Forging solidarity in the struggle over the North American Free Trade Agreement: Strategy and action for labor, nature, and capital.

Abstract

Focusing on the struggle over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the substantive problem is to account for the unprecedented coalescence of environmental and labor movement organizations in opposition to the NAFTA and the extensive mobilization of corporate interests through the USA*NAFTA coalition in defense of the agreement. Integrating a historical analysis of the NAFTA-opposition with a network analysis of pro-NAFTA corporate leadership, the thesis examines the ways in which collective action networks and political strategy interact to shape mobilization capacity. A wide range of data informs this study. Extensive interviews with prominent leaders of key unions, environmental groups, and the coalitions forming the NAFTA-opposition inform an analysis of cooperation and conflict in the process of forging political alliances. Documents, ranging from congressional testimony to economic analyses, explicate the varying positions and language of support and opposition to the NAFTA. Using financial, subsidiary investment, Political Action Committee, board interlock, and membership affiliation data for federal Trade Advisory Committees and business policy-planning bodies, the determinants of leadership among a sample of 228 corporations in the USA$\sp*$NAFTA coalition are analyzed. The capacity for a labor-environmental alliance was facilitated by an increasingly dense network of ties among 'intervening' movement organizations and grassroots supporters committed to environmental justice and democratic unionism, whose solidarity was reinforced through resource interchanges and the creation of a common interpretive frame for opposing the NAFTA. Conversely, corporate political actors, being less constrained by information and resource networks, were governed by an inner core of corporate elite whose positions in leading business associations, policy planning bodies, and board interlocks enhanced their collective capacity to mobilize support for NAFTA across a complex and stratified universe of intercorporate relationships. This study invites us to reconsider theoretical assumptions about continuities in social movement goals, the role of class struggle in shaping the political project of market liberalization, and the circumstances under which leading corporate actors mobilize to secure the broader social conditions for capital accumulation.