From Condition of Limited Liability to Exceptional Remedy: The History of Shareholder and Director Liability for Unpaid Workers' Wages in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is part of a larger study of the recurrent dilemmas that arise when protective labor law conflicts with the norms of capitalist legality. In this particular case, shareholder liability for unpaid workers' wages was first enacted in mid-nineteenth century New York State as a condition of providing investors with easy access to the corporate form at a time when there was deep unease about its legitimacy. The Canadian debate was more muted, but prominent reform politicians expressed similar concerns about the corporation, leading them to impose first shareholder and then director liability for unpaid workers' wages. In the latter part of the nineteenth-century, as the legal norms of separate legal personality and the limited liability of the makers and managers of corporations hardened into legal bedrock, the understanding of director liability as a condition of incorporation was inverted by the judiciary and treated as an exceptional privilege to be enjoyed only by the most vulnerable workers. In the late twentieth century, the Supreme Court of Canada adopted a similar line of reasoning to justify its holding that workers were not entitled to recover unpaid termination and severance pay from directors when their corporate employers defaulted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".