Increased globalization of national economies has been both posing new challenges to advanced industrial countries and demanding the "deregulation" of their labor markets since the late 1980s. However, Italy, Japan and the U.S. have shown contrasting policy responses to the growing globalization in the area of labor market policy. Labor market policies of these countries began to diverge in their degree of deregulation and followed different evolutionary paths. What caused such different policy innovations in the labor market policies in Italy, Japan and the United States? In this study, I hypothesize that the strategies of social actors (e.g., political parties and trade unions) when they created the original national labor market policy models explain the divergence of policy innovations in labor market policy in the 1980s and 1990s. I will test this hypothesis using a comparative case study of Italian, Japanese and American cases.