Most academic labour lawyers in Canada are used to focussing their attention on the "traditional" employment relationship in which workers are more or less permanently employed by a single employer and regularly work forty or so hours per week. This paper focusses attention on the "Baker Street irregulars" of the labour market, to use a Sherlockian analogy.
In this paper the authors look at the evidence of increased employee ownership in Canada. Employee ownership of a company may involve a 100 percent buyout to avoid closure, a transfer of ownership to employees (e.g., at the retirement of the owner), or the establishment of a company stock purchase plan. The paper looks at case studies of seven employee-owned firms in Canada. The studies show that employee ownership has meant survival, a return to profitability, and in many situations continued growth for these companies.
Research on the male-female wage differential in Canada has produced evidence of a substantial link between occupational segregation and low female earnings. Because most Canadian labour jurisdictions have enacted equal pay for equal work legislation, this component of the wage gap is unaffected. Consequently, programs which attempt to desegregate occupations and/or resolve pay inequities arising from occupational segregation are being debated.
This paper pursues the questionable effects of seniority systems by examining; the remedial powers at the disposal of each legal forum available to an employee to pursue a discrimination claim, the relevant Canadian jurisprudence on discrimination, and the American experience with discrimination claims based on seniority. This paper concludes with a proposal detailing an outline of an affirmative action plan tailored to fit the Canadian situation as it is exposed by the previous sections of the paper.
This research paper reviews the subject of psychological testing in personnel selection. The history of employment testing is traced from its beginnings in World War I to current day testing practices. Tests are described in a five category classification: intelligence, aptitude, performance, interest and personality tests. Next the various psychometric properties of tests are discussed: standardization of a test, objectivity, the different kinds of norms and reliability, and the different types of validity.
Many different forms of impasse procedure exist to facilitate arrival at an agreement once the parties, engaged in negotiations, reach an impasse. The more traditional approaches have tended to be the use of mediation (or conciliation), arbitration and strike/lockout.
The aim of this paper is to provide a general overview of dual-earner families in Canada. This paper is primarily a survey paper which provides an analysis of the existing literature and data on this topic. Unfortunately, little research has been done in Canada on dual-earner families specifically. However, much research has been undertaken with respect to the labour force behaviour of married women.
This summary report provides some of the first results of the analysis of the data contained in the Working with Technology Survey for the 224 respondents who responded to the questionnaires in both 1985 and 1991. Comparisons of establishments' behaviour across the two time periods provides many valuable insights both into tech change and its impacts on workers, and into organizational change. More detailed survey results will be reported later in the course of the Human Resource Management Project.
In this paper, Deborah Ann Campbell takes a look at the issue of sexual harassment in the Canadian workplace. Once considered to be an accepted part of a woman's job — something she just had to put up with — the author reflects on the changing legal and social attitudes towards sexual harassment. This report traces the evolution of sexual harassment case law in Canada, to illustrate how the fundamental issues were resolved. The emphasis is on Ontario human rights cases and Canadian arbitration cases.
This paper analyzes the methods by which settlements were arrived at in more than 1400 Ontario collective agreements during the years 1970-1973 and discusses some of the implications of these patterns. The analysis is based on information published jointly by the Federal and Ontario Departments of Labour, covering settlements involving more than 250 employees in industries other than construction.
This is a reprint of the closing keynote address presented at the special one-week Industrial Relations Seminar of the Industrial Relations Centre, Queen's University on October 22-27, 1972. The author is Judge, District Court, District of Parry Sound and Chairman, Ontario Labour-Management Arbitration Commission. Judge Little is well known for his valuable contributions as chairman of arbitration boards and as a member of various public bodies in the field of Canadian industrial relations.
This monograph examines the long run behaviour of the labour share of national income in Canada. The unincorporated business income is divided into labour income and non-labour income, in order to examine the impact of such a division on the stability of the labour share. Since there have been significant inter-industry shifts in Canada over the past four decades, the monograph also analyzes the influence of these shifts on the secular movement of the share of labour in national income.
The purpose of this paper is to study the key determinants of the union status of workers in Canada and to evaluate the relative significance of labour market segmentation by gender, in explaining the lower incidence of unionization among Canadian women. Using a unique micro data set, this study assesses the respective roles of demographic/human capital factors and the industry-occupation of employment in explaining gender differences in union membership in Canada.
The collective agreement is the basic corner-stone of collective bargaining in North America. From its beginning the problem of making the provisions of collective agreements binding on the parties who entered into them has been a major concern of unions, employers, employees and increasingly of public authorities.
This paper was presented at the 1963 Spring Conference Programme of the Industrial Relations Centre, Queen's University, at Kingston, Ontario. This paper discusses the origins of the idea of leisure, the need and desire for leisure, while also suggesting that we rethink the whole notion of leisure. It also makes some suggestions about how we might think positively and usefully about the concept of leisure.