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"Great Expectations" Defeated?: The Trajectory Of Collective Bargaining Regimes In Canada And The U.S. Post-Nafta, Eric Tucker

Eric M. Tucker

From the beginning of the free-trade era one contentious area has been the impact of trade liberalization on labor law. Opponents of NAFTA (and some supporters) predicted a regulatory race to the bottom (RTB) would ensue leading to increasingly deregulated labor markets. The result would be weaker collective bargaining laws, lower minimum standards, and a decline in the social wage. In recent years a number of scholars have examined the question in light of more than fifteen years experience under CUFTA and ten under NAFTA and there seems to be a growing consensus that, contrary to those 'great expectations', labor …