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This chapter explores the relationship between the social organization of migrant workers’ unfreedom through the conditionality of legal status and how the creation and deployment of precarious migrant labour regulates national labour markets. It begins by drawing the connections between neoliberal labour regimes, immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. It shows how precarious migrant status is linked to precarious employment, and how the categories of “foreigner” and “citizen” are used to justify the unfreedom and hyper-exploitation of migrant workers. Focusing on “low-skilled” occupations within the food services sector in which precarious (low-paid and insecure) jobs predominate, this chapter then describes the “low-skilled” (since October 2014 called “low-wage”) stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, its growth, the “public” reaction to foreigners taking Canadian jobs, and the government’s response to this controversy.

The article reviews the book, "Employment dispute resolution and worker rights in the changing workplace," edited by Adrienne E. Eaton and Jeffrey H. Keefe.

Modern slavery laws are a response to global capitalism, which undermines the distinction between free and unfree labour and poses intense challenges to state sovereignty. Instead of being a solution, Constructing Modern Slavery argues that modern slavery laws divert attention from the underlying structures and processes that generate exploitation. Focusing on unfree labour associated with international immigration and global supply chains, it provides a novel socio-legal genealogy of the concept 'modern slavery' through a series of linked case studies of influential actors associated with key legal instruments: the United Nations, the United States, the International Labour Organization, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Walk Free Foundation. Constructing Modern Slavery demonstrates that despite the best efforts of academics, advocates, and policymakers to develop a truly multifaceted approach to modern slavery, it is difficult to uncouple antislavery initiatives from the conservative moral and economic agendas with which they are aligned. --Publisher's description

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction.

The scope of labour rights that are protected by constitutional protections of freedom of association is highly contested and, increasingly, is being litigated before courts. In Canada, the Supreme Court began in 2001 to chip away at jurisprudence that provided a narrow interpretation of freedom of association, and, in 2007, it over-ruled precedent to hold that freedom of association includes collective bargaining. However, this incremental expansion of the freedom of association to include core labour rights came to a halt in the Supreme Court's April 2011 decision Attorney General of Ontario v Fraser. Although a majority of the Court agreed that freedom of association includes collective bargaining, Fraser is remarkable for the extent of disagreement amongst members of the Court over the scope of collective bargaining and how this disagreement has influenced the tone and cogency of the Court's reasoning. This article begins by providing a history of the successive rounds of litigation leading to the Supreme Court's decision in Fraser. This legal context is important because it is barely visible in the majority and concurring judgments, which read as if collective bargaining rights for agricultural workers were a subsidiary concern, and not the issue in dispute. The article then examines the four judgments that make up the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Fraser, focusing exclusively on the freedom of association arguments. The implications of the Fraser decision for the immediate future of constitutional litigation and labour rights in Canada are discussed in the final section.

In June 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada expressly overruled 20 years of jurisprudence that interpreted the freedom of association as excluding collective bargaining. This about-face by the Supreme Court was unexpected. What gave rise to this remarkable decision and what does it portend for the role of the courts in labour relations in Canada and beyond? The recent successes before courts have led some observers to suggest that it may now be a propitious time for a coordinated and proactive litigation strategy to vindicate labour's collective rights. This article offers some preliminary answers to these broader questions and issues by focussing on the Supreme Court's decision in the Health Services and Support case.

This article sketches the rise and fall of industrial citizenship in Canada, and presents two very different models of citizenship that might replace it. It begins by defining the concept of citizenship, and explaining how industrial citizenship has conventionally been understood. It then traces the genealogy of industrial citizenship in Canadian labour law, and how the processes of feminization, deregulation, and globalization have challenged it as a normative ideal and undermined the conditions that have sustained it. The article concludes by considering two scenarios for industrial citizenship in the future: one in which the substance of citizenship is circumscribed by an emphasis on the market, and the other in which citizenship is extended beyond employment to work.

The article reviews the book, "Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism 1821-1906" by John V. Orth.

This article reviews the book, "Daunting Enterprise of the Law: Essays in Honour of Harry W. Arthurs," edited by Simon Archer, Daniel Drache and Peer Zumbansen.

The article reviews and comments on the books, "Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice," edited by Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk, "Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom," by Julia O'Connell Davidson, and "The Poverty of Work: Selling Servant, Slave and Temporary Labor on the Free Market," by David Van Arsdale.

In Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Association v. British Columbia, [2007] 2 S.C.R. 391, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned precedent and concluded “that the grounds advanced in the earlier decisions for the exclusion of collective bargaining from the Charter’s protection of freedom of association do not withstand principled scrutiny and should be rejected” (at para. 22). The author explores the Supreme Court of Canada’s change of heart and what this change implies, not only for constitutional doctrine, but also for what the Court understands about the governance of the postFordist world of work. She situates the Court’s reasoning in a few key cases dealing with labour’s distinctive rights – to bargain collectively and to strike – in the social context that both shapes the legal discourse about labour rights and influences organized labour’s power. She considers the paradox of the Supreme Court’s embrace of Fordist labour rights in a post-Fordist economy, and suggests a modest, though important, role that the Court could play in fostering social justice in the brave new world of work.

Discusses the socio-political context of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's ruling regarding the pay equity complaint of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. The complaint was upheld, but the federal government filed an appeal. Argues for a new understanding of the labour market to counter the devisiveness of the prevailing neo-classical model.

The article reviews the book, "Labor Law and Business Change: Theoretical and Transactional Perspectives," by Samuel Estreicher and Daniel G. Collins.

Self-employed workers have an legal ambiguous status. Traditionally self-employment is equated with entrepreneurship and legally it is considered to be a form of independent contracting and thus outside the ambit of labour protection and collective bargaining laws. But the evidence suggests that most of the self-employed, especially those who do not employ other workers, are much more like employees than they are like entrepreneurs. Instead of attempting to draw a new line between employment and independent contracting for the purpose of determining the scope of labour protection, collective bargaining, and social insurance laws, all workers, including the self-employed, who depend on the sale of their capacity to work should be covered by these laws, unless there are compelling public policy reasons for a narrower definition.

Disputes over the meaning of human trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery have both provoked and coincided with a reinvigorated debate in academic and policy literatures about how to conceptualise unfree labour. This article traces the contours of the debate over free and unfree labour, identifying its key stakes as the debate has developed and paying particular attention to recent interventions. It begins by identifying a problem common to both canonical liberal and Marxian approaches to the free/unfree labour distinction, which is to fetishise the labour market. It then discusses the consensus that is emerging across disciplines and in leading international organisations that labour unfreedom in contemporary capitalism is best conceptualised as a continuum rather than a binary, highlighting recent disciplinary-specific contributions. It argues that the metaphor of a continuum of labour unfreedom obscures more than it illuminates. Drawing upon the growing body of literature that advocates a multifaceted approach to labour unfreedom, this article argues that a robust concept of local labour control regime does a much better job of capturing the complex mix of consent and coercion involved in extracting value from labour power than the idea of a continuum of labour unfreedom.

Explains in detail the purpose of the book (see publisher's description) and provides a synopsis of the essays contained therein.

Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor. --Publisher's description