NAFTA and Labor in North America (review)

This book explores the relationship between neoliberal economic restructuring and organized labour in North America. All of the chapters are richly detailed and well documented, but some of the interpretations of the situations described are overly simple, and thus problematic. But the book is still well worth reading, providing a good overview of key developments and thought-provoking arguments.

Chapter 1 offers an historical overview of 120 years of history for three national economies and labour movements in 32 pages. The chapter's partially realized and very laudable ambition is to tell this story at a continental level, looking at how the three North American economies became ever more tightly linked by networks of US-based transnational corporations and, to a lesser but still important degree, the international unions that followed them north and south of the US border. Caulfield's understanding of the three national cases is, inevitably, uneven: he knows the most about Mexico, the focus of his first book, and the least about Canada, especially Quebec. He does not see a significant difference in the character or culture of the dominant tendencies within the US and Canadian union movements after the Cold War purges: business unionism rules in both places, Caulfield thinks. To this reader, the Mexican section of the chapter was the most rewarding, but the attempt to compare and contrast the three movements—even when not entirely successful—was also stimulating.

Chapter 2 focuses on the politics of the Mexican labour movement from the economic crises that began in the 1970s to the present. Caulfield does an excellent job of sorting through the new labour federations that have sought to break the corporatist mould represented by the CTM federation. Caulfield shows how some of these relied on state support to protect them from the CTM, and in return supported the Salinas administration's attempt to reforge Mexican labour relations along non-adversarial lines; others, notably the miners' union, sought to increase their independence from the state, and found themselves in head-to-head confrontation with both employers and governments. No strand of this increasingly complex movement has made much headway, though the miners' three year (and counting) struggle in the copper mines of Cananea could be a turning point if the union, supported in a number of important ways by the United Steelworkers, is able to win. This chapter is wide-ranging, informative, and accurate.

Chapter 3 offers an overview of the labour side-deal to NAFTA. There is a brief discussion of its key provisions, followed by short summaries of each of the challenges to employer and state practices that unions from one or more of the three NAFTA countries have brought under its auspices. Caulfield spent some time as Acting Director of Research for the Secretariat of the labour side-deal's Commission for Labour Cooperation, so he is well placed to write on this topic. He finds that, while none of the cases resulted in direct gains for the workers whose rights were violated, the process of working together to bring the cases before the National Administrative Organization of one or two countries did promote international labour solidarity — a fair assessment.

Chapter 4 examines what NAFTA and neoliberal restructuring in Mexico meant for continental labour mobility. NAFTA included provisions to make it easier for middle-class professionals to get extended visas to work in another NAFTA country, but was silent about the mobility rights of everyone else-a striking omission in a document otherwise dedicated to maximizing continental capital mobility and property rights. But, legal provisions or no, the economic devastation wrought by neoliberal policies in Mexico resulted in the migration of at least eight million undocumented Mexicans to the United States over the last 20 years-a greater number than all the African Americans who participated in the Great Migration from the South to the industrial cities of the North between 1910 and 1970. This chapter examines US unions' responses to this migration, noting the growing commitment to organizing (as opposed to...