It's an awful shame. Europe is rapidly heading down the US route unfortunately. There's a huge free trade agreement being negotiated now which will turn the US, probably Canada and the EU into a giant free trade area. However only about 20% of the agreement is to do with free trade. Probably less than twenty. The rest is to do with arbitraging worker protection laws, health and safety and general laws that protect labour from the ravages of capital down to the lowest level anywhere in the free trade area which means everybody adopting American levels. It's basically putting corporations and big business in almost total control of all of those nations.

There doesn't seem to be any organised resistance to it either unfortunately.