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This paper looks at the “deep roots” of striking as a social practice in Canada, by providing an analytic framework for approaching the history of the right to strike, and then sketching the contours of that history. Focusing on the three key worker freedoms — to associate, to bargain collectively, and to strike — the authors trace the jural relations between workers, employers and the state through four successive regimes of industrial legality in Canada: master and servant; liberal voluntarism; industrial voluntarism; and industrial pluralism, the latter marked by the adoption of the Wagner Act model. On the basis of their review of those regimes, the authors argue that long before the modern scheme, workers enjoyed a virtually unlimited freedom to strike for collective bargaining purposes. Although government-imposed restrictions on the freedom have increased significantly, especially under industrial pluralism, legislatures have typically provided workers with compensating trade-offs, including rights enforceable against their employers. However, in contrast to the historical pattern, public-sector workers have with growing frequency been subjected to “exceptionalism,” i.e. the suspension or limitation of freedoms without a grant of compensatory rights. In the authors’ view, it is the imposition of such measures that will likely provide the context for consideration of whether the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to strike.

A response from the authors of the book that was reviewed entitled "Constitutional Labour Rights in Canada: Farm Workers and the Fraser Case" is presented. They all shared a commitment to the goal of promoting labour rights for agricultural workers and a belief that constitutional litigation could be a tool through which that objective was advanced. They want the implication of this formulation to be clear: they do not believe that constitutional rights and constitutional litigation were ever or are now the only or even the best means for advancing the struggle for labour rights for farm workers. However, the reality is that laws actively prescribe and sustain a particular balance of power. Laws actively construct relationships of domination/subordination and constrain the space for particular kinds of collective workplace action.

J.S. Woodsworth was a prominent Canadian socialist who was a member of the Canadian Parliament from 1921 to 1942 and a founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the present New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper uses a Gramscian framework to explore his promotion of labour rights in the inter-war years, which I argue was an interregnum, a period when the hegemony of the old order was weakened. In this period, counter-hegemonic projects were launched to challenge the old order but, at the same time, so too were liberal passive revolutionary projects that aimed to restore the hegemony of capitalist relation by accommodating some of the demands of disgruntled workers, as well as coercive ones to restore order by force. J.S. Woodsworth strenuously fought against rising coercion and attempted to pursue a politics of amelioration in the hopes it would eventually lead toward socialism, but in the end it was the liberal counter-hegemonic project that was successful. I then examine the Woodsworth legacy for our time, a moment that I argue is also an interregnum, when the hegemony of the post-war order has been weakened, but because subordinated classes are weak, a counter-hegemonic project is not in the offing. Instead, we are witnessing an increase in coercion, on the one hand, and a weak politics of amelioration on the other.

Nearly one in ten Canadians in the private sector works in the franchised sector of the economy. For the most part, franchisors operate as rentiers, extracting value from franchisees for the use of their brand. Research has demonstrated that this arrangement puts additional pressure on franchisees to extract surplus value from their employees that tend toward substandard and unlawful working conditions. In this scenario, franchisors benefit from but are only indirectly involved in the extract of surplus value. In some cases, however, the vertical controls exercised by “franchisors” over “franchisees” are so extensive, and the financial contribution of “franchisees” is so limited, that the franchisor becomes involved in directly extracting surplus value from franchisees. We explore this latter phenomenon through an excavation of the history of the legal distinction in Canadian business-format franchising in Canada and detailed studies of two recent Canadian cases in which “franchisees” successfully claimed employment status.

[The author] critically examines the rationale offered to justify the exclusion of agricultural workers from occupational health and safety legislation [in Ontario] which lasted until 2005. The chapter is a case study of marginalized workers denied the benefit of labour law protections. --From editor's introductory chapter, p. 38.

On 29 April 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada released its much-anticipated decision in Attorney General of Ontario v Fraser, which dealt with the scope of constitutional protection of collective bargaining. The case involved a constitutional challenge to an Ontario statute on the grounds that it violated agricultural workers’ freedom of association and right to equality by excluding them from the statutory protection that is available to virtually all other private sector workers and by failing to provide them with alternative legislative support for meaningful and effective collective bargaining rights. Although the Court upheld the constitutionality of the legislation by an eight to one majority, it provided four different, and incommensurable, sets of reasons. For the union that instigated the litigation, Fraser is a defeat. For the labour movement and their advocates, Fraser is ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that the Supreme Court of Canada was badly divided over the scope of protection that freedom of association provides to the right to bargain collectively. This collection of original essays untangles the two stories that are intertwined in the Fraser decision—the story of the farm workers and their union’s attempt to obtain rights at work available to other working people in Ontario, and the tale of judicial discord over the meaning of freedom of association in the context of work. The contributors include trade unionists, lawyers, and academics (several of whom were involved in Fraser as witnesses, parties, lawyers, and interveners). The collection provides the social context out of which the decision emerged, including a photo essay on migrant workers, while at the same time illuminating Fraser’s broader jurisprudential and institutional implications. --Publisher's description. Introduction: Farm Workers, Collective Bargaining Rights, and the Meaning of Constitutional Protection / Judy Fudge -- Farm Worker Exceptionalism: Past, Present, and the post-Fraser Future / Eric Tucker -- The Roots of Organizing Agriculture Workers in Canada / Wayne Hanley -- Development as Remittances or Development as Freedom? Exploring Canada’s Temporary Migration Programs from a Rights-based Approach / Kerry Preibisch -- Envisioning Equality: Analogous Grounds and Farm Workers’ Experience of Discrimination / Fay Faraday -- Harvest Pilgrims: Migrant Farm Workers in Ontario / Vincenzo Pietropaolo --The Fraser Case: A Wrong Turn in a Fog of Judicial Deference / Paul J.J. Cavalluzzo -- What Fraser Means For Labour Rights in Canada / Steven Barrett and Ethan Poskanzer -- Labour Rights: A Democratic Counterweight to Growing Income Inequality in Canada / Derek Fudge -- The International Constitution / Patrick Macklem -- Giving Life to the ILO: Two Cheers for the SCC / K.D. Ewing and John Hendy.

"[P]rovides a historical analysis of worker participation and occupational health and safety regulation in Ontario from 1970 to 2000 in light of the rise of neoliberal policies. [The authors] describe a shift from systems of mandated partial self-regulation in which workers had to participate, supported by external enforcement of regulations, to more ambiguous models that included the downsizing of government and voluntary compliance by employers." --Editors' introduction. Contents: Acts of God, acts of man: the invisibility of workplace death / Jordan Barab -- Criminal neglect: how dangerous employers stay safe from prosecution / Rory O'Neill -- Regulating risk at work: is expert paternalism the answer to workers irrationality? / Peter Dorman -- Silicosis and the on-going struggle to protect workers's health / Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner -- How safe are U.S. workplaces for Spanish-speaking workers? / Laura H. Rhodes -- Got air? The campaign to improve indoor air quality at the City University of New York / Joan Greenbaum and David Kotelchuck -- State or society? The rise and repeal of OSHA's ergonomics standard / Vernon Mogensen -- The ten-percenters: gender, nationality, and occupational health in Canada / Penney Kome -- All that is solid melts into air: worker participation in Ontario, 1970-2000 / Robert Storey and Eric Tucker -- The sinking of the neoliberal P-36 platform in Brazil / Carlos Eduardo Siqueira and Nadia Haiama-Neurohr -- Health and safety at work in Russia and Hungary: illusion and reality in the transition crisis / Michael Haynes and Rumy Husan.

"Regulating Strikes in Essential Services" offers a comparative perspective on one of the most sensitive areas of industrial relations: strike in essential services. Designing a fair, effective and acceptable regime that will reconcile public interest and the public's need for an uninterrupted flow of essential services on the one hand, while maintaining the freedom of collective bargaining on the other, is an ever more difficult public policy challenge. This book, the first detailed analysis of existing legal and practical approaches across a spectrum of key national jurisdictions, provides a structured and insightful overview of the law and practice of regulating strikes in essential services. As such it could be of great value for public policy debate and the enhancement of national law in the field. --Publisher's description

Examines the potential for labour and progressive social movement to use the values expressed in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms to mobilize direct political action and to advocate for reform against the backdrop of austerity. [The authors] focus on historical examples of radical organizing that have leveraged constitutional values, as well as recent Canadian social movements. --Introduction

Although Canada’s migrant labour program is seen by some as a model of best practices, rights shortfalls and exploitation of workers are well documented. Through migration policy, federal authorities determine who can hire migrant workers, and the conditions under which they are employed, through the provision of work permits. Despite its authority over work permits, the federal government has historically had little to do with the regulation of working conditions. In 2015, the federal government introduced a new regulatory enforcement system - unique internationally for its attempt to enforce migrants’ workplace rights through federal migration policy - under which employers must comply with contractual employment terms, uphold provincial workplace standards, and make efforts to maintain a workplace free of abuse. Drawing on enforcement data, and frontline law and policy documents, we critically assess the new enforcement system, concluding that it holds both promise and peril for migrant workers.

This latest collection in our State Trials series, the fourth, looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One through the 1930s and the Great Depression. Topics covered include enemy aliens, conscription and courts-martial in World War I, the trials following the Winnipeg General Strike, sedition laws and prosecutions generally and their application to labour radicals in particular, the 1931 trial of the Communist Party leaders, and the religious-political dissent of the Doukhobors. All regions of the country are covered, and special attention given in one essay to Quebec’s repression of radicalism. The volume focusses attention on older manifestations of contemporary dilemmas: what are the acceptable limits of dissent in a democracy, and what limits should be placed on state responses to perceived challenges to its authority. --Publisher's description

In Canada, as in most advanced capitalist countries, the right of workers to engage in collective action has been partially immunized from competition law, one of the basic norms of capitalist legality. The “zone of toleration”, however, has been contested over time and poses a recurring regulatory dilemma that stems from labour’s commodity status in capitalism. In the capitalist utopia, workers are commodified and atomized, each one competing against all others. But in capitalist reality, such an arrangement produces the tragedy of atomism. In Polanyian terms, labour is a false commodity and treating it as such results socially dysfunctional consequences, producing a counter movement. In Marxist terms, labour is embodied in human beings who resist their commodification and atomization, in part by uniting with other workers and acting collectively to improve their conditions and, perhaps, one day to create a different social order in which labour ceases to be a commodity. Viewed in either light, the zone of legal toleration within competition law is the product of recurring conflicts and struggles whose outcome is shaped and reshaped over time. In Canada, this conflict has been resolved by granting workers a legal immunity from liability under competition law for engaging in approved collective action to improve or defend their terms and conditions of work. However, the zone of toleration is contestable at three margins, explored in this chapter. First, is the margin between those workers who are covered by the exemption and those who are not; second is between the sale of labour power and the sale of the commodities it produces; and the third is between the means that covered workers can lawfully use to make their combinations effective and those that take them out of the zone of toleration. The chapter explores the history of the construction of the zone of toleration and conflicts over its margins.

Compares the case law on Fraser and Dunsmore and critiques the Supreme Court's failure in Fraser to address the functional nature of the discrimination against farm workers as an issue of equality rights under Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,

[Provides] a critical examination of Canada's Temporary Migration Programs for agriculture. I show how migrants are positioned to be relatively more vulnerable than other workers within the country's food agricultural system owing to their position at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, their precarious immigration status as temporary "foreign" workers, and their racialization as non-Whites from the global South. Moreover, I illustrate how changes to policies of temporary migration have constituted farm work as an even more precarious form of employment for migrants in particular, but also Canadians.... Finally, while recognizing that TMPs may contribute to aspects fo economic development, enabling participants to access income and assets formerly out of their reach, I call for greater attention to the rights, welfare, and dignity of migrants when considering temporary migrations programs.

Annotated photographs of migrant farmers in Ontario from 1984 to 2009, drawn from the author's book, "Harvest Pilgrim's" (Between the Lines, 2009).

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

Examines the Supreme Court's decision on Fraser in the context of the broader political battle on labour rights. The author links the decline in union density to increasing inequality in income and taxation. Canada's failure to ratify or comply with international conventions of labour rights is also analyzed.

Analyzes the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on freedom of association, notably B.C. Health Services (2007), in respect to Canada's constitutional relationship with international law.

Describes the efforts of agricultural workers to obtain legal protection with particular reference to legislation and proceedings in Ontario. Concludes that despite legal setbacks, the struggle continues through the Agriculture Worker Alliance of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

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