I’ve discussed the American labor law reform debates, and the proposed Employee Free Choice Act on a number of occasions. That law would allow unions to be certified on the basis of union membership cards rather than a mandatory vote, and would provide for access to first collective agreement arbitration.
The latest version of Just Labour, a free electronic journal produced out of York University, is devoted to the debates over the EFCA, but from a Canadian perspective. This is interesting because many of the opponents of the EFCA in the US have pointed to the Canadian experience with a card-check model to bolster arguments that all hell will break lose if the EFCA becomes law. Canadian scholars scratched their heads at these claims, and have noted that the methodology and assumptions about Canadian law used in these arguments are exaggerated or just plain wrong.
An important example was a paper written by an American economist who works for a corporate consulting company. Anne Layne-Farrar made the odd claim that the Canadian experience proves that “for every 3 percentage points gained in union membership through card checks and mandatory arbitration, the following year’s unemployment rate is predicted to increase by 1 percentage point and job creation is predicted to fall by around 1.5 million jobs.”
Her claims and methodology are taken to task by Canadian economists in several papers in the new Just Labour edition. There are also some nice short papers exploring the Quebec experience and Canadian experience with card-check and first contract arbitration. For labour law students, this collection does a very nice job of summarizing the arguments and drawing together the man studies out there on the differences between the Canadian and American labour law models.
