nal labor conventions and recommendations. This has not happened, however, but a piecemeal approach to the problem has developed. There are a number of organizations and activists involved with the issue, both inside countries and in the United States.
One of these is the ILO's International Programme for the elimination of Child Labour, which is active in 25 countries on three different continents. NAFTA also has provisions which are designed to limit child labor, but actually seems to be contributing to it in many instances. In the NAFTA agreement, the countries involved are bound by treaty not to engage in exploitative child labor. Any country that is found to utilize and exploit child labor is subject to significant fines, as well as public relations exposure. In addition, Mexico has a labor side agreement that makes failure to enforce their child labor laws a punishable offense (Bachman, 1997).
However, according to both Bachman and David Bacon (1997), the immediate result of the NAFTA agreement was to in
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