In most contemporary occupational health and safety (OHS) regimes, great emphasis is placed on amplifying worker voice in regulation through worker health and safety representation in the employers’ OHS management system. Historically, these regimes were designed on the assumption that the...

New governance theory has a large following in academia and is exerting an influence in numerous spheres of regulatory policy. Yet in the area of occupational health and safety, new governance is hardly new at all. Indeed, it is fair to say that it in many ways what are now labelled new...

Street railway strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often accompanied by high levels of public disorder. The challenge to public authorities, however, was not just in the scale of the disorder but also the disjuncture between the behaviour that a significant portion...

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...

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...

J.S. Woodsworth was a prominent Canadian socialist who was a member of the Canadian Parliament from 1921 to 1942 and a founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of the present New Democratic Party (NDP). This paper uses a Gramscian framework to explore his...

Any attempt at a historical overview inevitably involves contentious choices, including those of focus, the analytic lens to deploy, and the themes that structure the narrative. The first and most controversial choice that we have made is that of focus. Our topic is the legal regulation of...

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 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...