NAFTA and the Emergence of Continental Labor Cooperation

Abstract

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. …