ABSTRACT
The ambition to establish a free trade area in North America began to engage the attentions of governments in the region in the late 1980s. The first step was taken in 1989 with the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the USA and Canada. The second step, the participation of Mexico, was completed in November 1993 with the establishment of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). As a purely economic arrangement, NAFTA offers only limited points of comparison with the process of European integration. Its main provisions are the elimination of virtually all tariffs, the abolition of national preferences in the issuing of public contracts, and liberalisation of capital movements between the three participating states (Congressional Digest 1992; Dussel-Peters 1993). Whereas Europe’s trade unions have broadly supported the process of economic integration in Europe, US trade unions were vehemently opposed to NAFTA, fearing that the existing trend towards shifting production southwards because of lower wages and less stringent environment regulation in Mexico would be further boosted by the opening up of free trade.
