Leaving Labour Law’s Pragmatic and Purposive Fortress Behind: Canadian Union Successor Rights Law as a Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I analyze a series of Canadian cases on union successor rights defining the circumstances in which labour rights should be transferred to a successor entity in the context of business sales, restructuring and subcontracting. My analysis casts doubt on a globally influential theory of legal interpretation, which I call the “old legality.” According to this theory, labour law is made not through conventional legal reasoning but through non-legal, pragmatic, and purposive applications of loose industrial relations standards. I claim that the old legality paradigm is analytically inaccurate and has the perverse effect of normalizing the status quo of the post-war labour law regime in a context where its insufficiency is widely acknowledged. Against the old legality, I propose a new approach to studying and teaching labour law doctrine, which I apply here to union successor rights law. This approach portrays labour law reasoning not as pragmatic and purposive but as riven by continuously recurring and incommensurable legal policy conflicts that render purposive argument inconclusive. I suggest that, by constantly bringing these conflicts to the fore in their research and teaching, labour law academics can contribute to opening up the status quo for normative contestation and help create possibilities for ambitious re-regulation of living conditions in the direction of, say, radical equality, participation, and redistribution.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".