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The need to reexamine academic orthodoxy in the light of recent feminist scholarship is particularly pressing in the case of industrial relations. A study focuses on industrial relations as conceptualized and practiced by academics in Canadian business schools where systems theory remains the predominant analytical paradigm. The purpose of the study is to show that industrial relations so constructed is profoundly gender-biased. As a discipline, industrial relations is growing out of touch, not only with the changing realities of the workplace, but also with academic discourse in the social sciences. While some attention is paid to the so-called women's issues - maternity leave, sexual harassment policies, pay equity, and other issues - attention is limited. What is missing from industrial relations as presently defined and practiced is an analysis of gender relations as power relations.
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The article reviews the book, "Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace," by Paul Johnston.
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It is argued that labor's rights have been effectively the rights of working-class men because only men were constructed as family breadwinners for whom collective bargaining was both necessary and legitimate. Working-class women, by contrast, were defined as non-working wives and mothers, so had no claim to steady jobs at good wages or to union representation in their own right. Secondly, PC 1003 accorded rights to men (but not women) inasmuch as it codified an industrial model of workers' rights. Thirdly, PC 1003 supported and encouraged the growth of a male model of collective bargaining. The implications of a gendered analysis of PC 1003 for the study of industrial relations are discussed.
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What role the law should play in encouraging the growth of trade unions is a matter of considerable controversy in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Limits to growth in other sectors of the economy coupled with heightened employer hostility to unionism have made the extension of collective bargaining to the tertiary sector the most pressing task for unions in the 1980s. In a limited way, the Canadian procedure for certifying and recognizing unions is being considered as a model for labour law reform. And there is much to recommend the Canadian system. It is far more efficient than its American counterpart. There are fewer delays, fewer unlawful interventions by employers, and a substantially higher likelihood that newly organized unions will be granted certification. Even so, unions have failed to break into the trade, finance, and services industries that are so critical to their future. Taken as a whole, Canadian labour law tends to block rather than promote the growth of unions in the unorganized sectors of the economy. The certification procedure is only one aspect of a legal regime that has as its primary purpose the preservation of industrial peace, not the encouragement of union growth. By shaping bargaining structure and regulating bargaining tactics, Canadian labour law tilts the balance of power in favour of employers. Small, fragmented unions are frequently pitted against large corporations and as there is nothing to stop antiunion employers from using their overwhelming strength to frustrate the collective bargaining process, efforts to organize the tertiary sector have failed.
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In this paper I challenge the prevailing theoretical framework [of study in industrial relations] that marginalizes women by examining how unpaid work on and off the job is and is not analyzed in the literature and by demonstrating its importance to issues as central to the discipline as wages, job allocation, and industrial conflict. In the section entitled, "Unpaid Work on the Job," I argue that the concept of the "effort bargain"— how unpaid work is currently studied in industrial relations — obscures pay discrimination against women because it is more likely to implicitly recognize as work the tasks associated with jobs traditionally performed by men than many of the tasks associated with jobs performed by women. Under the heading, "Unpaid Work in the Household," I argue that unpaid work in the home determines, in part, how paid work is allocated and, in particular, how the social construction of women as non-workers/wives and mothers by researchers naturalizes women's place in the secondary labour market and reifies men's access to "breadwinner jobs." Finally, I conclude by arguing that incorporating unpaid work into the study of industrial relations is necessary to move women from the margins to the centre of discourse. --From author's introduction
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The author addresses the questions of why industry-wide bargaining was developed in the Canadian meat-packing industry and why it suddenly collapsed.
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This paper examines how the recent amendment to the Labour Relations Actestablishing compulsory first contract arbitration in Ontario fits within the existing legal framework.
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