The authors are engaged in a multi-dimensional project that analyzes Canadian private sector experience under provincial and federal labour statutes. The broad objective of the research is to draw nuanced lessons from the Canadian experience that will inform the debate over labour law reform in...

Labour legislation was amended to require that a union applying to certify a group of employees must obtain at least 50% of the ballots in a mandatory representation vote. These amendments eliminated the card-based certification system that had prevailed until this time, under which a...

This article proposes a new theoretical framework - the strategic dynamic certification model - to explain how union certification processes operate. Statutory certification procedures are not neutral. Instead, they produce particular incentives, disincentives, and opportunities for employers,...

This article explores the effect of a legislated change in certification procedure in Ontario in 1995, from a card-check system to a mandatory vote system. The author concludes that introduction of mandatory votes had a highly significant negative effect on the probability of certification. In...

In this paper, we examine and compare the impact of American and Japanese labor law on the relative bargaining power of the labor and management within the context of the new global economy based on information technology. We begin by providing a simple economic definition of bargaining power...

Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, have not seen a police strike in living memory. The reason for this is the mandatory interest arbitration model adopted in the two provinces, which sees disputes that cannot be resolved by mutual bargaining referred to a panel of arbitrators who assess...

Globalization has led to union decline almost universally across the world's capitalist democracies. But despite globalization, global labor unions have been able to sign International Framework Agreements (“IFAs”) with more than 110 multinational corporations that cover about 9 million...

In this chapter, we present an outline of the economic analysis of the regulation of unions and collective bargaining. We begin with the simple model of the market for union services and analyze regulations that may increase or decrease either the demand or supply for union representation. In...