Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

Professor Arthurs Lecture

"Globalization and the New Economy: Implications for Labour Law"

The title of my talk begins with "globalization" and ends with "labour law"; what connects them is "the new economy". In the literature of labour law, these three notions don't often appear on the same page, which is curious given that most of us, in this room at least, sense there is a pretty powerful connection amongst them. This disconnect requires that we ask some fairly straightforward questions: What is globalization? Why don't labour law and industrial relations scholars and practitioners talk about it very often? How does globalization in fact influence our existing IR and labour law systems? And most important, what kind of new labour law system is developing in the context of the global economy?

What is globalization?

Globalization - as we know it today - is an integrated system of business arrangements which seeks to move large volumes of goods, services, information and capital across international borders with low friction and at high velocity. But it is much more. Globalization is a technological system which uses transportation and communications and manufacturing techniques to make such movements possible. Globalization is also a political system sometimes known as neo-liberalism, whose adherents believe that markets are preferable to all other forms of social ordering, such as state intervention or community cooperation. Consequently, neo-liberals want to get rid of regulation in domestic markets and ban all barriers to transnational trade. Of course, neo-liberals do not favour markets to the point of utter foolishness: states are still welcome to provide infrastructure, protect commerce from fraud and violence, and discipline obstreperous workers. But at least at the level of rhetoric, globalization as we know it is built on the neo-liberal premise that states should govern to the least extent possible. This neo-liberal political project has succeeded to the point where now we tend to accept unquestioningly that the logic of markets sweeps everything before it. Not surprisingly, people who resist market logic - people who persist in thinking and acting as if politics or families or culture or communities mattered - often become the sworn enemies of neo-liberalism and globalization. Workers who claim rights and dignity despite their lack of market power, farmers resisting destruction of their indigenous stocks by genetically-modified imports, cultural communities sheltering their books and movies from the great global entertainment conglomerates are all, in their way, fighting the culture of globalization and neo-liberalism.

Finally, a point I want to stress, globalization is a legal system. It requires states to repeal old laws which constrain trade, to bring their existing laws into alignment with the regulatory and property regimes of their trading partners, to abstain from passing new laws which discriminate against foreign firms or discourage foreign investors, and to accommodate the complex body of contractual and customary legal arrangements which have grown up to facilitate global business transactions.

One might expect that this economic, technological, political, cultural and legal system we call globalization would have produced something we could call global labour law. However, no such thing exists, according to forty or so management-side labour lawyers I recently interviewed in seven countries. They were unanimous: international labour standards do not affect their advice-giving or advocacy functions. Labour law is local law, plain and simple.

Why do lawyers insist that labour law is local, not global?

How can we explain this discrepancy between what we all know to be the important role of law in the process of globalization, and the conclusion of experienced lawyers that globalization has nothing to do with labour law?

Perhaps these labour lawyers have simply not grasped the big picture and perhaps, as a practical matter, they need not do so: after all, there is no Global Labour Relations Act or Global Ministry of Labour. True, there is NAFTA and its labour side agreement; true, there are the UN Covenants on Human Rights and the ILO and its Charter and Conventions; there is the OECD and its guidelines; there is a host of other international norms and norm generating bodies. In fact, the corpus of global labour law is as large as the corpus of global banking or shipping or insolvency or intellectual property law, though admittedly one key global actor - the United States - has not ratified or adopted most of it. So we are back to the same basic question: why does the whole notion of global labour law seem so strange to lawyers around the world? Three reasons.

First, unlike capital, goods or information, workers generally do not move across national borders in our global economy. True, there are exceptions. Some highly privileged workers do work abroad in the global economy and so do some highly underprivileged workers including the immigrants, refugees, guest workers and illegal border-crossers. But putting aside the over-privileged and the underprivileged, it remains true that most workers are not mobile, and in that sense, labour is not a "globalized" factor of production like capital or trademarks.

Second, despite a century or more of experimentation, unions have not managed to develop viable international structures, comparable to those of transnational corporations. Labour organizations seem unable to achieve any kind of ideological or programmatic consensus; workers in different countries see themselves as competing for the same job opportunities; and governments are vigilant in excluding foreign labour agitators. Once again, for the record, I have to cite a few contrary examples. Most US unions have - or used to have - large Canadian memberships; the American Federation of Labour worked closely with non-Communist unions in Europe and Latin American during the Cold War; and some individual American unions have begun to collaborate with unions abroad to resist the negative effects of globalization. Nonetheless, since unions are clearly not significant players in the global economy, few lawyers have any compelling reason to think about anything as improbable as global labour law.

Third, none of their clients wants them to think about global labour law: not first world governments or employers, not third world governments or employers, each of whom has its own reasons for wanting labour law to be local law. This is not to say that lawyers think only what their clients want them to think. In fact, lawyers in every country I surveyed - except the United States - acknowledged that globalization had significantly influenced the content and administration of their national labour law.

Fourth, then, I have to say something about American exceptionalism, a subject much mooted in the labour relations literature and one worth paying attention to in these days of the American imperium. Why was it that in my study American labour lawyers turned out to be different from those in other countries? My tentative hypothesis is that they seem to have taken little notice of globalization because their experience of it differs from that of lawyers in most other countries.

Some countries, especially the United States, are globalizers; others, like Guatemala or Thailand, are globalizees; and some, like Canada or Australia, France or Korea are a mixture of the two. It makes a difference into which category you fall. Thus, globalization for Canada largely involves integration into a North American economic space dominated by the United States; globalization for the United States is a marginal adjustment of its relationship with other countries in order to advance the interests of American investors and, if they are lucky and well-behaved, American workers. Globalization for Canada is the export of some 40% of our GDP; globalization for the U.S. is the export of 5% to 10%. Globalization for Canada is the gradual transformation of our corporate enterprises into subsidiaries of foreign-based transnationals; globalization for the U.S. is the increasing domination of other people's markets and production centres by American companies. In short, American lawyers may seem indifferent and insensitive to globalization, even as compared with Canadian, Mexican, European and Australian lawyers, because they are generally the authors of globalization, not its subjects.

But, I want to suggest, if so they ought to rethink their position. Globalization is no respecter of persons, countries or lawyers. Canada obviously is a junior partner in the North American economic system. But this year Ontario - my home province - will produce more cars than Michigan, and Toronto - my home town - will provide locations for more movie shoots than any North American city except New York and L.A. Seagrams began in Canada, converted itself into an American company, and has now disappeared into Vivendum, a French firm; Chrysler - which was once as American as apple pie - now looks suspiciously like apfel strudel. My point is simply that even globalizers must pay a price for globalization, that even globalizees may benefit from being on the receiving end, and that the absence of personal encounters with globalization - good or bad - may explain, but does not excuse, a failure to consider its full effects.

So what exactly are those effects? How does labour law does change under the pressure of globalization, even in the United States. That is the third question on my agenda.

The influence of globalization on labour law and industrial relations

In fact, international forces - global forces - have always been influential in industrial relations and labour law. Even American exceptionalism is not, under close scrutiny, quite as exceptional as all that. In fact, the American pioneers of industrial relations as a modern academic discipline and social system were greatly influenced by their ongoing exchanges with European practitioners, administrators and scholars. When they designed the New Deal labour standards legislation in the 1930s, the Wagner Act which introduced compulsory collective bargaining and the first elements of a social security system American policy makers drew heavily on the comparative labour legislation and labour scholarship which they had been importing from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand since at least 1900. However, by the 1930s, ideas were about all that was being imported: international trade had fallen drastically in the face of world-wide protectionism. The subsequent recovery of the American and world economies very much depended on the recovery of export, as well as domestic, markets. In fact, recovery became sustainable only after 1939 when the economy was given a significant boost by the demand for war materiel, then for aid to reconstruct Britain and liberated Europe, and ultimately for more conventional exports. This export-enhanced prosperity created jobs for Americans, improved American living standards, and built a foundation of confidence for American unions. Not by coincidence, it also made internationalists of the whole postwar generation of thoughtful American labour lawyers.

This was hardly surprising in that far-off, innocent time, when fair labour standards, collective bargaining and social security were thought to be fundamental to free and democratic societies. In 1944 - the year of the ILO's historic Philadelphia Declaration - American labour law was adopted holus bolus in Canada; soon afterwards, the Japanese were introduced to collective bargaining through the unlikely agency of Gen. MacArthur; by the late 1940s, American labour experts and practitioners had helped to persuade the ILO to adopt important conventions on subjects such as Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining; and American negotiators had initially agreed - though Congress ultimately did not - that fair labour standards would be guaranteed by the International Trade Organization, the failed precursor of the GATT.

Then, we come to the 1950s and 1960s when the domain of collective bargaining expanded and when health and safety and anti-discrimination legislation developed. This expansion of labour rights - including rights for minorities and women - was made easier by an expanding American economy fuelled, in part, by the recovery of the world economy. But of course, the world economy did not always bring prosperity to America and positive outcomes to its workers. Beginning with the oil shocks of the early 1970s, the deregulation of international financial markets around the same time, and the rise of powerful foreign competitors in key sectors such as steel, electronics, cars and banking, the American economy entered a new and more challenging period which featured slowing growth and rising inflation. It also featured the erosion of real hourly wages, the decline of unionism, the stalling of progress for minorities, the abandonment of the idea of full employment, and the end of prospects for reform - or even effective enforcement - of the statutory collective bargaining system, not to mention the dissolution of the historic New Deal coalition which had supported all of the above. So was American labour law exceptional? was it immune from international influences? Not for its first hundred years; and not I expect, for its second.

America may be ensconced as the dominant global economic power, but it is a troubled power not just because its leading corporations are in disgrace, but because American workers have been experiencing over the past twenty or thirty years a decline in their rights, political power, job security and incomes. In this, incidentally, they closely resemble workers in most other advanced economies, including yours and ours. What is interesting for present purposes is that like other labour movements, American unions seem to have fastened on opposition to globalization as a strategy for rallying their fast-fading forces . Who knows what the outcome will be? Perhaps labour's new agenda will generate new energies and attract new recruits; perhaps it will lead to a new labour-led coalition of social forces; or perhaps in the end labour will conclude that globalization is indeed the engine of prosperity and that further resistance is counterproductive. Whatever happens, globalization cannot be ignored: one way or another it is affecting the vital interests of American workers, shaping the fate of the American labour movement and rewriting American industrial relations - as it so evidently has done on the Arctic and Antipodean frontiers of the American empire. .

Next, I am going to turn to the more specific effects of globalization on labour law. Perhaps most importantly, globalization has changed the way we think about labour law and labour policy. As a result of what I have called "globalization of the mind", governments of all stripes now accept that in the world-wide competition for jobs, investment and prosperity, rewards will flow to countries whose labour market policies can be described as "business friendly". Though the mix varies from country to country, these policies come in three basic models: model one, monetarist policies designed to keep workers in line and reduce the threat that wage-driven inflation will dilute returns on investment; model two, deliberate failure to renovate labour law or to administer it vigorously, so that it no longer works effectively to protect workers' rights and interests; and model three, the repeal of important statutes which favour labour, and the enactment of new laws which tilt the balance of power more clearly to employers.

These policies are evident in Canada where our statutory collective bargaining regime, now almost 60 years old, can no longer function effectively, but is too young to be put out of its misery. They are evident in Australia where an even more ancient system was rather brutally taken off life support in the 1990s, and replaced by new and somewhat ill-considered legislation. And they are evident in varying degrees in other English-speaking countries, and even to an extent in Western Europe.

Second, globalization has changed the law - or at least the effect of the law - by placing groups of workers in different jurisdictions in competition with each other. Because these competing groups of workers are located in jurisdictions which are sovereign nations, rather than the states of a federal union, there appears to be no way to bring them all under one overarching legal regime, as Australia did 100 years ago in its constitution.

Third, globalization has helped to attenuate the connections between employers and employees and to dilute the whole notion of community of interest amongst workers. Whereas workers used to work for an identifiable common employer, today they occupy an often-uncertain location on a global production and distribution chain which links transnational corporations, their divisions, subsidiaries, and allies to a host of ephemeral local contractors, brokers and distributors. Whereas employees of a given employer used to share many common interests and characteristics - language, culture, politics, history, legal rights, managerial supervision and integrated work processes - workers in the global economy may share none of the above. In fact, some very large companies technically employ no production workers whatsoever. Thus, it is increasingly difficult for workers in the global economy even to identify their common adversary, let alone to define common expectations, to claim common entitlements or to implement common strategies.

Fourth, even when workers occasionally manage to organize across national boundaries, they confront systemic difficulties, in the form of local labour laws with inconsistent legal rules. Even as between democratic countries where workers have comparable protections, even within industries where operations are integrated across national boundaries, these systemic difficulties are formidable. Just imagine the legal problems of trying to negotiate a collective agreement which covers all Toyota workers in Japan, Mexico and Australia. Just imagine the complexity of orchestrating a lawful strike of the world-wide workforce of a given airline, or even of the players in the National Hockey League which operates on both sides of the Canada-US border.

The principle of national sovereignty - the right of every nation to enact and enforce its own laws - is a prime source of these systemic difficulties. It stands in the way of creating an effective transborder labour law regime. It complicates the harmonization of national labour laws. It gives repressive states a rationale for insisting that they be allowed access to global markets on their own terms, unconstrained by "universal" labour standards. And it enables democratic states - I will not name names - to insist hypocritically that everyone else should agree to sign on for international standards even though they themselves refuse to do so.

To sum up, globalization has shifted much labour activity beyond the reach of national law, has weakened the political legitimacy and practical effect of national labour law, and has inhibited - not promoted - the development of new labour law systems which might respond to the realities of transnational economic activity.

And now one more point: law - in the formal sense of international or national law - is, as we all know, not the only normative regime operating in any workplace. Equally important is the so-called "law of the shop", the web of rules found in all workplaces, whether unionized or not. By transforming corporate management, globalization has transformed the law of the shop, no less than it has national or international law.

The head offices of global companies now exercise much greater control than they used to all the way down the product chain. However, this does not mean that head office will directly intervene in local IR or HR policies or practices. Head office is primarily concerned about the bottom line, not about how a division, subsidiary or supplier arrives there. Only if a strike threatens to interrupt the global production chain, or if a local agreement might create a precedent for negotiations elsewhere, or if a public relations disaster looms will head office intervene directly. The result is that globalization has effectively severed corporate head office power from managerial on-site responsibility. This places local managers and workers on a short lease: they can adhere to local industrial relations culture and customs only so long as they can produce the results mandated by head office. Such arrangements are a prescription for conflict - or more accurately, they would be if unions were not at the same time paralysed by the fear that jobs may be outsourced or exported. It is in this way - by changing the dynamic of employment relations - that globalization has transformed the law of the shop.

All in all, then, this has been a pretty melancholy account of where labour law stands today, and where it seems to be going in an age of globalization. On the basis of what I have said so far, one might conclude that labour's prospects at the beginning of the 21st century are pretty dismal, that the workers of the world far from uniting to shed their chains ought to thank management for the privilege of being paid to wear them. But that's not my position. I don't believe we have arrived at the end of history, that workers or citizens will continue indefinitely to accept whatever cards they are dealt by the invisible hand of the market, that labour law and industrial relations as we have known them will ultimately disappear. To the contrary: I believe that there can be a new dawn for labour law and industrial relations, that workers and states and enlightened employers and sympathetic citizens can discover how to construct a just and effective law of labour in our new, global economy.

What kind of new labour law system is developing in the context of the global economy?

This brings me to the final task I have set myself for this evening: to report on how - despite the inability of many lawyers to detect it - a new labour law actually is emerging in the global economy. This new regime has not yet displaced the formal labour legislation of most states; but it is gradually beginning to shape relations between transnational employers and their workers, and to influence thinking about labour law in many jurisdictions. In the long run, I expect, it will leach back into state systems, just as foreign ideas about labour law - progressive, social democratic or neo liberal - have been doing for the past 100 years.

The first component of this new global labour law comprises international treaties and conventions. Obviously, these have a direct juridical effect only in countries which sign them which, in most cases, the United States has not - a significant omission when one is talking about the global economy. However, the United States has been arguing for some time that countries which violate "core labour standards" should be denied membership in the World Trade Organization. Ironically, since "core labour standards" are, in fact, borrowed directly from ILO Conventions, if the United States persists in this position, and if it succeeds in making compliance a condition of WTO membership, it will have extended the reach of the ILO not only to cover other countries, but possibly to itself as well. In fact, it has been argued since the WTO statute requires adherence to customary international law, it implicitly requires adherence to ILO standards since they are part of that customary law.

Another example is NAFTA, which unites the U.S., Mexico and Canada in a free trade regime. The NAFTA countries have signed a so-called "labour side accord", the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation - the NAALC. This agreement commits each NAFTA partner to adhere to its own labour laws; it establishes a dispute resolution process to ensure compliance; and it allows that process to be accessed not only by the other governments, but by their aggrieved citizens. As a result, over the past seven years, American workers, unions and social movements have filed some thirty complaints with the NAALC National Administrative Office in Washington against the failure of the Mexican government to extend protection to its own workers, especially in cases involving foreign subsidiaries doing business in the maquiladoras, the export processing zones. Some of these complaints have given rise to hearings; the resulting findings and publicity have embarrassed the employers involved, the official Mexican trade unions, and the Mexican government, and the result has been modest improvements in the administration of Mexican labour law and significant pressure for fundamental reforms. More to the point, the complaints process has helped to launch a new independent trade union movement in Mexico, fostered much greater cooperation amongst Mexican, Canadian and American unions, and legitimated the activities of churches, women's groups and other social activists on behalf of Mexican workers. Complaints against Canada and the United States have been relatively infrequent, but they have occurred, and in a couple of cases, they have prompted some positive action by both governments. Here, then, we see a beginning - a very modest beginning - of a new treaty-based regime of labour law which reaches across national boundaries, which may be able to change the way in which national labour law is administered, and which may significantly change the industrial relations dynamic of the countries bound by it.

A final example is the Treaty of Rome which established the European Union, by far the world's most elaborate and effective transnational regime. So far, the EU has not developed a significant body of collective labour law. However, it does have legislation governing workplace discrimination, plant closings, redundancies and Works Councils. Whether a more general regime of collective labour law will grow up alongside EU competition, consumer and agricultural law remains to be seen. However, the EU example shows that it is possible for the national labour law to be explicitly reconfigured as a result of globalization and regional economic integration.

The dissemination of "best practices" is the second process through which global labour law will develop. This is essentially the optimistic version of my earlier pessimistic account of how the law of the shop, the web of rule, has been degraded by globalization. The optimistic version begins with the proposition that best practices are indispensable for success in knowledge-based economies, which depend on human capital. As advanced economies become more tightly integrated, they will all contribute to a virtuous circle in which ideas about management, work and law originate in one country, are exported and re-engineered abroad, and ultimately return to challenge - even change - thinking in their country of origin. Seniority, quality circles and flexible production are all historical cases in point. It is likely - the optimists argue - that such a virtuous circle will increasingly shape labour practices in the global economy in the future, as the world's leading economies compete with each other, learn from each other, imitate each other's successes and avoid each other's mistakes. If this is true, the dissemination of "best practices" will proceed both by way of borrowings amongst national legal systems, and by way of non-legislated changes in company philosophy and shopfloor practice. As one lawyer suggested to me when I was doing my survey, he functions in the same way as "bees and wasps". He gathers best practices from one set of clients, incorporates them into formal legal arrangements, and then cross-pollinates them via advice and documentation provided to a second set of clients.

Third, global labour law is being constructed by management in the form of corporate codes of conduct. Growing numbers of these codes are being adopted by individual corporations and trade associations voluntarily, in response to the urgings of national governments and international bodies, or under pressure from labour unions and social movements. Although they are often called "voluntary" codes, to distinguish them from legislated codes, many of them have been forced on unwilling corporations seeking to avoid strikes, boycotts, embargoes, or political and legal sanctions. And in fact, some people feel they should be voluntary no longer: scholars have proposed that codes and their enforcement should be made transparent and their enforcement "ratcheted" ever-upward through exposure to market sanctions - a notion the Secretary-General of the UN has adopted in his Global Compact; and an Australian Senator has introduced a bill which would require that corporations engaged in the export trade adopt and implement codes of conduct.

Of course, codes vary in many respects. Most are purely internal and can be activated - if at all - only by the corporation's own compliance officer. Only a few carry the imprimatur of third parties, provide for independent monitoring or are enforceable through neutral complaints bodies. Likewise, they differ in their content and coverage. Some offer specific guarantees of what I earlier called "core labour rights", and even of a so-called "living wage"; others amount to no more than a vague promise of good intentions. Some extend to all domestic and foreign suppliers and subsidiaries of global corporations; others only to their core operations. Many are no more than words on paper; others have produced at least modest changes in employment conditions. In short, one would never mistake corporate codes for effective labour legislation. But then, the same can be said of some Acts of Parliament.

Corporations are not the only actors shaping global labour law. Unions are contributing as well - national unions, international labour bodies such as the so-called "trade secretariats", and ad hoc union alliances built around specific disputes. As noted earlier, union efforts to build solidarity across national boundaries have not been very successful, but in a few celebrated cases, unions have been able to win battles, if not actual wars. Employers have been forced to abandon plant closings or compensate redundant workers, improve wages and working conditions, recognize unions and respect local health and safety standards. These successes owe much to support from the newest actors in the global economy: social movements which mobilize women, consumers, university students, religious communities, environmentalists, aboriginal peoples, human rights groups, and anti-poverty and anti-child labour activists. These movements, operating in both advanced and developing countries, have been able to arouse public indignation against abusive labour practices which, in turn, forces retailers, investors and governments to bring pressure to bear on offending employers.

Of course it is difficult to imagine that governments, unions, corporations and social movements will be able to create and administer a system of global labour law by pasting together a collage of treaties and conventions, best practices, corporate codes, ad hoc settlements and the vestigial remnants of national legislation. But that, let's recall, is pretty much how most countries constructed their "old" systems of labour law. After all, there was collective bargaining in North America before it was mandated by legislation; there were union-sponsored benefit funds in the United Kingdom before the welfare state; there were special labour tribunals in Europe, and (I believe) arbitration tribunals in Australia, before the state gave them permanent legal status.

So do these frail and imperfect rule-making and dispute resolving regimes not only remind us of our past, but foreshadow our future? I think they may. In fact, we I speculate on the future of labour law in the global economy, we may also be imagining the future of law in general.

Obviously, we will not easily translate into the global sphere two hundred years' experience of embedding labour rights in complex legal language, of enforcing them through elaborate administrative and judicial proceedings. In fact, since for the foreseeable future we will be improvising a good deal, we must abandon the notion that global labour law will be legislated at all in the conventional sense, or that violations will be adjudicated by public labour tribunals or courts of general jurisdiction, or that the rules will be enforced by the coercive agents of some kind of super-state. And just the classic functions of the three branches of government will be obscured in the global context, so too will many other distinctions familiar to labour lawyers: distinctions amongst law, moral obligation, rules and custom; distinctions between public and private law and amongst state, supra-state and non-state law; distinctions between labour law and other bodies of law such as human rights and trade law; distinctions between employees and non-employees; between unions and other groups representing workers; between lawful and unlawful subjects of bargaining; between lawful and unlawful forms of economic pressure; and between rights disputes and interest disputes.

Clearly, then, global labour law is going to be unclear, unfinished, and some would say, un-legal.
I will not try to persuade an audience containing lawyers that this is a step forward; but perhaps we can all take solace in the fact that this lack of clarity is going to give everyone - lawyers, IR/HR specialists, unionists, social activists - a great creative opportunity. Vague standards in treaties or corporate codes will have to be translated into specific rights and duties which can be claimed and responded to by workers and employers. Techniques will have to be found to give legal form and effect to understandings and practices which are not formally part of state law. Home-country remedies will have to be invented to protect foreign workers against blatant abuse. Protections will have to be developed so that employers with a decent respect for labour standards can go about their business free from harassment by strikes, boycotts or trade sanctions. And finally, much of this work will have to be performed in forums where labour lawyers now seldom appear, such as trade tribunals under the WTO or compliance offices unilaterally established by employers or clandestine meetings convened by unofficial intermediaries.

Much of this work, but not all: in part, global labour law is also going to be made where domestic labour law is made today - in national legislatures, courts and tribunals. This is inevitable, because like charity, transnational labour relations often begin at home. However, while goods leave home, and work leaves home, and sometimes people leave home, law generally does not. So will labour disputes be decided under the law of the company's home jurisdiction, or under the law of the place where the dispute occurs? In order to resolve this choice of law dilemma, we will have to develop some new international conflicts of labour law rules which, sooner or later, will have to be standardized and accepted by most countries, as they are in other branches of the conflicts of laws. Depending on how these rules sort themselves out, some countries - those whose companies are active in the global economy - are likely to become net exporters of labour law; and others - those who have enterprise zones, for example, and those trying to gain access to valuable global markets - are likely to become net importers. In the mid-term, this imbalance between importers and exporters of labour law may lead to some informal convergence amongst national labour law systems. In the long term, it may lead to proposals to formally harmonize labour law through treaties or conventions, such as those which now govern intellectual property or the carriage of goods by sea.

In the long term, however, I won't be here to answer for my predictions none of which, I assure you, in all of my long and garrulous academic career, have ever come true.