[Excerpt] I first met Pierre Verge just before beginning my service with the NAFTA labour commission in 1995. Not long after that, Pierre Verge and my own labour law professor at Yale in 1972, Clyde Summers, jointly wrote a penetrating evaluation of the first years of the NAFTA labour side accord, which still serves as the best single analysis of that seminal but flawed instrument linking labour standards and a trade agreement (Summers, Verge and Medina, 1998; Verge, 1999; Verge, 2002). Since then, my understanding of international labour standards and how they relate to labour law in North America has been shaped and enriched by Pierre Verge’s writing. In this essay, I want to examine a question implicit in some of Pierre Verge’s work: is the “Wagner model” that underpins both the U.S. and Canadian labour law systems consistent with international norms on freedom of association?