The international defense of workers : labor rights, U.S. trade agreements, and state sovereignty

"This book examines the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (the NAALC), a "side-agreement" added to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAALC is a foundational case in the evolution of debates over the links between trade and labor standards in U.S. foreign policy and a watershed in the international promotion of labor rights. The book investigates the origins of the agreement both in earlier twentieth-century efforts to insert labor provisions into multilateral and U.S. preferential trade agreements and in the 1990-1992 negotiations over the NAFTA; the intense political controversies that arose in 1993 among Canada, Mexico, and the United States over the NAALC's scope and institutional design; how the agreement operated in practice between 1994 and 2020, with attention to its principal successes and failures; and the longer-term policy legacies of the NAALC, including in subsequent U.S. free-trade agreements, the 2017-2019 negotiations over revising the NAFTA, and the labor rights provisions of the successor United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Political scientist Kevin Middlebrook establishes a comparative context for analyzing the NAALC experience by overviewing alternative international arenas for the promotion of worker rights (like cross-border union solidarity actions, initiatives undertaken by the International Labour Organization, and corporate social responsibility campaigns) and by examining the negotiation, content, and implementation of labor rights provisions in the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences program, post-NAFTA U.S. free-trade agreements, and the USMCA, which constitute the principal international examples of the links between trade and labor rights. Most important, the discussion systematically assesses sovereignty leverage as a causal mechanism in two distinct political moments: the negotiation and subsequent implementation of labor rights provisions in trade agreements. He takes an interdisciplinary comparative approach and brings extensive previously unexamined primary research materials to bear in this analysis of international trade agreements and labor rights."