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The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]