Brian Langille

The idea of labour law

This chapter begins by recontextualizing and re-interpreting the dominant story of labour law in order to offer a different account, one that treats labour as a ‘fictive commodity.’ After historicizing labour law’s narrative, the chapter reviews one of the major contemporary contenders to replace it, an account that sees the function of labour law as regulating the labour market. Using this account as a jumping-off point, this chapter develops a reinvigorated conceptual and normative account of labour law, which draw’s upon Amaryta Sen’s conception of capabilities and Elizabeth Anderson’s idea of democratic equality. The ‘new’ account of labour law proposed herein is attentive to feminist concerns about socially necessary, but unpaid, work.

“Strictly Speaking—It Went Without Saying”

Herbert Simon once observed that watching an ant make its way across the uneven surface of a beach, one can easily be impressed—too impressed—with the foresight and complexity of the ants internal map of the beach. Simon went on to point out that such an attribution of complexity to the ant makes a serious mistake. Most of the complexity is not in the ant but in the beach. The ant is just complex enough to use the features of the beach to find its way.

The Polical Economy of Fairness: Frank Iacobucci's Labour Law Jurisprudence

Although Frank Iacobucci ran some rather large operations during his magnificent career (as provost of the University of Toronto, the largest university in the country, and as deputy minister of justice, the largest law firm in the country), and probably spent more time than he cares to remember on personnel issues, he was not a labour lawyer in his pre–Supreme Court life. But it is fair to say that he became one while on the Court. A good one. This is no mean achievement, and it is one in which Frank takes, as he has publicly admitted, some pride in having, as he put it, ‘played in a minor role in the development of an ongoing debate on this most fundamental part of our lives.’ It is no mean achievement because to be a good labour lawyer requires an overview, a coherent account, of all of the various and disparate laws (common law, employment-standards law, human-rights law, collective bargaining law – and much else) that bear upon the lives of human beings engaged in productive activity – often, not always, and decreasingly, within the legal category we call ‘employment.’ Articulating such an overarching and coherent account of the field is both difficult and a necessary precondition to principled decision making. It is a task Frank undertook with insight and passion. In what follows we first discuss this issue of the nature of labour law and Frank’s role in articulating its basic theory. Then we discuss Frank’s contributions to labour law under three headings: the common and statutory law of dismissal, the law of collective bargaining, and freedom of association under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Finally, we attend to several other cross-cutting themes in Frank’s judgments that strike us as significant and revealing, not only of Frank’s attitudes to law in general, and to labour law in particular, but of his attitude to life itself. Taken

Global Social Policy Forum

This issue’s Forum is dedicated to the memory of Professor Peter Townsend, who sadly died in June 2009. Peter was a pioneer of Global Social Policy as a field of study and research and a champion of human rights from the outset. In the 1960s, he was developing a global analysis of world poverty combining the insights of global sociology with those of development studies with those of social policy. This work was published in The Concept of Poverty in 1970 where he set out an ‘approach to development and stratification [to explain] how poverty arises, and is perpetuated, in low income and high income countries’. It was this work that formed the basis for his theory of poverty, including the seminal Poverty in the UK (1979). The ‘domestic’ and ‘the international’ were, for Peter, inseparable realms of analysis and action. When it comes to explaining the production – and reproduction – of poverty and the systematic abuse of human rights, he maintained that a globalist analysis is an essential part of any coherent programme of research and action. Well known is his argument that poverty and wealth are directly related to one another. But less recognized is that this was articulated in global terms from the outset. The riches of (those living in) high income countries are, he argued, inextricably linked to poverty (of those living) in low income countries. This idea that poverty at home and abroad are directly connected is best articulated in the following quote: ‘A wealthy society which deprives a poor country of resources may simultaneously deprive its own poor classes through maldistribution of those additional resources’ (The Concept of Poverty, 1970: 42). G S P F O R U M 151