A Yankee Gets Schooled in King Arthurs’s Court: Canadian Labour Law as a Cautionary Tale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harry Arthurs has managed to be both mourner-in-chief for the impending demise of the aging “Wagner model” of labour relations that Canada and the United States share, and an aspiring architect of the future of work law in North America and beyond. From his lofty perch, he has chronicled the arc of organized labour’s rise and decline, on this continent and beyond. Never losing sight of the forest for the trees, and armed with a consummate erudition and eloquence, Harry has become a kind of labour law prophet for the advanced capitalist world, and especially for its Anglo-American regions. I write as one of his humble American followers. Harry’s importance to American labour lawyers and scholars stems partly from the location of his perch in Canada. We in the United States could learn a great deal—if we were capable of learning it—from Canada and the trajectory of its labour law regime. Of course, Harry would be the first to caution us about the complexity of cross-country learning. But if any two national labour law systems are “mutually intelligible,” ours should be. Canada’s basic framework for union organizing and collective bargaining was famously modelled on ours. It is a striking illustration of the “extraterritorialization of American labor law.” Our National Labor Relations Act (NLRA ), or Wagner Act, of 1935 served as a model for Canadian reformers in the mid-twentieth century, and the basic features that distinguish the Wagner model from much of the developed world—enterprise-based bargaining, exclusive representation, and majority rule—are still at the core of both systems. Yet, Canada has largely escaped one central pathology of American labour law: its sheer obduracy. Canadian labour law thus suggests some paths not taken in the United States.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.063 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".