Thwarted and Delayed: Three Eras of Legislating Labour Rights in the Ontario Public Service, 1867-2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seeking to understand why public servants took so long to achieve labour rights—particularly the right to strike—compared to those in the broader economy, this dissertation explores the historical evolution of labour relations within the Ontario Public Service (OPS) from 1867 to 2017. Through an examination of the interplay between institutions and broader socio-economic and political forces, viewed through a critical institutionalist framework, this study argues that the development of OPS labour relations is defined by three distinct eras. The first era, from Confederation until the 1960s, was dominated by the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, which limited the labour rights available to public servants. The second era, from the 1960s to the 1990s, saw the ideology of the governing party as the primary dynamic, with party ideology playing a significant role in the emergence of public servants’ right to strike. Starting in the 1990s, the third era saw the rise of neoliberalism shift the focus of governments of all partisan stripes toward cost containment. As a result, this era was marked by hard bargaining and practical constraints on the feasibility of the strike option. This study demonstrates how these primary factors, along with other influences such as worker militancy and class relations, have shaped the long development of the OPS labour relations regime. The dissertation concludes that, despite significant legislative changes, the government has nevertheless retained considerable control over the material outcomes of the public service labour relations system.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".