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This edited collection draws together original case studies written by leading researchers in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States that examine the politics of working disasters. The essays address two fundamental questions: what gets recognized as a work disaster? And how does the state respond to one? --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Politics of Recognition and Response / Eric Tucker -- Trucking Tragedies: The Hidden Disaster of Mass Death in the Long-Haul Road Transport Industry / Michael Quinlan, Claire Mayhew, and Richard Johnstone -- The Australian Epidemic of Repetition Strain Injury: A Sociological Perspective / Andrew Hopkins -- "All Part of the Game": The Recognition of and Response to an Industrial Disaster at the Fluorspar Mines, St Lawrence, Newfoundland, 1933-1978 / Richard Rennie -- The Long Road to Action: The Silicosis Problem and Swedish Occupational Health and Safety Policy in the 20th Century / Annette Thörnquist -- Disaster, Meaning Making, and Reform in Antebellum Massachusetts / Patricia Reeve -- Regulating Safety, Regulating Profit: Cost-Cutting, Injury and Death in the British North Sea after Piper Alpha / Dave Whyte -- Courts, Crime, and Workplace / Richard Johnstone -- Blame and Causation in the Aftermath of Industrial Disasters: Nova Scotia's Coal Mines from 1858 to Westray / Susan Dodd -- Accountability and Reform in the Aftermath of the Westray Mine Explosion / Eric Tucker.

This edited collection draws together original case studies written by leading researchers in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States that examine the politics of working disasters. The essays address two fundamental questions: what gets recognized as a work disaster? And how does the state respond to one? --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: The Politics of Recognition and Response / Eric Tucker -- Trucking Tragedies: The Hidden Disaster of Mass Death in the Long-Haul Road Transport Industry / Michael Quinlan, Claire Mayhew, and Richard Johnstone -- The Australian Epidemic of Repetition Strain Injury: A Sociological Perspective / Andrew Hopkins -- "All Part of the Game": The Recognition of and Response to an Industrial Disaster at the Fluorspar Mines, St Lawrence, Newfoundland, 1933-1978 / Richard Rennie -- The Long Road to Action: The Silicosis Problem and Swedish Occupational Health and Safety Policy in the 20th Century / Annette Thörnquist -- Disaster, Meaning Making, and Reform in Antebellum Massachusetts / Patricia Reeve -- Regulating Safety, Regulating Profit: Cost-Cutting, Injury and Death in the British North Sea after Piper Alpha / Dave Whyte -- Courts, Crime, and Workplace / Richard Johnstone -- Blame and Causation in the Aftermath of Industrial Disasters: Nova Scotia's Coal Mines from 1858 to Westray / Susan Dodd -- Accountability and Reform in the Aftermath of the Westray Mine Explosion / Eric Tucker.

The rise of rentier capitalism in advanced capitalist countries has detrimentally affected large numbers of worker and impaired the efficacy of protective labour and employment laws. However, capitalist rent-seeking is not unique to rentier capitalism, but rather has taken a variety of forms over time. This chapter begins by exploring the evolving meaning of rent and changing practices of capitalist rent-seeking. It then considers the ways in which workers responded to those practices in both rent-rich and rent-poor sectors of the economy, including through the enactment of labour and employment laws appropriate to, but only partially successful in addressing labour exploitation in each sector. The chapter then considers the impact of rentier capitalism on work in productivist firms and the efficacy of existing protective labour and employment laws. It concludes by considering possible reforms to protective laws for rentier capitalism while recognizing their limits in worlds built on structures generative of labour exploitation.

North American regimes of industrial legality provide workers with protected rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike. However, they also limit the freedom to strike. Trade unions commonly accept and enforce these limits, but at great cost to solidarity and militancy. This article examines the many ways law works against labour by restricting the freedom to strike and explores the practice of unlawful strikes in North America, including recent examples that resulted in successful outcomes. It concludes with reflections on the revival of unlawful strikes as a tactic forrebuilding and remobilizing the North American labour movement. While the article’s focus is North America, the discussion of unlawful strikes may also be relevant in other countries that limit the freedom to strike.

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.

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.

... Occupational health and safety regulation sits atop these structures of risk creation and distribution and historically has been shaped by the struggles of working people to limit the harm that unbridled capitalism would have otherwise inflicted upon them. The results, which are the subject of this chapter, have varied over time and place, and have secured real improvements for some workers. Given space limitations, the remainder of this chapter focuses on OHS regulation in advanced capitalist countries, with a concentration on the English-speaking world. The next section outlines the broad lines of the historical development of OHS regulation, beginning from the rise of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century through to the last decades of the twentieth century and the creation of a new mode of regulation, variously called regulated selfregulation or mandated partial self-regulation. The following section considers various debates over the performance of that regime, including the relation between self-regulation and state enforcement, the practice of state enforcement and the efficacy of worker participation rights. Finally, the last section of the chapter examines emerging OHS challenges to the regulatory regime. --From introduction

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 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.

Debates over worker subordination are central to discussions of the efficacy of protective labour and employment law whose central mission in a capitalist political economy, after all, is to reduce but not eliminate subordination. When protective labour and employment law seems to be fulfilling its mission discussions of worker subordination seem to ebb, but the topic becomes more urgent as the efficacy of the law declines. Not surprisingly, as labour law’s efficacy has been declining over the past several decades, we are in the midst of a revival of debates over worker subordination, the premise of this special issue. While many seek to revive the classic mission of labour and employment law, ameliorating the worst excesses of subordination, while leaving in place labour’s structural dependency on capital, the goal of this article is to revisit and elaborate a marxist political economy perspective to demonstrate that workers’ structural subordination to capital is deepening and that this limits the possibility of achieving much of the reformist agenda. While there are no easy ways of overcoming that structural subordination, a progressive reform agenda must centre that subordination and think about how labour laws might contribute to a transformative project. --Introduction

Work on Trial is a collection of studies of eleven major cases and events that have helped to shape the legal landscape of work in Canada. While most of the cases are well-known because of the impact they have had on collective bargaining, individual employment law, or human rights, less is known about the social and political contexts in which the cases arose, the backgrounds and personalities of the judges and the litigants, the legal manoeuvres that were employed, or the ultimate fate of all those who were involved. These studies, written by some of Canada's leading labour and legal historians, provide this context. Beginning with Toronto Electric Commissioners v. Snider, one of the earliest and most important cases involving the division of powers in the Canadian federation, to the events leading to the articulation of the "Rand Formula" in the immediate post Second World War period, and on to the struggles of women workers in the late 20th century in challenging the continu-ing employment practices based on hegemonic gender-based assumptions, each study tells a compelling story, rich in detail and full of perceptive insights into the complex relationship between law and work. -- Publisher's description.

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

For nearly fifty years, Professor Harry Glasbeek has been at the forefront of legal scholars and public intellectuals challenging assumptions and understandings about the injustices embedded in the economic, social, political and legal orders of Western capitalist democracies. His writings and teachings have influenced generations of law students, academics and activists. [This book] brings together eleven incisive contributions from pre-eminent scholars across several disciplines activated by the same desire for democracy and justice that Glasbeek advances, showing how capitalism shapes the law and how the law protects capitalism. This collection foregrounds a class analysis of the laws responses to corporate killing, workplace violence, surveillance, worker resistance and income inequality, among other issues. --Publisher's description

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.

This study examines worker voice in the development and implementation of safety plans or protocols for covid-19 prevention among hospital workers, long-term care workers, and education workers in the Canadian province of Ontario. Although Ontario occupational health and safety law and official public health policy appear to recognize the need for active consultation with workers and labour unions, there were limited – and in some cases no – efforts by employers to meaningfully involve workers, worker representatives (reps), or union officials in assessing covid-19 risks and planning protection and prevention measures. The political and legal efforts of workers and unions to assert their right to participate and the outcomes of those efforts are also documented through archival evidence and interviews with worker reps and union officials. The article concludes with an assessment of weaknesses in the government promotion and protection of worker health and safety rights and calls for greater labour attention to the critical importance of worker health and safety representation.