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The article reviews the book, "Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870-1939," by Mark Aldrich.
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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.
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The article reviews the book, "Back to Work? Labour, State and Industrial Relations in Canada," by Bob Russell.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The article reviews the book, "Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism," by Daniel R. Ernst.
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The article reviews the book, "Law and the Shaping of the America Labor Movement," by William E. Forbath
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The article reviews the book, "Work and Health," by M. Quinlan.
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At the turn of the century, the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of the Canadian state responded to the labour conflicts associated with the second industrial revolution by simultaneously expanding both their coercive and their facilitative roles. This paper examines one aspect of this development, the rise of the labour injunction, through a study of a series of strikes conducted chiefly by metal workers in south central Ontario between 1900 and 1914. In addition to retrieving the largely forgotten genealogy of a body of law that continues to play an important role in regulating and containing trade union activity, the study contributes insights into debates raging among labour historians regarding the role and significance of state institutions and public discourse in determining the trajectory and fate of organized labour.
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The paper will proceed as follows. It tells the Westray story in two parts, first, the decision to set up the mine and, second, the operation of the mine. These events illuminate the salience of the broader political economic context to an understanding of what happened. Further, the story gives the lie to the assumptions which underpin health and safety regulation. Next, the paper details the implications of the political economy and the prevailing ideology for the enforcement of health and safety regulation. The paper then critically examines a component of, or prop for, the consensus theory which postulates that workers and capitalists share, in some roughly comparable way, the risks of production. In part this is done by examining the proposition that the corporate form is a neutral, facilitating device.