The Politics of the Ontario Labour Relations Act: Business, Labour, and Government in the consolidation of Post-War Industrial Relations, 1949–1961
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ontario Labour Relations Act (olra) has long dictated the legal relationship between trade unions and employers in the province. Although subject to years of delay, when the provincial government introduced the olra in 1950, its official stance on labour relations was a “hands off” program that was designed to leave collective bargaining to the participants. Often defined as industrial pluralism, this new legal regime was supposed to have been crafted in the name of “fairness and balance” in which trade unions abandoned previous militancy for state-sponsored freedoms. Upon closer examination, however, the provincial government’s approach to industrial pluralism was much less hands off than has previously been assumed. Rather, the entrenchment of collective bargaining in Ontario was closely aligned with the class interests of Ontario businesses. Through an examination of the politics surrounding olra, this article argues that Leslie Frost’s Conservative government structured the Act in order to appease employer demands surrounding increased legal regulation of collective bargaining and union organizing, which limited the extension of unionization throughout the province. In making this observation, the article maintains that the Conservative regime of industrial pluralism was both the by-product and the purveyor of ongoing class antagonism throughout the 1950s. Resume La Loi sur les relations de travail de l’Ontario a depuis longtemps gouverne les relations juridiques entre les syndicats et les employeurs dans la province. Bien qu’elle soit assujettie a des annees de retard, quand le gouvernement provincial avait introduit la Loi sur les relations de travail en 1950, sa position officielle a l’egard des relations de travail etait un programme « non interventionniste » concu pour laisser la negociation collective aux participants. Souvent defini comme pluralisme industriel, ce nouveau regime juridique etait suppose etre confectionne au nom de « la justice et l’equilibre » dans lequel les syndicats avaient abandonne le militantisme precedent pour la liberte sanctionnee par l’Etat. Toutefois, par suite d’un examen minutieux, l’approche du gouvernement provincial au pluralisme industriel etait moins non interventionniste que precedemment assume. L’enchâssement de la negociation collective en Ontario etait etroitement aligne avec les interets des entreprises de l’Ontario. Par l’intermediaire d’une etude des politiques se rapportant a la Loi sur les relations de travail, cet article denote que le gouvernemnet conservateur de Leslie Frost avait structure cette loi pour faire des concessions aux demandes des employeurs relatives au reglementation juridique accru a l’egard de la negociation collective et au recrutement syndical, qui limitait la croissance de la syndicalisation partout dans la province. En faisant cette observation, cet article insiste sur le fait que le regime conservateur du pluralisme industriel etait a la fois le produit derive et l’origine de l’antagonisme permanent des classes tout au long des annees 1950.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".