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The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on labor has been variously interpreted in terms of wage and employment levels as well as labor market structures in Canada, the United States and Mexico. NAFTA has brought the issue of continental labor cooperation to the fore of labor union strategy, not as a well-meaning moral duty or empty political slogan, but as a necessary and concrete tactic in the neoliberal era of the regionalized production system. Accordingly, NAFTA has encouraged the founding of tri-national labor alliances to confront common employers as well as less formal linkages around specific problems and broad-based lobbying and mobilization coalitions. Key to the trajectory of this phenomenon has been the ineffectiveness of the labor side agreement in NAFTA, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), in establishing an arena for the exercise of depoliticized, institutionalized governance. Most observers of the impact of free trade on labor agree on the central role of competition in this dynamic: by liberalizing and widening markets, trade agreements such as NAFTA increase competitive pressures in the labor market. Canadian unions found little interest from their American counterparts in opposing the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), and indeed, the 1980s saw a deepening trend towards the de-affiliation of Canadian unions from their American-dominated international unions.