Entering into force in late 2001, the Free Trade Agreement between the US and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was lauded as a major step forward in the protection of labor rights. For the rest of the decade, the US-Jordan FTA was the ideal to which other bilateral trade deals were compared. While the limitations of labor provisions is well-explored in the academic literature, using US archives and interviews in Amman, Jordan, I argue that while the labor provisions did not succeed in their stated goals, they have had a perverse and complex ‘afterlife’ shaping labor in Jordan in unexpected ways, coloring the US-Jordan relationship, and influencing FTAs the US over the past nearly 25 years.