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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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter compares the historical development and use of criminal law at work in the United Kingdom and in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, it considers the use of the criminal law both in the master and servant regime as an instrument for disciplining the workforce and in factory legislation for protecting workers from unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, including exceedingly long hours work. Master and servant legislation that criminalized servant breaches of contract originated in the United Kingdom where it was widely used in the nineteenth century to discipline industrial workers. These laws were partially replicated in Ontario, where it had shallower roots and was used less aggressively. At the same time as the use of criminal law to enforce master and servant law was contested, legislatures in the United Kingdom and Ontario enacted protective factory acts limiting the length of the working day. However, these factory acts did not treat employer violations crimes; instead, they were treated as lesser ‘regulatory’ offences for which employers were rarely prosecuted.

Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has often been portrayed as a model for temporary migration programmes. It is largely governed by the Contracts negotiated between Canada and Mexico and Commonwealth Caribbean countries respectively. This article provides a critical analysis of the Contract by examining its structural context and considers the possibilities and limitations for ameliorating it. It outlines formal recommendations that the article co-authors presented during the annual Contract negotiations between Canada and sending states in 2020. The article then explains why these recommendations were not accepted, situating the negotiation process within the structural context that produces migrant workers' vulnerability, on the one hand, and limits the capacity of representatives of sending and receiving states to expand rights and offer stronger protections to migrant farmworkers, on the other hand. We argue that fundamental changes are required to address the vulnerability of migrant agricultural workers. In the absence of structural changes, it is nevertheless important to seek improvements in the regulation of the programme through any means possible, including strengthening the Contract.

The nature of employment is changing: low wage jobs are increasingly common, fewer workers belong to unions, and workplaces are being transformed through the growth of contracting-out, franchising, and extended supply chains. Closing the Enforcement Gap offers a comprehensive analysis of the enforcement of employment standards in Ontario. Adopting mixed methods, this work includes qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with workers, community advocates, and enforcement officials; extensive archival research excavating decades of ministerial records; and analysis of a previously untapped source of administrative data collected by Ontario’s Ministry of Labour. The authors reveal and trace the roots of a deepening "enforcement gap" that pervades nearly all aspects of the regime, demonstrating that the province’s Employment Standards Act (ESA) fails too many workers who rely on the floor of minimum conditions it was devised to provide. Arguably, there is nothing inevitable about the enforcement gap in Ontario or for that matter elsewhere. Through contributions from leading employment standards enforcement scholars in the US, the UK, and Australia, as well as Quebec, Closing the Enforcement Gap surveys innovative enforcement models that are emerging in a variety of jurisdictions and sets out a bold vision for strengthening employment standards enforcement. -- Publisher's description.