Free trade, social policy, and labor inspection in North America: An ethnography of Mexico's labor regulatory structure

This thesis is set within the context of debate over the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on working conditions in Mexico. A number of commentators have argued that NAFTA encourages US and Canadian industry to move to Mexico in order to take advantage of Mexico's lax regulatory culture, degrading both working conditions in Mexico and labor standards in the US and Canada. The operating premise of this argument is that Mexico lacks a well-developed and effective labor regulatory structure.;This thesis draws upon and contributes to anthropological literature concerned with the study of social policy, legal culture, and the regulatory domain. It also provides a much needed, anthropologically-grounded description of Mexico's workplace regulatory structure for use by policy makers in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Finally, it demonstrates that, though hampered by a number of shortcomings, Mexico's labor regulatory structure essentially serves to protect Mexico's workers from injury or illness.;This thesis adds to this debate an ethnographic study of Mexico's labor regulatory structure, specifically its labor inspection system. As this discussion demonstrates, properly conducted labor inspection activities are essential to the protection of the Mexican laborer from injury or illness caused by workplace conditions, but such activities cannot be understood without examining their embedding social and cultural context. Thus, this study examines (1) the local context which surrounds the performance of labor inspection activities, (2) the cultural setting which shapes the development of formal inspection policy, and (3) the social processes which transform this formal inspection policy at the moment of its implementation.