James Brudney was quoted in The Atlantic about how labor groups act under NAFTA.
The only remedy for labor groups that think workers are being treated unfairly is to file a complaint with a national administration office, but Helper says these complaints lead to employers getting chastised by government offices, not any sort of requirement that labor practices change.
Even these complaints are rarely filed, according to James J. Brudney, a labor and employment law professor at Fordham University. Labor’s grievances can, under NAFTA, lead to arbitration, but the process of getting to that stage is so difficult that only one labor complaint has reached arbitration in the history of trade deals in the Americas, and labor groups lost because they did not prove the poor labor conditions had affected trade. The number of labor complaints filed declined significantly after 1998, when labor groups realized that NAFTA’s structure was not effective for responding to complaints, Brudney said.