Labour Law: A Top-Quality Essay For Your Inspiration

The legal regime that regulated industrial conflict in Canada during the first decade and a half of the 20th century was based on the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act. It cast the government in the role of a mediator between labour unions and employers and was geared toward preventing strikes, lockouts and other potential disruptions in work. It required workers and employers alike to bring their disputes to a government appointed panel for conciliation to present their grievances and accompanying evidence before they were allowed to strike, and barred any work stoppages or mass firings from taking place until after a mandated ‘cooling-out’ period.
The government played the role of in labour disputes. Theoretically this allowed the government to act as a neutral party capable of forcing labour and employers to negotiate mutually acceptable compromises to workplace disputes. This had the effect of acting as a stop-gap against more radical demands for government intervention in and direct control of industry by giving workers and employees an outlet for their grievances. Effectively, it gave potential strikers and other sources of labour unrest just enough of a voice to make the actual Socialists with their demands for radical change look like crazy extremists who should be ignored.
Turn of the century Canada was undergoing a massive economic expansion. This expansion was dependent on a proportionally large labour pool, much of it consisting of immigrant labour from overseas. In the case of private labour disputes government intervention was based on the policy of conciliation, with the government’s primary goal being to ensure peaceful relations between employees and employers in addition to protecting native Canadian workers from losing jobs, wages and other opportunities to unregulated, cheap immigrant labor. Intervention in public labour disputes, by contrast, was geared at projects such as railways, munitions and public services that were unavoidably part of the government’s bailiwick.
The industrial dispute board system was heavily biased in favor of employers. The boards in question had no ability to enforce their rulings, leaving employers free to disregard them or even refuse to recognize an union to begin with. They also restricted when workers were allowed to strike, enabling employers to drag out negotiations. Given their lack of teeth this meant that the dispute boards left striking workers at a severe disadvantage against employers who could call upon courts, police and militia as tools against labour. All of this constituted a legal and social infrastructure that while theoretically geared toward conciliation was in practice heavily coercive toward labour.
Railway companies’ demand for cheap and subservient labour led them into conflict with the federal government because securing that labour required a heavy reliance on immigrant labor, especially from China and Asia in general. To that end railway companies lobbied heavily for unrestricted immigration to ensure a steady supply of cheap foreign labour, while simultaneously pursuing rigorous strike-breaking and anti-union policies. This caused conflict with the interests of the federal government both for the good reason that it hurt the Canadian citizens who were their constituents and the bad reason that the federal government and its constituents were often virulently racist, especially against oriental immigrants.
Railway companies were vastly less likely to be prosecuted when their conduct resulted in violence than striking union members because the railway companies were powerful business interests who had the financial and legal influence to ensure that the government would show them leniency and favoritism. Money talks, and the railway companies had a lot of it. By contrast the striking workers themselves were unskilled or blue-collar labour of low social status and little political power. Because of this whenever violence broke out in the course of a strike they were the first to be blamed because they were seen as bad people and troublemakers.
Railways were critical to Canada’s national economic development because they provided fast and reliable transportation of the goods and resources that were necessary for industrialization. This led to the federal government helping the railway companies suppress labour demands because catering to workers would increase costs for the railway companies, which would in turn make them less willing to cooperate with the government’s development programme. This threat allowed the railway companies to successfully lobby the federal government into siding with them by such means as restricting workers’ ability to strike, their right to free speech and allowing the railway companies to employ the police and courts against unions when they came into conflict.
So-called ‘responsible unions’ focused on policies of conciliation and incremental change in an attempt to work with employers to secure modest but important benefits for their members. They tried to work within the system and existing legal framework to reach compromises with employers. This put them in contrast with more radical and socialist unions which agitated for massive socio-political change as a core policy. In effect, responsible unions attempted to position themselves as the reasonable, moderate labour alternative that employers could work with, as opposed to those crazy radical troublemakers who would always demand more and more and never be satisfied.
The state took away unionists’ right through such means as censoring pro-union papers and charging union members with intimidation and other crimes for using terms such as ‘scab.’ By preventing the dissemination of union propaganda the state made it more difficult to, for example, plan and organize boycotts of companies that carried out anti-worker policies. Furthermore, by rigorously holding unions legally accountable for the actions of their members the state had a chilling effect on unionists’ free speech because that meant that the organization as a whole would be vulnerable to legal action when any of its members said or did anything judged violent.
The Canadian state has historically responded to strikes in certain industries with coercion and violence. One of those industries was the railway industry. This could take many forms. Legally, one of the major stumbling blocks was the conciliation process. Would-be strikers were required to first submit their grievances to employees at government-mediated councils, and were further enjoined from striking until after a government-mandated ‘cooling off’ period. When strikes happened despite this, employers could usually count on the power of the courts and the police to back them up. On the street level this could take the form of straight up violence; police wading in to beat strikers on a picket line and drag them off to jail. Once in court magistrates were notoriously hostile to striking labourers. More subtly, strikers were held to a much higher standard than police or employers. If any member of an union resorted to violence during the course of a strike the entire union could be held legally accountable. In short, there were innumerable ways to stack the deck against labour.
There were a number of reasons for this. Probably the most influential reason is the fact that the railways were of vital importance to the then ongoing expansion of the Canadian economy. That expansion meant that the stability and equilibrium of the Canadian economy was in a fragile state, which meant that labour strikes by railway workers could have far-reaching consequences for the country as a whole. Because of this, preventing labour disruptions and heading off labour violence on the side of the employees was seen as of a vital and necessary concern to welfare of the Canadian state. To do otherwise risked substantial economic damage to the country as a whole, and by extension ran the risk of citizens throughout Canada blaming their government for the fallout thereof. And of course the railway companies themselves were influential and wealthy interests who had substantial pull with the government both publicly and privately in the forms of bribes and donations.
This was not an entirely one-sided relationship. The government had an interest in casting itself as a friend to the working man and the average citizen. It was also in their interest that large swathes of the population not be unemployed or underpaid. For similar reasons it was against the government’s interests to allow the unrestricted immigration that the railway companies wanted. But overall the dynamic was very much slanted against labour. When employers could not be ordered to reach and keep accommodations with workers but employees faced the threat of literal military intervention it is not hard to see which side was being favored.