Solidarity, Unconscionability, and Enforcement of Union Fines: Birch v. Union of Taxation Employees, Local 70030
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the case of Birch v. Union of Taxation Employees, Local 70030, the Ontario Court of Appeal refused to enforce a disciplinary fine imposed on union members who had crossed a picket line established in support of a legal strike. The union had followed all of the applicable constitutional rules in imposing the fine, but the Ontario Court concluded that enforcement of the fine would be unconscionable. This case comment explores the Court’s reasoning, noting a move towards the use of unconscionability as the ground for limiting enforcement of penal contractual clauses, rather than an outright rejection of such clauses. It nevertheless notes that the Court’s reasoning leaves a number of unanswered questions, including whether unconscionability should be determined at the time of contract formation or in the context of the contractual breach, and whether all union fines would be considered unconscionable, or just the ones imposed in this case. The comment notes the unique nature of a union constitution as a contract, and describes other alternatives, such as the legislative scheme in Saskatchewan, that might permit the enforcement of reasonable union fines.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".