The Casualization of Work and the Rise of Precariousness in Sudbury’s Nickel Mining Industry

This paper examines the specific circumstances of contract employment within Sudbury Canada’s mining industry. We attribute this degradation to a shift from direct employment with a major mining company to a concomitant erosion of collective bargaining language and a precarious contract-based relationship. We contend that subcontracting the hiring of employees to a third party skirts provisions of both Federal and Provincial labour legislation which governs and limits the employer’s power (in the case of Ontario this includes the ‘closed shop’ provisions in the Rand Formula, discussed in detail below), and denies fair union representation to what would otherwise be an organized cadre of mining employees, duly employed by the primary employer of record. --From introduction