Advice for Future Labour Law Professors

All labour law professors get asked for their advice by law students about how best to prepare for an academic career.  I am a relatively newcomer to academia, but that does give me the benefit of having recently gone through the training and recruitment process.  In my case, I came from a practice background.  Recently I was asked the following questions by a law student interested in a career as an employment law professor.  Here are my answers, for what they are worth.  I’d encourage anyone else (especially academics) who have their own advice or think I am just wrong to chime in by adding comments.
1. Is there any particular school that is best to do an LLM/PhD?
The advice I received when I was thinking of returning to academia was to try and do a graduate degree in the U.S. or Britain at a major school, since degrees from named foreign schools carry more weight on Canadian hiring committees than a list of exclusively Canadian schools.  That is not at all a rule: lots of great professors in Canadian law schools did all their degrees in Canada (Michael Lynk, Sara Slinn, Gillian Demeyere, Stephanie Bernstein). But if you play the odds, I’d think that most law professors have at least one degree from abroad.  Below you can see a rough list of the degrees of some Canadian labour law scholars.
I  did my LLM at LSE, which has a great labour law faculty and a long  history of labour law scholarship. It also has a specialist labour law LLM.  But, of course, Oxford carries a lot of weight (Judy Fudge, Brian Langille, Bernie Adell, among others) as well as Cambridge and Kings College at U. of London has a great labour law faculty.  But England is expensive.  
As are the major U.S. universities, but if you look at people being hired in law schools, a disproportionate number have degrees from Harvard (Harry Arthurs, Paul Weiler, George Adams,Kerry Rittich, Ravi Malhotra, Kevin Banks), Yale (Brian Etherington, Eric Tucker), Berkeley (David Beatty), and Cornell is great for labour issues.  Doesn’t mean you need to go to a foreign school, but the statistics suggest that can help in job competitions.   I don’t think you need to do both your LLM and PhD at a foreign school, but having one of them helps and the LLM is shorter and therefore cheaper.
2. Should I article?
If you are absolutely sure you have no intention of practicing, then I suppose there is no need to article.  But my own thought would be to article so you have the option down the road of practicing, plus you can learn a lot and earn some money to pay for your grad degrees.
3. Is there a benefit to practicing law before returning to grad studies?
I actually think that having practiced law doesn’t help you in search for academic job, and can sometimes work against you, as there appears to be a bias against people who are practitioners first.  There is a sense that they are not sufficiently academic and theoretical.  I think having practiced law actually makes me a better law professor, since I have a sense of how things work in the ‘real’ world and this allows me to link theory to practice, which I think students like.  But I certainly don’t think my law practice experience was a strong benefit in my attempt to retool from a practitioner to an academic.
4.  What are job prospects like in labour law academia?
Not good, is the short answer, and that’s unfortunate.  Labour law has slowly been falling off the priority lists at most law schools for years.  When I started my PhD at Osgoode, there were 4 labour law professors (5 if you include Harry Glasbeek, who still appeared occasionally to teach the odd course) and in one year, that number was reduced to 1 due to faculty moves and Harry Arthurs’ retirement.  It is now back to 2 since Sara Slinn moved over from Queens.  But there appears to be little interest in growing that number.  Queens used to have 4 labour law professors, and is down to 1 (Kevin Banks).  UBC has been using mostly practitioners to teach labour law courses for years (although Janine Benedit is there now).
The point is that labour law is not a sexy topic in law schools right now, which is odd because labour policy  is an extremely important topic right now and there are loads of jobs in practice for labour and employment lawyers.  Maybe if some of the law firms started to complain more about the decline of labour law scholarship in Canada, some of these Deans would listen.
The advice I received from a number of senior labour law professors when I started my Phd was not to focus too narrowly on labour law proper, but to expand my area of speciality to sexy topics, like corporate governance, legal theory, and globalization.   So I did that.  Now that I have a job as a professor, I can write about whatever I like.  But my Ph.D focused on legal theory, globalization, supply chain management, and risk theory, as applied to labour practices.  This has opened up a huge range of research areas beyond simply domestic labour and employment law, and has allowed me to engage in a dialogue with academics who know little about labour law.  It also allowed me to sell myself more broadly than just a labour law expert.  So it was very good advice I received to branch out in my graduate research to areas beyond pure labour law.  
That is not to say that there will not be labour law jobs down the road.  Much has to do with timing. Of course, I’m not even in a law faculty, I’m in a business school, and there will also be those types of opportunities.  I think law faculties will always have someone specializing in these areas, there’s just fewer positions than in the past.  That is why it is good to have other complimentary areas of specialization, if possible.
That’s my two cents worth.  Anyone have anything else to add?