Trade Politics prior to NAFTA

Chapter 3 explores key political and economic conditions in North America that led to NAFTA’s negotiation and examines the relations between labor unions and environmental organizations in the years prior to its proposal when trade policy was dominated by a political elite. It begins with a discussion of trade in the 1930s, then moves into the 1970s when trade policy was not contested by activists. It then tracks the shift to trade liberalization policies, an erosion of legislative consensus around trade, and growing discontent among labor environmental activists leading into the late 1980s. Finally, the chapter examines the history of emerging labor-environmental coalitions in response to maquiladoras.

Environmental Coalitions and the Limits of Science

This article examines the origins, evolution, ideology, and political impact of an environmental coalition in the 1970s. Two wilderness activists in northwestern Ontario challenged established preservationist groups to shift their advocacy from public battles over management policy for individual parks, to design and promote a system of provincially-owned wilderness parks. To build public support and maximize their political clout, the two advocates persuaded five groups to form the Coalition For Wilderness (CFW) in 1973. Unfortunately CFW was mostly a two-man show. Constituent groups gave insufficient material support because of their diverse interests, economic woes, and the “free rider” problem. Nevertheless, CFW’s tactic of privately lobbying park planners within the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources had some political impact. It generated policy information and educated the public about the need for a wilderness park system, thereby supporting the parallel efforts of the bureaucrats. Ironically, the coalition’s scientific rationale for protecting wilderness limited its influence among planners and the wider advocacy community, both of whom regarded recreational and other reasons for wilderness protection as more politically defensible than science. This difficult episode taught the CFW leadership valuable lessons, enabling Ontario preservationists to build more successful coalitions in the 1980s and 1990s.

Blue–Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities. By Brian Mayer

Blue–Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities. By Brian Mayer. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press and Cornell University Press, 2009. 240p. $57.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.When do labor-environmental coalitions emerge and endure? In a period when headlines are dominated by economic recession, unemployment, and oil spills, the focus of Brian Mayer's book takes on practical urgency. The question is theoretically intriguing as well. Labor unions are often characterized as archetypical interest-based organizations, representing industrial workers' concerns for their own material well-being. Environmental mobilization, in contrast, is seen as a quality-of-life movement most commonly associated with members of the postindustrial middle class who possess leisure time and resources sufficient to enable their activism. When the question of how to regulate industries that employ toxic chemicals arises, these two groups can become locked in an acrimonious jobs versus the environment debate, making them more likely antagonists than allies. This sense of latent opposition is captured by one worker's assertion that greens want to “save the whales and kill the workers” (p. 2). How can these divisions be overcome? In his clearly written and compelling book, Blue–Green Coalitions, Mayer argues that concern over the effects of hazardous materials on human health offers one avenue for generating powerful and enduring coalitions.