NAFTA and the politics of labor transnationalism

The 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its labor side agreement, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) was a watershed event for North American labor movements. As the controversial free trade agreement moved toward passage, some insisted that it would generate antagonism among North American unions and intensify tendencies toward economic nationalism by pitting workers against each other for jobs. Others warned of a backlash against Mexican workers and immigrants in the wake of potential job losses north of the Rio Grande. The possibilities for cross-border labor cooperation seemed bleak.; Analysis of how unions in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico actually behaved post-NAFTA shows that NAFTA actually had more nearly the opposite effect; it stimulated cross-border labor collaboration and cooperation among many North American unions, and began to erode union policies and discourses rooted in racism and economic nationalism. This dissertation examines the emergence of labor transnationalism in North America and its relationship to a new global governance institution, NAFTA. I focus on three empirically linked questions that emerge in NAFTA's wake: (1) "How did NAFTA help catalyze labor transnationalism in North America?" (2) "Why did NAFTA have a catalytic effect for some unions but not for others?" and (3) "What does the analysis of labor transnationalism tell us about transnational political opportunity structures?"; I argue that NAFTA and the NAALC stimulated labor transnationalism among North American unions by constituting a new political opportunity structure at the transnational level that facilitated the creation of a nascent transnational political action field through which labor activists could engage each other. NAFTA catalyzed labor transnationalism in two ways. First, its threat stimulated labor unions in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to mobilize trinationally to try to kill the free trade agreement. Second, NAFTA created nascent institutions through which labor activists could collaborate and through which they could build transnational relationships. NAFTA's catalytic effect was, nonetheless, limited. That is, it only generated transnational relationships among unions with certain preexisting and predisposing ideological and organizational characteristics.