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