NAFTA’s Side Agreement on Labor: Sidelined Forever?

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.