Law, industrial relations, and the state - Pluralism or fragmentation? Thetwentieth-century employment law regime in Canada

In 1947, Bora Laskin, the doyen of Canadian collective bargaining law, rema rked that "Labour relations as a matter for legal study...has outgrown any confinement to a section of the law of torts or to a corner of the criminal law. Similarly, and from another standpoint, it has burst the narrow bound s of master and servant." That standpoint was liberal pluralism, which comp rises collective bargaining legislation administered by independent labour boards and a system of grievance arbitration to enforce collective agreemen ts. After World War II, it came to dominate our understanding of labour rel ations law such that, according to Laskin, reference to "pre-collective bar gaining standards is an attempt to re-enter a world that has ceased to exis t." But this picture is only partially true. Instead of replacing earlier r egimes of industrial legality, industrial pluralism was grafted on to them. Moreover, it only encompassed a narrow, albeit crucial, segment of workers ; in the mid-1950s "the typical union member was a relatively settled, semi -skilled male worker within a large industrial corporation." More than 65 p ercent of Canadian workers at that time, a large proportion of whom were wo men and recent immigrants, fell outside the regime. This paper broadens the focus from collective bargaining law to include other forms of the legal r egulation of employment relations, such as the common law, minimum standard s, and equity legislation. In doing so, it examines the extent to which lib eral pluralism regime was implicated in constructing and reinforcing a deep ly segmented labour market in Canada. It also probes whether the recent ass ault on trade union rights may be the trajectory for the reconstruction of a new regime of employment relations.