A labour commission created as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is still struggling to define its purpose five years after its creation but one of its former officials is upbeat about its progress.

Lance Compa, former director of labour law and economic research at the Dallas-based NAFTA Labour Commission, concedes that when the labour-monitoring body first came out 1994, “there was harsh criticism that this wasn’t going to amount to anything”.

Five years later “I see the glass as half full,” he says

Compa contends that the labour monitoring system set up in a side agreement to NAFTA – which includes the Commission’s 12 staff members, national offices for labour complaints and meetings among the three national labour ministers – has helped to spotlight labour rights in all three countries.

The North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation, the labour “side agreement” to NAFTA that helped secure political support for the free-trade deal, “was criticised for not having any teeth in it”, says Compa, currently a professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labour Relations. But now, the labour bodies have helped push the idea of “some kind of standards that should be complied with”, he argues.

“I think it has (had success), but it’s been marginal,” says Pharis Harvey, executive director of the International Labour Rights Fund, of the NAFTA Labour Commission. “They’re a small finger in a big hole in a large dike.”

The Commission includes National Admistrative Offices (NAOs) in all three NAFTA member states – Canada, Mexico and the United States – that have proved useful in bringing complaints against companies which do not abide by their domestic labour standards, Compa says.

In one case brought before the NAOs, Compa notes, the Mexican government and companies like Zenith, Motorola and General Motors have been prodded to adopt practises designed to crack down on alleged discrimination against pregnant women workers in Mexico.

The NAO involvement came after Human Rights Watch reported that Mexican women workers in the ‘maquiladora’ assembly zone were made to take pregnancy tests, and would not be hired or would be given less desirable jobs if found to be pregnant.

The NAFTA Labour Commission, Compa says, encouraged Human Rights Watch to file a complaint, which led to a hearing on the charges in San Antonio, Texas, and eventually a meeting of the Canadian, Mexican and U.S. labour ministers.

The complaint “has led to a commitment by the Mexican government to be more open to deal with groups in the (Mexico- U.S.) border area,” adds Harvey. “Since the filing of the complaint, women’s groups in the border area have begun to see that they could take this issue up. So it’s had an encouraging effect, although not necessarily a curative effect.”

In general, that has been the limited success of the NAFTA side bodies, Harvey argues: “The filing of complaints has had the effect of shining the light on the labour practises in all three countries … (But) it does more to highlight the problems than to solve them. It’s an experiment in the right direction, but not going too far in the right direction.”

Still, Compa says, the complaint process has put more pressure on companies to comply with labour standards than they first expected when the free-trade accord was passed in 1993. At the time, organised labour dismissed the labour side agreement as a mild step designed by U.S. President Bill Clinton to win support among his Democratic Party for NAFTA.

Initial fears that any labour-monitoring mechanism would focus most on Mexico and become perceived as a “Mexico-bashing operation” were bolstered when some 90 percent of the early complaints to the NAOs were directed again Mexican companies, Compa says. But recent complaints against U.S. firms and even a few – such as one directed against a McDonald’s branch in Quebec – against Canada have lessened that worry, he adds.

There remain some worries, however, about whether the NAFTA labour bodies can be as effective if the governments present at their start – those of Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo – change. The NAFTA Labour Commission, Compa points out, “took shape because Clinton won” 1992 elections and insisted on labour-friendly measures to accompany NAFTA’s passage.

“If we had a more recalcitrant administration, we wouldn’t get too far with these bodies,” Harvey says. If governments do not cooperate, he contends, the success of the labour bodies “to lay out a venue for some intervention between the public and the government” on labour issues won’t be maintained.

Regardless, Harvey doubts that the labour bodies have done much to prevent NAFTA as a whole from weakening organised labour. He notes that U.S. companies have stepped up their threats to relocate factories outside of the United States in response to demands for better labour conditions, and argues that overall, “the use of NAFTA has been negative toward labour rights”.

Nor do labour officials think that picture will change dramatically as long as the U.S. government pushes for lower tariffs and free trade in ever-larger trading zones, including the envisioned Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

“The Washington consensus has been that democracies, civil societies and labour unions aren’t so important as long as you have good growth rates,” says Thea Lee, assistant director of public policy for the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

Now, however, global economic woes, including the Asian financial crisis, have discouraged some of the momentum behind NAFTA-style free-trade accords, she adds. “It has slowed down, and it is a good thing to slow it down,” she says.