A while back, I advertised that Professor Michael Lynk of Western Law School was presenting the Rand Memorial Lecture on labour law at the University of New Brunswick. His talk is now a law journal article that will be published in the forthcoming UNB Law Journal. A copy of the paper is now available for free download on Michael’s SSRN site. Here is the link:
Here is the abstract:
Rising economic inequality in Canada and the Western world has become an
unspoken but influential political theme over the past quarter century.
The Great Compression between the late 1940s and the 1980s – which
brought an unlamented end to the pre-war Gilded Age and its social
inequities, established a post-war middle-class society in the
industrial democracies, and created a host of equalizing institutions,
including a vibrant union movement – has been unravelling since the rise
of modern political conservatism. A hydraulic relationship exists
between unionization and inequality. Countries that have higher
unionization rates tend to have lower patterns of economic inequality.
And as unionization rates decline, inequality tends to rise. In Canada,
the political impulse to reform labour laws has been waning since the
early 1990s, shortly after Canadian unions had reached their numerical
zenith. As income and wealth inequality levels rose, labour’s share of
the Gross Domestic Product has declined to record lows in the post-war
era, wages have stagnated and most of the economic productivity gains
over the past 25 years have been captured by those at the very top of
the income scale. One significant explanation for the eroding levels of
unionization in Canada has been the country’s stagnant labour laws. In
particular, statutory changes to the union certification process in a
number of Canadian jurisdictions has diminished the ability of unions to
protect their representational levels. Empirical social science suggests
that labour laws matter, not only for unionization levels, but as an
important tool to enhance economic egalitarianism.
