populism at the national level is capable of creating a chain of equivalence between diverse struggles that can lead to electoral victories. On the other hand, these victories at the national level are not enough, because the decision-making process takes place elsewhere. As such, Syriza reflects a structural limit that all left-wing populist forces in the EU countries inevitably face. Hence, to return to Mudde's blunt aphorism, it may be more accurate to characterize this defeat not as the failure of the populist promise per se, but “the failure to have a successful (progressive) populism in government, in one country.”48A circle was closed for left populism in the summer of 2015. Syriza's U-turn had a negative impact on Podemos and Sinn Féin, which had to readjust and moderate their strategy and program.49 The European “pink tide” crashed before it was even born. The defeat of Syriza reveals the limits of national politics. The dispersion of power from the national level to the supranational and intergovernmental institutions of the EU and its subsequent divorce from politics that remained tethered to the national and local levels became yet again evident.50 The hope that their remarriage can take place in one state faded. Nevertheless, there was a small but not insignificant victory of Syriza, which consists precisely in the fact that it unmasked the postdemocratic face of the EU and the ruthlessness of the authoritarian turn in the Troika countries. In so doing, it contributed to the politicization of the EU and the Europeanization of problems related to debt, banks, and poverty, which have mostly been considered national issues.Perhaps one of the most crucial lessons that this case teaches us is that under neoliberal globalization, issues of democracy, sovereignty, and mobilization have been posed anew and problems related to them—but also to debt, poverty, migration, and the environment, among others—are not national problems anymore. They are transnational ones, and thus potential solutions to them cannot be found within the narrow confines of the nation-state. This brings forward a strong normative hypothesis that those who believe in the radical democratic potential of left populism have to start thinking of this phenomenon in transnational terms.Transnational populism may sound like contradictio in terminis, in particular for those who maintain that populist politics cannot take place outside the nation-state.51 After all, it is true that the populist construction of “the people” usually takes place within a national context simply because we still live, banally speaking, in a world of nations. However, I argue that the Essex School of Discourse Analysis offers the safest path for making the idea of transnational populism thinkable.52 This is due to the detachment from particular site-specific, ideological or any other content. Put differently, there is no predetermined essence, ideas or elements that accompany “the people,” which is the always contingent outcome of bringing together heterogeneous demands and groups into a common chain.53 This can take many different routes at many different levels: from national to local and various regional levels.To better grasp the specificity of transnational populism, it is important to distinguish it from two other possible forms of populism beyond the national level, namely the international and the postnational. To begin with, the international form entails a flexible collaboration between national peoples, parties and/or movements.54 A postnational articulation of populism would strive to construct a homogeneous postnational identity that would negate the heterogeneity of national identities. It would focus on going beyond the level of the nation-state. A transnational populism, in my view, brings those two moments together; it means between, but also beyond, the nation-states, involving the construction of a popular identity that, although it moves beyond the national borders, does not aim to replace national identities but rather to supplement them.55 Whereas both and postnational a common in one postnational in the transnational populism entails “a people” that is as a of a postnational populism are yet to cases of international and transnational populism do One is the of is to Syriza's It was formed as a response to what after the July With an on an international against the elites across the ECB and the aspired to with this gave its place to a more against the EU, with many involved in this the position of the EU and going back to the As the national arena and it is As such, international populism in a between national national peoples, which in a of national politics without the to beyond this of the moment of Syriza's is a paradigmatic case of transnational This was by the Yanis and the and political in February the from the national to the transnational level as the main arena of This was mostly by the failure of national to have any real The aim of has been to expand the populist of the anti-austerity wave to the European level by a Indeed, the demand to the back to democracy against the European Union that sees people power as a to its with the demand for an EU that the people not against the people” the populist character of In a more formal discourse is upon the populist logic an antagonistic between two opposing “we, the people” and “they, the establishment.” The idea put forward is that there is an to beyond the of national to an alternative and thus to construct a transnational people in the of democracy against what they as transnational people that to construct is of and “the all those who from austerity, the and genuine the other end of the the elites that the a of and institutions both national and transnational logic is the of the status national and transnational elites, the without It is crucial to note that a transnational fight against both national and transnational of discourse that in this article is the idea of a that this to to popular democratic and even to national are often but for the only be through struggles that are the European at the European level with “a sovereign European people” is presented as the for the of at the national A of is because “the of and . . . is no with a democratic As to the that such as national still is is with the of a European people and it an has taken place in the EU on the one hand, a further of postdemocracy with the of the executive with the of national as well as with the Europeanization of the policies the European and the Fiscal On the other hand, the Troika's in the Programme a more authoritarian turn with an and of It is this context of economic and political that populism back on the The radical left populist anti-austerity wave, from the various movements and mobilizations to the electoral played an important in the produced by the policies of austerity and the with formal politics due to the way that the crisis was into to the hollowing out of the people, left-wing populism the by discursively a people and demanding to put the back into failure of Syriza forces us to the limits of populism, or more of populism on the national The construction of “a people” at the national level is not to fight against policies that have been orchestrated and coordinated at the EU The main point here is that you have an you to to up to and the is the neoliberal one needs to on the transnational level, because these are transnational This might that we new forms of radical politics that the transnational level, not only to get to the of the but also to them and produce real populism can be as a In this I have on the specificity of transnational populism, that a transnational people does not a postnational that would national identities. It would rather with diverse national leading to a of shared This is in the discourse of that is the populist antagonistic a common identity that, although going beyond national does not aim to replace national offers a key case for the phenomenon of transnational populism, its potential and its The fact that forces like have to within a world where the nation-state is still makes the construction of a transnational people a This with its and might electoral in the European a that beyond the scope of this On a more positive such can to the of an transnational public where political their for Europe as well as to the expansion of democratic politics on the EU Although might not be to the of Europe and the fight for a more democratic EU in this of transnational populist mobilizations.

Despite being one of the few existing international labor rights agreements, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) — the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) labor ‘side’ agreement — has garnered little appreciation from either activists or scholars. Upon NAALC’s establishment in 1994, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization’s (AFL-CIO) Lane Kirkland called the accord a ‘bad joke ... a Rube Goldberg structure of committees all leading nowhere’ (Grayson 1995: 177). The dismissal of NAALC rests above all on the accord’s absence of binding authority. Although it liberally allows individuals or NGOs to file petitions of labor rights violations before specially created quasi-judicial bodies, the latter cannot compel compliance nor issue sanctions. Despite frustrations with the process, North American activists have raised over 30 petitions from 1994 through 2007. In so doing, they have contradicted the negative assessment of NAALC by effectively using citizen petitions to mobilize added political pressure on recalcitrant local agencies, federal agencies, and private companies. For example, a petition challenging the State of Washington’s treatment of migrant apple pickers prodded the state government to increase its enforcement of health and safety regulations and one of the major packing companies to accept a card-signing initiative from the Teamsters to unionize the plant. Notwithstanding, then, NAALC’s limitations, its citizen-petition mechanism presents a significant transnational political platform for challenging neoliberal-style economic integration.

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

Global governance is no longer a matter of state cooperation or bureaucratic politics. Since the end of the cold war, advocacy groups have proliferated and enjoyed increasing access to global governance institutions such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations climate conferences. This special issue seeks to push theories of interest groups and international non-governmental organizations forward. We argue that the advocacy group effects on global governance institutions are best understood by examining how groups use and shape domestic and global political opportunity structures. The individual articles examine how, when, and why domestic and global political opportunity structures shape advocacy group effects in global governance, across global institutions, levels of government, advocacy organizations, issue areas, and over time. As special interests are becoming increasingly involved in global governance, we need to better understand how advocacy organizations may impact global public goods provision.

In the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—the concrete embodiment of globalization in North America—had the unanticipated consequence of catalyzing labor transnationalism among key Mexican, United States, and Canadian unions and union federations. I argue that NAFTA stimulated transnationalism by creating two institutional fields—transnational trade-negotiating and legal fields—that provided new arenas for workers to build collective interests, strategies, and trust. In this chapter, I revisit these issues by examining whether transnational ties have been relevant to the negotiation and/or enforcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced NAFTA when it entered into force on July 1, 2020. I show that labor transnationalism continues to be an important factor in efforts to strengthen labor rights and improve working conditions across North America, even though some relationships waned as NAFTA’s labor side agreement proved ineffective in this effort.

Global Governance

Trump, Trade, and Trabajo:Renegotiating NAFTA's Labor Accord in a Fraught Political Climate Lance Compa* I. INTRODUCTION Quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and demanding renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—along with its supplemental labor pact, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC)—were among the first actions of the new U.S. Administration in 2017.1 NAFTA renegotiations concluded—for the time being—in October 2018 with announcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to replace NAFTA.2 Controversial proposals on the bargaining table contained important implications for employment, labor rights, and labor standards in North America. This paper reviews the status of negotiations, the risks of losing the first-ever international instrument linking trade and labor standards (despite its flaws), and the options for preserving and strengthening trade-labor linkage in a new agreement. [End Page 263] NAFTA renegotiation is a moving target, hard to hit in a definitive way given the volatility of the U.S. administration. Throughout 2017 and 2018, each week brought new tweets, new twists, and new threats to undo NAFTA.3 Less than three weeks after celebrating the USMCA, President Donald Trump threatened to cancel it if Mexico did not stop migrants from Central America moving toward the U.S. border.4 When Democrats re-took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2018 mid-term elections, some Democratic party leaders said they would block approval of the new trade agreement unless stronger labor protections were added.5 The version of this paper published in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies will likely be overtaken by later events. But the hope is that even a partial analysis of the renegotiation process can clarify the potential effects on workers and employers in North America and broaden debates about the relationship between trade and labor rights. Following this Introduction, Part II of the paper looks at NAFTA's labor side agreement and the resulting standards and obligations, institutional structure, and complaint mechanism. It also reviews labor rights advocates' use of the complaint system to advance their interests and a sample of cases to convey the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Part III moves to discussion of the current status of negotiations, continued flaws and failures in the three countries' labor law system, and challenges negotiators face in crafting a new labor accord. It also looks at key elements of post-NAFTA trade-labor agreements with other countries to see how they might influence the renegotiation process. Part IV examines how a renegotiated NAALC accord can fix flaws in [End Page 264] the original and add new features to advance workers' rights. Part V argues for the continuing vitality of the labor agreement and reviews key elements of the labor chapter in the new USMCA. II. LOOKING BACK A. Background At its inception in 1994, NAFTA was the first and only trade pact with a labor dimension. The United States, Canada, and Mexico were each other's largest trading partners. From 1989-1992, the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Carlos Salinas, and Brian Mulroney, all pro-business conservatives, put NAFTA together as a strictly commercial agreement without any reference to labor standards. Those three heads of state signed the continental trade agreement in August 1992. The Canadian and Mexican parliaments approved it in short order, but it took more than a year before the U.S. Congress approved it in November 1993, a year of political change and political battle over NAFTA's social dimensions.6 The three leaders signed NAFTA just as the 1992 U.S. presidential race was heating up. Labor, environmental, and human rights organizations pressured candidate Bill Clinton to repudiate the agreement in his campaign for the presidency. Critics charged that the agreement favored multinational corporations and investors at the expense of workers and the environment. At the same time, Clinton's candidacy relied heavily on financial support from important elements of the corporate and investment banking communities that supported the trade agreement. Clinton responded to both pro- and anti-NAFTA forces and opted to support the pact if supplemental accords dealing with labor and the environment...

The processes of globalization and trade regionalization are creating new forms of regional concentration of economic activities both within and across sovereign borders. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement has spawned cross-border strategic production alliances that impact economic development at both the subnational and transnational levels. This article examines the southern California/Mexico transnational apparel production network: NAFTA-era bi-national production alliances that are reconfiguring strategic apparel production districts, as well as the larger North American apparel commodity chain. Using the commodity chains framework, I analyze the importance of NAFTA as an intervening variable in the economic integration of North America's textile/apparel sector; the extent to which southern California apparel production has shifted offshore to Mexico; and the characteristics of post-NAFTA strategic production alliances. From this discussion I address more fundamental issues of economic development, namely how cross-border changes in the mix of high- and low-value production activities have reconfigured the southern California fashion and apparel production center, and garment-specific industrial clusters in Mexico, and enhanced the prospects for industrial upgrading in Mexico.

The central aim of this article is to analyse whether migrants based in two southern European countries attempt to engage in ‘transnational’ collective action in new political spaces opened up by the European Union. To what extent and in which ways do migrants living in Italy and Spain organise and act at the European level? This specific aspect of migrants’ mobilisation is discussed as part of a more general analysis of the organisational forms taken by migrants’ collective action, and the models of participation they face in their national host societies. My starting point is to look at the contextual factors that shape collective organisation, which I explore through the concept of ‘political opportunity structure’ adapted from my fieldwork observations. The migrants’ active response to multi‐levelled opportunities (ie. opportunities at both the nation state and transnational level) will be illustrated. In order to provide a more complete and dynamic approach, the different degrees of cultural ‘know‐how’ pertinent to engaging in social action will also be taken into account.

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on labor has been variously interpreted in terms of wage and employment levels as well as labor market structures in Canada, the United States and Mexico.(1) These studies tend to arrive at either positive or negative assessments of the consequences of NAFTA for nationally specific working classes. Less discussed, however, has been the transformative effect of the agreement on labor union structures, strategy and ideology on a continental scale.(2) Not only did NAFTA initiate downward pressures on wages and working conditions, encourage the ongoing restructuring of national employment patterns and restrict the bargaining position of organized labor, but these developments themselves have promoted reassessments in the Canadian, American and Mexican labor movements. These reappraisals have included a de-linking of unions from state and party institutions, a more active approach of the labor bureaucracy to organizing the unorganized, the empowerment of the rank and file, and an opening up to civil society and activist groups. Most significantly, NAFTA has brought the issue of continental labor cooperation to the fore of labor union strategy, not as a well-meaning moral duty or empty political slogan, but as a necessary and concrete tactic in the neoliberal era of the regionalized production system. Accordingly, NAFTA has encouraged the founding of trinational labor alliances to confront common employers as well as less formal linkages around specific problems and broad-based lobbying and mobilization coalitions. If the crafters of NAFTA sought the continentalization of governance from above, then labor is attempting a catch-up game of governance from below. Key to the trajectory of this phenomenon has been the ineffectiveness of the labor side agreement in NAFTA, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), in establishing an arena for the exercise of depoliticized, institutionalized governance. Arguably, the absence of a binding labor regulation regime in NAFTA, and the refusal of elites to negotiate the like in future trade deals, has further promoted labor union contestation and the emergence of independent governance from below. Thus the destructive effects of NAFTA on the Canadian, American and Mexican working classes relevant, but only give us half the story; paradoxically and completely unintentionally, NAFTA has also led to a creative-destructive process that in many ways promises the revitalization of the North American labor movement. Most observers of the impact of free trade on labor agree on the central role of competition in this dynamic: by liberalizing and widening markets, trade agreements such as NAFTA increase competitive pressures in the labor market. Various interpretations derived from this fact, however. The dominant view, embracing a surprisingly wide range of analytical frameworks, emphasizes the cross-border conflict that this competition engenders between national working classes. Bob Milward argues, from a Marxian perspective, that labor unions are in direct competition for the jobs of their members with the workers in underdeveloped economies and therefore, there appears to be no coincidence of interest.(3) Liberals also have argued that workers cannot bridge the North-South divide because, as Sylvia Ostry argues, they competing, and in southern countries their governments competing ferociously for foreign investment.' Others have emphasized cultural and linguistic cleavages as well as the enormous asymmetry of living conditions between the North and the South as barriers to cooperation.(5) Antonio Negri, an intellectual linked to the explicitly internationalist anti-corporate globalization movement, has even declared the definitive end of working class internationalism.(6) According to this understanding of labor competition, cooperation between labor unions and the emergence of governance from below as reactions to NAFTA appear unlikely if not impossible. …

Under what conditions are members of Congress and the president (political elites) responsive to social movements and when do social movements gain access to members of Congress and the president? This research explores the ebb and flow of political elite responsiveness to social movements, and social movement access to political elites, through a longitudinal analysis of one of the waves of the women's movement: 1890-1920. It focuses on the political opportunity structure as a determinant of the degree of responsiveness and access, and of relations between social movements and political elites. The political opportunity structure is a term used to describe the political climate and institutional arrangements of a political system. It is composed of the level of electoral stability, level of unity among elites, mass opinion, and powers granted to party leaders. Findings include that the political opportunity structure (POS) was a key determinant of the relations between the women's movement and political elites, and more generally, of relations between political elites and social movements. Under an open POS the women's movement gained more access to and response from Congress and the presidency than under a closed POS. During an open POS members of the Congress and the president were in need of the resources that the women's movement offered (members, votes, issues). Thus, the women's movement had increased political leverage with political elites under an open POS. The disfranchisement of twelve millions of people, who are citizens of the United States , should command from us immediate action. Since the women of this country are unjustly deprived of a right... common justice requires that we should submit the proposition for a change in the fundamental law to the State legislatures, where the correction can be made. (Favorable Committee Report of the Judiciary Committee, January 13,1890

While it is widely believed that the ongoing transformation of the global economy and the accompanying fragmentation of capitalist production is undermining solidarity, cohesion and trust among workers, this article presents a contrasting perspective: my main argument is that conflicts between capital and labor are complex processes that can serve as catalysts for fostering both solidaristic trust among workers as well as antagonistic trust between capital and labor representatives. While these varieties of trust are in a certain political tension with each other, they both point to the fact that conflicts play a crucial role in politicizing workers and revitalizing their collective power at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels of the production process. What is at stake in these conflicts is not only collective bargaining, but also how the “political” of labor is constituted under conditions of the global capitalist production, namely via the (re)construction of political consciousness and common identities among workers in daily practices. I develop this argument theoretically by drawing on organizational, industrial, and conflict sociology as well as social movement studies and underpin it empirically with reference to three qualitative and ethnographic research projects on trust and capital–labor conflicts at national and transnational levels. As I show, trust and (class) conflict are not mutually exclusive, but can reinforce each other dialectically, true to the motto: In conflict, we trust!