We’re back and ready for a new year of workplace law blogging.  I’m teaching four courses this fall–two undergrad, one masters’ level, and one Ph.D–covering the full range of employment and labour law and industrial relations.  So I’ll be blogging about all these topic this term.
I begin the term, appropriately, with some workplace law scholarship.  I have a list (see above under the Scholarship tab) of leading scholars in workplace law and the articles they have posted on the free source site called SSRN.  I’m a big fan of publicly accessible scholarship, since I believe we academics should be speaking to a larger audience than just each other.  Not everyone posts their papers here, and not all papers are available from any one scholar.
Here is a list (as of today) of the Top 10 Most Downloaded papers on workplace law by Canadian scholars on SSRN.  Check them out:
10.  Patrick Macklem, Toronto, The Right to Bargain Collectively in International Law: Workers’ Right, Human Right, International Right?, July 2004, U of Toronto, Public Law Research Paper No. 04-14

8.  (269)  Harry Arthurs, York. Labour Law after Labour, Osgoode CLPE Research Paper No. 15/2011
7.  (281).  Harry Arthurs, York.  Fairness at Work: Federal Labour Standards for the 21st Century, Federal Labour Standards Review, 2006
6.  (324) Eric Tucker, York.  The Constitutional Right to Bargain Collectively: The Ironies of Labour History in the Supreme Court of Canada CLPE Research Paper No. 3/2008, Labour/Le Travail, Vol. 61, Spring 2008
5. (327)  Judy Fudge, Victoria, Fiona MacPhail, UNBC. “The Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada:Low-Skilled Workers as an Extreme Form of Flexible Labour, Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, Vol. 31, p. 101-139, 2009
4.   (335)  David Doorey, York. “Can Factory List Disclosure Improve Labor Practices in the Apparel Industry? A Case Study of Nike and Levi-Strauss”  CLPE Research Paper No. 1/2008 [Here is the revised, published version now in the Journal of Business Ethics (2011)]
3.  (346)  Judy Fudge, Victoria, “The New Discourse of Labour Rights: From Social to Fundamentl Rights?” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2007
2.  (393) Patrick Macklem, Toronto, Labour Law Beyond Borders, (2001) U of Toronto Public Law Research Paper No. 02-2
Drum roll please ….  By a land-slide…
1. (834 downloads)  Michael Lynk, Western, Disability and Work: The Transformation of the Legal Status of Employees with Disabilities in Canada, Working Paper Series (2007)
There you have it.  If I’ve missed someone or some paper, please let me know.  If you read any of these, or other workplace law papers, and have an opinion to share about the papers, send along your comments, and I will post them.
Now let’s get ready for another busy and raucous year… We’ve got Charter challenges, provincial elections, and the always entertaining and nutty Toronto City Council, which is sure to put workplace law on the front pages on a regular basis this term.  Stay tuned…