Rethinking NAFTA's NAALC Provision: The Effectiveness of Its Dispute Resolution System on the Protection of Mexican Migrant Workers in the United States
![handle is hein.journals/iicl18 and id is 157 raw text is: RETHINKING NAFTA'S NAALC PROVISION: THE
EFFECTIVENESS OF ITS DISPUTE RESOLUTION
SYSTEM ON THE PROTECTION OF MEXICAN
MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES
Adam Brower*
INTRODUCTION
Since its novel inception in 1994, the North American Agreement on
Labor Cooperation (NAALC), a labor side agreement to the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has been the center of heated political
debate.I Over the past decade, experts and proletarians alike have lined up on
both sides of this debate armed with conjectures and experiential data that both
.2
claim to bolster their support for and/or defiance of this truly innovative
agreement.3 Mirroring that debate should be a discussion of the NAALC's
inclusion of migrant worker protection in its eleven core Labor Principles, and
whether the NAALC has been both proficient and effective in actually
protecting Mexican migrant workers in the United States.
Protection of migrant workers' rights in the U.S. is an extremely
important endeavor considering migrant workers make up an estimated three-
and-one-half-percent of the U.S. labor force4 and can be considered the
threads that hold together the tapestry we call North America.5 Moreover,
* J.D. candidate, May 2008. B.A., Purdue University, 2003. The author would like to
thank Professor Maria Lopez and Professor Karen Bravo, Indiana Univ. School of Law at
Indianapolis; Christina Laun and Lindsay Carlberg, Indiana Univ. School of Law at
Indianapolis, for their assistance with this Note. The author would also like to thank his wife,
Amy Brower, for enduring four years of his law school experience, while he worked over forty-
hours per week, went to school every single night of the week, and saw her in the few, brief
hours in between.
1. Brianna Busch, Free Trade Agreements and Labor Considerations After the NAALC;
How the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement Created a Faulty Template, 4 INT'L Bus. L. REv. 59,
61 (2004), available at http://www.alsb.org/intemational/ijml/busch/busch2004.pdf.
2. Commission for Labor Cooperation, Foreword,
http://www.naalc.org/english/report4_l.shtml (last visited Nov. 20,2007). See also infra notes
24-33 of this Note and the accompanying text.
3. Busch, supra note 1, at 61.
4. Susan M. Richter et al., Impacts of Policy Reform on Labor Migration from Rural
Mexico to the United States 2 (Nat'l Bureau of Econ. Research, Working Paper No. 11428,
2005), available at http://www.nber.org/paperslw11428 (last visited Nov. 21, 2007).
5. Commission for Labor Cooperation, GUIDE TO LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT LAWS FOR
MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES 7,
http://www.naalc.org/migrant/english/pdf/guide-en.pdf (last visited Nov. 21, 2007) [hereinafter
GUIDE].](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/iicl18&div=9&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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