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The article reviews the book, "Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain," by Jamie L. Bronstein.

The article focuses on the constitutional right to bargain collectively in Canada. Employers in Canada have adopted labour management policies that including resistance to and avoidance of collective bargaining, shifting from secure employment forms and increasing demand on the workforce. It mentions the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU) which had successfully fought a long battle to achieve pay equity for its largely female membership.

The article reviews the book, "The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law," by John Fabian Witt.

The article reviews the book, "Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870-1939," by Mark Aldrich.

During the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the question of whether trade unions in Ontario were criminal conspiracies under common law was never clearly determined. By examining the development and interaction of the legal and social zones of toleration we can illuminate how law was shaped by and shaped early struggles between workers and employers. The statutory reforms of 1872 clearly defined a narrow zone of legal toleration in which trade unions were accepted as labour market organizations while the means they could to pursue their objectives were restricted. The contours of industrial legality which began to emerge during this period remain a salient feature of current labour law.

The article reviews the book, "Back to Work? Labour, State and Industrial Relations in Canada," by Bob Russell.

The development of industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century in Ontario brought new and more serious hazards into the workplace and drew women and children into the waged labour force. As a result of working class lobbying and the efforts of middle class reformers, the state empowered itself to regulate health and safety conditions in factories and to protect child and female labour. The implementation of these regulations was left to an inspectorate which was armed with substantial legal powers to enforce the law. These powers were rarely invoked by the inspectors. However, the failure to prosecute does not in itself indicate that the law was unenforced. An alternative enforcement strategy based on persuasion was followed by most inspectors. It has been argued that persuasion was chosen over prosecution because it made more efficient use of the scarce enforcement resources available to the inspectors, and that persuasion was effective. This paper argues that although it is true that the government chose to devote woefully inadequate resources to enforcement of factory legislation, this is not an adequate explanation of the inspectors' enforcement behaviour. The belief that persuasion was an effective enforcement model also flowed from the inspectors' values and assumptions, including the following: that worker carelessness was the major cause of accidents; that employers were socially responsible; that workers and employers had common interests in occupational health and safety; and that women and children needed special protection. It is further argued that persuasion was not an effective enforcement strategy, especially because it was linked with an acceptance by the inspectors of 'normal' industrial practices, even where those practices generated significant risks for workers. In effect, health and safety regulation probably did as much to legitimate industrial capitalism as it did to protect workers health and safety.

This article reviews the book, "Assault on the Worker: Occupational Health and Safety in Canada," by Charles E. Reasons, Lois L. Ross, and Craig Paterson.

This article reviews the book, "Safety at Work : The Limits of Self Regulation," by Sandra Dawson, Paul Willman, Martin Bamford & Alain Clinton.

This article reviews the book, "Unions in Court: Organized Labour and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms" by Larry Savage and Charles W. Smith.

Constitutional labour rights in Canada now protect workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively and to strike. These associational freedoms are especially important for public sector workers, the most frequent targets of legislation limiting their freedoms. However, the Supreme Court of Canada judgments recognizing these rights and freedoms have also introduced important ambiguities about their foundation, scope and level of protection. This brief comment locates these ambiguities in the context of Canada’s political economy and industrial relations regime, which are beset by contradiction and conflict. It then explores the origins and development of the jurisprudential ambiguities in constitutional labour rights through a survey of recent Supreme Court of Canada’s labour rights judgments, including most recently British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and British Columbia (2016).

Analyzes the historical and legal framework of restrictive labour laws that constrain the right to strike. Argues that, although the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutional freedom to strike in 2015, the impact of the SCC ruling should be assessed within this broader context.

This article is part of a larger study of Canadian labor law before the advent of statutory collective bargaining, which questions the traditional periodization and the meanings of the categories. It is often an un-articulated premise that the exercise by employers of their superior economic power, as imparted and structured through the law of property and contract, is not coercion. Rather, the analysis is restricted to direct state coercion, exercised through the criminal law, the police, and the injunction. This framework produces a partial view of the role of law and interferes with an analysis of the strategic choices made by workers and employers. By bringing 'normal' market relations back in, we can more fully examine the nuances of coercion and consent at a given time.

Causation analysis is densely political in at least three ways. First, because causation is crucial to our system of attributing moral, legal, and political responsibility, causation arguments are advanced for purely instrumental purposes. They do political work. Second, because any particular occurrence is the outcome of an almost infinite number of antecedent events, “but for” causation analysis produces trivial results. A judgment about causal significance is required and will depend, in part, on the goals of the analysis. The choice of goals is political, but unstated goals and hidden assumptions often exclude consideration of some possible causes as significant. Theses politics of causation need to be made explicit. Third, the institutional setting in which official determinations of causation are made influence the outcome. Hence, it is necessary to explore these as well. Each of these three dimensions of the politics of causation is explored through an analysis of the 1992 Westray Mine disaster which killed 29 miners in Nova Scotia, and the official responses to it. It is argued that if the goal is to protect workers and nothing else, the political-economic context that promotes the creation of hazardous conditions must be considered a significant cause of harmful occurrences. It is unlikely, however that any of the official responses to the disaster will take this approach.

Discusses "The Westray Story" (Report of the Westray Mine Public Inquiry, Justice K. Peter Richard, Commissioner, 1997) that made scathing findings regarding the operation of the short-lived mine and the government's failure to regulate it properly.

The article reviews the book, "Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism," by Daniel R. Ernst.

The article reviews the book, "Law and the Shaping of the America Labor Movement," by William E. Forbath

Despite the comprehensiveness of neo-liberal restructuring in Canada, it has not proceeded uniformly in its timing or outcomes across regulatory fields and political jurisdictions. The example of occupational health and safety (OHS) regulation is instructive. This article compares recent OHS developments in five Canadian jurisdictions, Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and the Federal jurisdiction. It finds that despite the adoption of a common model by all jurisdictions, there has recently been considerable divergence in the way that the elements of worker participation and protection have been combined. Modified power resource theory is used to explain a portion of this divergence.

The article reviews the book, "Work and Health," by M. Quinlan.

The Wagner Act Model has formed the basis of Canada's collective bargaining regime since World War II but has come under intense scrutiny in recent years because of legislative weakening of collective bargaining rights, constitutional litigation defending collective bargaining rights and declining union density. This article examines and assesses these developments, arguing that legislatively we have not witnessed a wholesale attack on Wagnerism, but rather a selective weakening of some of its elements. In the courts, it briefly appeared as if the judiciary might constitutionalize meaningful labour rights and impede the erosion of Wagnerism, but recent judicial case law suggests the prospects for this outcome are fading. While the political defence of Wagnerism may be necessary when the alternatives to it are likely worse, holding on to what we've got will not reverse the long-term decline in union density. The article concludes that at present there are no legal solutions to the labour movement's problems and that innovative efforts to represent workers' collective interests outside of formal collective bargaining provide a more promising alternative.