Your search

Climate change will dramatically affect labor markets, but labor law scholars have mostly ignored it. Environmental law scholars are concerned with climate change, but they lack expertise in the complexities of regulating the labor relationship. Neither legal field is equipped to deal adequately with the challenge of governing the effects of climate change on labor markets, employers, and workers. This essay argues that a legal field organized around the concept of a ‘just transition’ to a lower carbon economy could bring together environmental law, labor law, and environment justice scholars in interesting and valuable ways. “Just transitions” is a concept originally developed by the North American labor movement, but has since been endorsed by important global institutions including the International Labour Organization and the U.N. Environmental Program. However, the prescriptions that would guide a policy of just transition have been under-explored in the legal literature. This paper marks an important early contribution to this challenge. It explores the factual and normative boundaries of a legal field called Just Transitions Law and questions whether such a field would offer any new, valuable insights into the challenge of regulating a response to climate change.

This paper examines how two trade union organisations in Quebec (Canada) manage to integrate issues of concern to young members (30 years old and under) and spur changes in their agenda, structures and practices. Between 2009 and 2014, 25 interviews were conducted in these two organisations, while 41 focus group discussions were held with more than 430 members. We contend that improving young members' feeling of belonging to the union, enhancing internal network density and implementing more participatory forms of democracy are key elements when it comes to increasing their participation. Our findings reveal that unions must dare to integrate young members, without seeking to mould them to fit with the values and practices they deem to be outdated. It means not only training young members to carry the necessary message to their peers but also allowing them to challenge the strategic orientations suggested therein.

The article reviews the book, "The Future of the International Labour Organization in the Global Economy," by Francis Maupain.

The article reviews the book, "The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers' Movement," by Stanley Aronowitz.

Why are US labor unions so weak? Union decline has had important consequences for politics, inequality, and social policy. Common explanations cite employment shifts, public opinion, labor laws, and differences in working class culture and organization. But comparing the United States with Canada challenges those explanations. After following US unionization rates for decades, Canadian rates diverged in the 1960s, and are now nearly three times higher. This divergence was due to different processes of working class political incorporation. In the United States, labor was incorporated as an interest group into a labor regime governed by a pluralist idea. In Canada, labor was incorporated as a class representative into a labor regime governed by a class idea. This led to a relatively stronger Canadian labor regime that better held employers in check and protected workers’ collective bargaining rights. As a result, union density stabilized in Canada while plummeting in the United States.

This article reviews the book, "Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada," by Ian Milligan.

This paper offers some predictions about the impact of the Supreme Court of Canada's landmark ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour on the numerous limitations on the right to strike currently in effect in every Canadian jurisdiction. In the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour case the Court - strongly affirming its earlier decision in B.C. Health, in which it held that freedom of association under section 2(d) of the Charter encompasses the right to a "meaningful process of collective bargaining," and that "substantial interference" with that right will give rise to an infringement - declared that the right to strike is an essential component of a meaningful process of collect- ive bargaining, and as such is protected under the Charter. The author (who points out that this is not his first attempt at "reading constitutional tea leaves ") expresses surprise at the breadth of the majority's interpretation of what will constitute "substantial interference," as it is likely to result in many of the exist- ing schemes for regulation of strikes in essential services being held to violate section 2(d) and therefore to require justification under section 1 as a reason- able limit. Equally surprising, in the author's view, is the Court's section 1 analysis itself which suggests that the Court is prepared to undertake a detailed, searching review of "controlled strike" and "no-strike" schemes for designation of essential services and essential employees and the adequacy of any alterna- tive dispute resolution mechanism provided under such schemes as a substitute for the right to strike. Based on the Court's reasons in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, the author posits that numerous Charter challenges can be expected in the coming years against legislated restrictions on collective bargaining and strike activity, including the ad hoc "instant" back-to-work model to which the federal government has repeatedly resorted. Nevertheless, he cautions, given the considerable uneveness of the jurisprudential road which led from B.C. Health to Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, one should be wary of trying to predict the course of the Supreme Court's pronouncements.

On January 9, 1927, a fire tore through the Laurier Palace, a cinema located in a French-speaking, working-class neighborhood on the east side of Montreal. Seventy-eight children died. This article uses the abundant documentation generated by the fire to explore a number of themes related to working-class childhood in early-twentieth-century Montreal: children’s autonomy versus parental surveillance and authority; the place of commercial leisure and petty consumption in the lives of working-class children; and contemporary understandings of such tragic accidents as the Laurier Palace fire. The article reflects on the promise and perils of what David Lowenthal has termed the “voyeuristic empathy” promoted by historians. Are historians of youth, what one scholar calls “latter-day child savers,” more likely than others to adopt a perspective reliant upon (or vulnerable to) such empathy?

This article reviews the book, "Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973–2010," by Francis Peddie and Royden Leuwen.

The article reviews the book, "The Origins of Right to Work: Anti-labor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago," by Cedric de Leon.

The article reviews the book, "Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism," by Robin Truth Goodman.

The article reviews the book, "Autonomie collective et droit du travail. Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Pierre Verge," edited by Dominic Roux.

This paper uses the Canadian Labour Force Survey to understand why the level and dispersion of wages have evolved differently across provinces from 1997 to 2013. The faster increase in the level of wages and the decline in wage dispersion in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Alberta are the starkest interprovincial differences. We find that they are accounted for by the growth in the extractive resources sectors, which benefited less‐educated and younger workers the most. Increases in minimum wages since 2005 are found to be the main reason why wages at the very bottom grew more than those in the middle of the distribution.

This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment.

This study examines how five unions in the Canadian province of Alberta responded to a sudden influx of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), as part of Canadian employers’ increased use of migrant workers in the mid-2000s. The authors find three types of response to the new TFW members: resistive, facilitative and active. Furthermore, these responses were dynamic and changing over time. The different responses are best explained not by the unions’ institutional context, but by internal factors shaping each union’s response. Drawing upon the concept of referential unionisms, the study explores how unions’ self-identity shapes their responses to new challenges such as the influx of migrant workers.

This article reviews the book, "Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment," by Gerald Tulchinsky.

This article examines changes in levels of confidence in unions and proposes an intra-national comparison between Quebec and the rest of Canada based on the analysis of the three most recent waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) database, of which Canada is part (i.e. 1990, 2000, 2006). After noting differences in the trends of confidence in unions in these two regions, we applied the same logistic regression model to both regions, based on the 2006 WVS wave, in order to bring out the determinants of the propensity of individuals to express confidence in unions. The results show both similarities and differences between the two regions. As for the similarities between Quebec and the rest of Canada, it should be noted that involvement in politics and the fact of being unionized had a positive effect on the respondents’ propensity to have confidence in unions whereas most of the socio-demographic variables had no significant effects. As for the differences, the fact of reporting a higher income had a significant negative impact in Quebec, but was not significant in the rest of Canada. The fact of supporting the NDP in the rest of Canada had a more structuring effect on the propensity of individuals to have confidence in unions than the fact of supporting the BQ in Quebec. Moreover, the greater the extent to which citizens in Quebec identified with left-leaning ideological positions, the more likely they were to have confidence in unions. Finally, the respondent’s level of education was not significant in the rest of Canada but, cetiris paribus, was highly significant and positively related to confidence in unions in Quebec.

The article reviews the book, "Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike That Shook London and Helped Launch the Labor Movement," by John Tully.

This article reviews the book, "A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain," by Owen Hatherley.