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

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.

In this study of the relations between workers and the state, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker examine the legal regulation of workers' collective action from 1900 to 1948. They analyze the strikes, violent confrontations, lockouts, union organizing drives, legislative initiatives, and major judicial decisions that transformed the labour relations regime of liberal voluntarism, which prevailed in the later part of the nineteenth century, into industrial voluntarism, whose centrepiece was Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907. This period was marked by coercion and compromise, as workers organized and fought to extend their rights against the profit-oriented owners of capital, while the state struggled to define a labour regime that contained industrial conflict. The authors then trace the conflicts that eventually produced the industrial pluralism that Canadians have known in more recent years." "The book is simultaneously & history of law, aspects of the state, trade unions and labouring people, and their interaction within the broad and shifting terrain of political economy. The authors are attentive to regional differences and sectoral divergences, and they attempt to address the fragmentation of class experience. -- Publisher's description

[F]ocuses on the legal regime that regulates the entry and exit of low-skilled temporary foreign workers and these workers' rights and terms and conditions of employment while in Canada. ...We are also interested in beginning to explore the impact of this program in relation to the Canadian labor market. In order to understand the distinctive features and effects of the low-skilled temporary foreign workers program, we situate the low-skilled TFWP in the context of the emergence and development of Canada's general TFWP.

In 1947. Bora Laskin, the doyen of Canadian collective bargaining law, remarked that "Labour relations as a matter for legal study … has outgrown any confinement to a section of the law of torts or to a corner of the criminal law. Similarly, and from another standpoint, it has burst the narrow bounds of master and servant." That standpoint was liberal pluralism, which comprises collective bargaining legislation administered by independent labour boards and a System of grievance arbitration to enforce collective agreements. After World War II, it came to dominate our understanding of labour relations law such that, according to Laskin, reference to "pre-collective bargaining standards is an attempt to re-enter a world that has ceased to exist." But this picture is only partially true. Instead of replacing earlier regimes of industrial legality, industrial pluralism was grafted on to them. Moreover, it only encompassed a narrow, albeit crucial, segment of workers; in the mid-1950s "the typical union member was a relatively settled, semi-skilled male worker within a large industrial corporation." More than 65 per cent of Canadian workers at that time, a large proportion of whom were women and recent immigrants, fell outside the regime. This paper broadens the focus from collective bargaining law to include other forms of the legal regulation of employment relations, such as the common law, minimum standards, and equity legislation. In doing so, it examines the extent to which liberal pluralism regime was implicated in constructing and reinforcing a deeply segmented labour market in Canada. It also probes whether the recent assault on trade union rights may be the trajectory for the reconstruction of a new regime of employment relations.

Analyzes Supreme Court of Canada's decisions of the 1980s and 1990s that collective bargaining is a not a fundamental right under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Using gender as its analytic lens, this article examines segmentation in the Canadian labour market by focusing on the standard employment relationship. It illustrates how standard employment was crafted upon a specific gender division of paid and unpaid labour, the male breadwinner norm, and was only available to a narrow segment of workers. To this end, it traces how from the lOSO's the standard employment relationship was supplemented by a growth in jobs associated with, and filled primarily by, women workers and it shows how women's increasing labour market participation in the late 1960s and early 1970s shaped demands for equality in employment policies. Since the 1980s, a deterioration in the standard employment relationship has undermined both demands for and the basis of gender equality strategies and the article concludes by raising the question of the normative basis for regulating employment in order to move towards strategies for reregulation.

Over a million self-employed Canadians work every day but many of them are not entitled to the basic labour protections and rights such as minimum wages, maternity and parental leaves and benefits, pay equity, a safe and healthy working environment, and access to collective bargaining. The authors of "Self-Employed Workers Organize" offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the legal, political, and social realities that both limit collective action by self-employed workers and create huge impediments for unions attempting to organize them. Through case studies of newspaper carriers, rural route mail couriers, personal care workers, and freelance editors - four groups who have led pioneering efforts to organize - the authors provide a window into the ways political and economic conditions interact with class, ethnicity, and gender to shape the meaning and strategies of working men and women and show how these strategies have changed over time. They argue that the experiences of these workers demonstrate a pressing need to expand collective bargaining rights to include them. --Publisher's description