Freedom of Association in a Free Enterprise System: Wal-Mart in Jonquière
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After a union was certified to represent employees at a Wal-Mart store in Jonquiere, Quebec, in 2004, the union and Wal-Mart bargained to impasse. When the union obtained an order requiring that the dispute be submitted to arbitration, Wal-Mart announced that it would close the store and subsequently did so. The union and the dismissed employees initiated a range of unfair labour practice complaints challenging the closing and the dismissals. Two of these complaints were eventually reviewed by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2009, and in the leading decision in Plourde v. Wal-Mart, the Court concluded that no remedy was available to the dismissed employees under certain sections of the Quebec Labour Code which provided for reinstatement where workers have been dismissed for exercising rights under the Code. This paper first examines Wal-Mart’s well-documented pattern of resistance to unionization. It then considers whether the majority’s position is defensible in the light of the wording of the Quebec statute, the Court’s previous commitment to the purposive interpretation of statutory unfair labour practice provisions, and its recent commitment to protecting collective bargaining as an important derivative of the guarantee of freedom of association in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Particular attention is paid to the origins of the idea, especially in the United States, that an employer has the right to close a business even in order to avoid a union, and to how that idea has been addressed by labour boards across Canada.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".