By David Doorey
North American professional sports provides a fascinating example of voluntary transnational collective bargaining. It works (most of the time) because the leagues and their member teams and the players’ unions agree to make it work. However, the collective bargaining model rests on a precarious legal foundation that mostly presumes that parties are capable of agreeing to apply American labor law to Canadian employment relationships.
In a two part series originally published on Harvard Law School’s OnLabor blog, I explore the uneasy fit between the transnational collective bargaining models devised by North American sports leagues (especially the NHL, which has the most Canadian teams) and Canadian labor law.
Here are the original OnLabor posts:
The ‘Canada Problem’ in Professional Sports Collective Bargaining, Part I
The ‘Canada Problem’ in Professional Sports Collective Bargaining, Part II