As the world's economies grow ever more interdependent, national regulation of labor markets become more and more problematic. Globalization fundamentally alters how labor markets respond to regulatory regimes. Differences in national political solutions of balancing the market's demand for a company's efficiency and productivity and employees' and unions' demands for state interventions become harder to maintain in an environment where employers can shift work among jurisdictions through cross-border movements of workers, trade agreements, and global human resources management.

This important theme was the focus of New York University's 54th Annual Conference on Labor and Employment Law. This long-standing, influential conference is the premier forum for bringing together legal practitioners, academics and researchers, government officials, representatives of companies and labor unions, and human resources specialists to explore solutions to problems in the workplace. The Conference has recently been brought under the umbrella of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at the New York University School of Law, chaired by Professor Samuel Estreicher.

This highly significant book reprints the papers presented at the 54th Conference, with several additional papers. In its pages more than 40 noted labor and employment experts from a diverse range of countries and disciplines offer penetrating analyses of developments and trends in such areas as the following: