The Carney government is contemplating changes to Canadian labour law that several unions say aims to designate more workplaces as "essential services" and curb the right to strike while undermining
I don’t think you have any understanding of how labor law works. Even adopting very pro-worker legislation requires coordinating with companies. Otherwise you end up with a system that does nothing for workers at best or just drives every employer out of business at worst. There’s certainly more room to shift compensation from owners and executives to the actual workers. But companies aren’t magic infinite money trees. If you write even well-intentioned workers rights laws, but you completely ignore the actual workings of companies, you end up with a disaster.
Consider the example of pregnancy employment protection. You want to help working mothers out, and you want to pass a law requiring employers to offer so many months of paid maternity leave, and similarly paid paternity leave.
If you look into the legal language of these laws, they always have limits on which employers they apply to. And one of those limitations is company size. Imagine you operate a small shop or business. You’re a sole proprietor for years. Eventually things grow enough that you can take on an employee. You’re probably not going to be in a position to be able to afford to pay maternity or paternity leave. Your operation is just too small. You just don’t have the resources to pay people to not work. That one person going on leave represents you losing half of your capacity. If they pass a law requiring you to anyway, all that will mean is that you have to close up shop. No one actually benefits. The new parent you would have hired doesn’t get a job at all. The community loses a small locally owned business. Everyone is worse off. More business shifts to the megacorps.
Now if you’re operating a hundred-person company? You can afford to offer parental leave. You have enough resources. That one person going on leave means you lose just 1% of your capacity. That’s perfectly manageable.
Different jurisdictions and laws set the threshold at different numbers of employees. But they all set it somewhere. And to calibrate that number requires coordinating with employers. When writing such legislation, you have to strike a fine balance between helping as many workers as you can without driving the very businesses they rely on out of business.
And this is just one example. There is no such thing as a policy that only concerns workers, not employers. Even if you don’t care at all about the employers, at a minimum you need to make sure businesses stay viable. All labor labor law, even extremely pro-worker law, needs to have employers at the table as a kind of sanity check.
How exactly do you plan on implementing any of this without consulting employers?
Same as any law. You implement it then they figure out how to still exist.
It concerns workers, not them.
Sure, let’s just shut down everything -for the workers!
I don’t think you have any understanding of how labor law works. Even adopting very pro-worker legislation requires coordinating with companies. Otherwise you end up with a system that does nothing for workers at best or just drives every employer out of business at worst. There’s certainly more room to shift compensation from owners and executives to the actual workers. But companies aren’t magic infinite money trees. If you write even well-intentioned workers rights laws, but you completely ignore the actual workings of companies, you end up with a disaster.
Consider the example of pregnancy employment protection. You want to help working mothers out, and you want to pass a law requiring employers to offer so many months of paid maternity leave, and similarly paid paternity leave.
If you look into the legal language of these laws, they always have limits on which employers they apply to. And one of those limitations is company size. Imagine you operate a small shop or business. You’re a sole proprietor for years. Eventually things grow enough that you can take on an employee. You’re probably not going to be in a position to be able to afford to pay maternity or paternity leave. Your operation is just too small. You just don’t have the resources to pay people to not work. That one person going on leave represents you losing half of your capacity. If they pass a law requiring you to anyway, all that will mean is that you have to close up shop. No one actually benefits. The new parent you would have hired doesn’t get a job at all. The community loses a small locally owned business. Everyone is worse off. More business shifts to the megacorps.
Now if you’re operating a hundred-person company? You can afford to offer parental leave. You have enough resources. That one person going on leave means you lose just 1% of your capacity. That’s perfectly manageable.
Different jurisdictions and laws set the threshold at different numbers of employees. But they all set it somewhere. And to calibrate that number requires coordinating with employers. When writing such legislation, you have to strike a fine balance between helping as many workers as you can without driving the very businesses they rely on out of business.
And this is just one example. There is no such thing as a policy that only concerns workers, not employers. Even if you don’t care at all about the employers, at a minimum you need to make sure businesses stay viable. All labor labor law, even extremely pro-worker law, needs to have employers at the table as a kind of sanity check.