This report maps current enforcement and compliance measures and practices in Ontario's regulation of employment, particularly as they relate to precarious employment. It evaluates the effectiveness of Ontario's enforcement regimes, focusing on Employment Standards (ES) and Occupational Health...

It is the purpose of this paper to contribute to a discussion of the early development of occupational health and safety regulation in Ontario. Why was the state empowered to regulate occupational health and safety in the late nineteenth century, and why was this power exercised with such little...

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...

In recent years there has been an outpouring of popular and scholarly writing on the constitutionalization of labour rights. In this paper I seek to add to this literature in three ways. First, at a conceptual level I unpack two important dimensions of labour rights, their thickness and their...

In recent years the term “wage theft” has been widely used to describe the phenomenon of employers not paying their workers the wages they are owed. While the term has great normative weight, it is rarely accompanied by calls for employers literally to be prosecuted under the criminal law....

Labour law historians rarely write about the theoretical and methodological foundations of their discipline. In response to this state of affairs, this article adopts a reconnaissance strategy, which eschews any pretense at providing a synthesis or authoritative conclusions, but rather hopes to...

The rise of digital platforms through which labour is bought and sold is transforming the world of work and challenging the existing regulatory regimes that govern it. Depending on one's point of view, Uber has become the poster child or bête noir of this transformation, challenging traditional...

It is widely agreed that there is a crisis in labour/employment standards enforcement. A key issue is the role of deterrence measures that penalise violations. Employment standards enforcement in Ontario, like in most jurisdictions, is based mainly on a compliance framework promoting voluntary...

This article assesses whether a deterrence gap exists in the enforcement of the Ontario Employment Standards Act (ESA), which sets minimum conditions of employment in areas such as minimum wage, overtime pay and leaves. Drawing on a unique administrative data set, the article measures the use of...

This paper examines strikes as an expression of worker voice. It begins with a discussion of the connection between voice and strikes. It then documents the sharp decline in strike frequency across the common law world. It looks more closely at strike rates in Canada, where strike rates have...