The Legalization of Transnational Political Opportunity Structures: Mobilization of NAFTA’s Labor Citizen Petitions for Domestic Political Gain

Abstract

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.