The NAFTA truck saga provides an example of how NAFTA reaches “behind the border” to undermine important domestic environmental and safety policies, and how Congress can lose control of such domestic policies if they are implicated by a trade pact. NAFTA included a requirement that all three countries’ highways be fully accessible to trucking companies based in any NAFTA nation by 2000, an item pushed by large U.S. trucking firms seeking deregulation and lower wages. (Mexican long-distance truck drivers are paid about one-third of what U.S. drivers earn.) NAFTA also recommended, but did not require, that Mexican and U.S. truck and driver standards be harmonized (i.e. made uniform, although not necessarily at the higher U.S. level). Year after year, the U.S. Department of Transportation conducted studies that revealed severe safety and environmental problems with Mexico’s truck fleet and major flaws in Mexico’s drivers’ licensing and insurance, drug testing, and hours of service tracking systems.
For detailed background on the NAFTA trucks case, click here.