NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism (review)

Initiatives by leading capitalist actors to enhance their own profits and political power often trigger sustained opposition by a diverse range of discontent actors. Indeed, this long appreciated theme offers a crude, if incomplete, summary of Polanyi's idea of a "double movement." Thus, it is not surprising that the efforts in the 1990s by increasingly globalized manufacturing, service, and finance sectors to promote the enactment of ambitious neoliberal regional and global trade-investment regimes triggered vigorous protests in multiple parts of the globe. Fittingly, such developments stimulated a vibrant wave of scholarship on international political economy, social movements, and global civil society.¹ Surprisingly, this scholarship devoted little attention initially to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a forum for contentious politics. Compared to the European Union (EU) and, to a lesser extent, the World Trade Organization (WTO), NAFTA was the proverbial neglected stepchild. In fact, the NAFTA initiative of the early 1990s marked the first contemporary political struggle between advocates of neoliberal economic integration and a cross-border network of labor movements, environmental activists, and other social justice constituencies. Long before the 1999 "Battle in Seattle" over the WTO, there was the momentous fight over NAFTA.

Happily, NAFTA's marginal status has ended. In recent years, a number of monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles have assessed the myriad of ways in which activists have tried to instill a social agenda to counter NAFTA's neoliberal dynamics.² These works have deepened appreciation of the politics of NAFTA and our understanding of the evolving strategies of labor movements, environmentalists, and other social justice constituencies to adjust to a more globalized and neoliberal order. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the NAFTA arena offers a far more representative regional setting for observing the clash between neoliberal and social justice forces than the more frequently studied EU.³ Tamara Kay's NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism presents another valuable contribution. Her lively work provides a comprehensive narrative of NAFTA's impact in sparking and deepening cross-border solidarity between independent labor movements in Mexico, the most reformist wings of the US, and Canadian labor movements. Although somewhat thin in engaging scholarship on NAFTA, and on transnational activism, and globalization in general, Kay presents an intriguing account of how new regional economic institutions can instill corresponding regional strategies and identities among labor activists. Overall, this book will be well appreciated by both NAFTA specialists and scholars of transnational activism. However, she does stumble on one important point, which concerns the importance of a quasi-judicial institutional feature found in NAFTA's parallel labor accord. Because the matter raises important theoretical and political issues on how institutions matter and on what type of transnational mechanisms to support, I spend some time below critiquing this point.

The heart of the book is an in-depth case study of NAFTA's impact on cross-border labor activism in the three North American countries. Kay addresses two main themes: (1) the ways in which the pre-enactment debate over NAFTA and the post-enactment labor citizen-petition mechanism have inspired a new transnational focus; and (2) the reasons why only some labor movements have turned transnational. She presents a convincing argument that NAFTA exerted a pivotal influence on a notable segment of the North American labor movement. Kay also persuasively demonstrates the importance of political ideology in shaping how labor movements respond; in short, left-leaning activist unions, like the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and Mexico's Authentic Labor Front (FAT), are the ones who have become transnational.

The book is best in addressing the seismic impact of the NAFTA debate. To be sure, her central finding that the debate convinced certain labor sectors to add a transnational strategy is well known, yet Kay gives this finding new vitality. Helped by ample incorporation of interview material, Kay presents...