Constitutionalizing the Right of Workers to Organize, Bargain and Strike: The Sight of One Shoulder Shrugging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada may well conclude in Fraser that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms confers upon agricultural workers the full panoply of bargaining rights provided under contemporary Canadian collective bargaining legislation, from the right to be represented exclusively by the bargaining agent chosen by the majority, to the right to engage their employer in good faith negotiations, to the right to strike. If the Court does so, its decision will be greeted with delight by progressive legal scholars, proponents of countervailing power as a strategy of labour market regulation, and true believers in the potential of constitutional and international rights discourse to transform political economy and social relations. There will be congratulations all 'round: to the skilled advocates who will have achieved a famous victory against long odds, to the imaginative academics who will have erected the conceptual scaffolding on which counsel’s arguments will have been constructed, and not least, to the judges who will have finally liberated themselves from the tyranny of precedent and sloughed off 200 years of curial antipathy to workers and their interests.Of course, not everyone will be delighted. Dour devotees of legal logic and historical accuracy are likely to grimace or roll their eyes, neo-liberals who favour unregulated labour markets and managerial unilateralism will cry havoc, and sceptics who question the capacity of courts to bring about deep and lasting change, and the wisdom of asking them to do so, will simply shrug. I consider myself to be a progressive scholar who recalls the bygone era of collective bargaining with great nostalgia, I admire skilled lawyers and free-thinking judges and have built the odd conceptual scaffold for both in my time, and I retain an atavistic attachment to logic and historical accuracy. But because most of all I am a sceptic, I will shrug.Of course, I will shrug with one shoulder only. Clearly, the Agricultural Employees Protection Act was a cynical attempt to perpetuate the unjustified exclusion of workers on farms and in food processing plants from the regime of collective bargaining. Clearly these workers should have the same rights to organize, bargain and strike as workers in auto plants and banks - however modest the value of those rights may turn out to be in practice. Consequently, if the Supreme Court decides in their favour, one shoulder will remain firmly in place, but the other will shrug.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".