 Thank you. Welcome. It's looking great. Thank you for the pleasure of introducing this fourth, in this year, distinguished lecturer is offering an intensive course that begins this evening. In alternating years, we offer a symposium with the lecture, so stay tuned for 2014's symposium. Let me begin with the subject. Professor Innis-Krisky QC. How does one approach a man, particularly as someone who did not have the honor of leading him in person? Professor Krisky was born and raised in Nova Scotia. He started his academic career at Queen's University in 1964. In his time there, he completed the liability of strikers in the law of torts. A book of continuing importance for the Supreme Court of Canada has learned a thing or two. In 1971, he returned to Nova Scotia and took up a post very thankfully for us at Dalhousie Law School, where he taught full-time until 2003 and then part-time until 2007. He served as our dean from 1985 to 1991. His teaching interests were wide. Labor and employment law, poverty law, municipal law, administrative law, contracts, commercial law, and professional ethics. He had a leading role in law reform. He was engaged in the Woods Task Force on Labor Relations in Canada in 1967, drafted the Nova Scotia Trade Union Act in 1973 with former D3, and the Nova Scotia Labor Standards Code in 1972. He changed the way employment law is taught at law schools in part through his influential tax and employment law in Canada. He served in the 1970s as a member of Canada's or the Canadian Anti-Inflation and Heal Tribunal, was counsel to the Nova Scotia Labor Standards Tribunal, and was chair of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board. In addition, he was deputy minister in the Nova Scotia Department of Labor and chair of the Nova Scotia Workers' Compensation Board. Additionally, he served as a part-time member of the Federal Public Staff Relations Board and of the Canadian Human Rights Commission Tribunal. Professor Christie's career was the sort that we aspire to. He taught, mentored, and inspired generations of labor law students across Canada and has contributions to academic labor law, to public policy formation and administration, to labor arbitration and adjudication, and to legal education are broad, deep, and enduring. The Innist Christie Symposium in Labor and Employment Law honors his life and work. The gift that provides support for this symposium was initiated by the firm Pink Larkin. The firm was quickly joined in supporting the initiative by the major firms in Halifax on both the employer and union side. Support was garnered from people across Canada. The response was swift and tremendous. Many thanks to those of you who ensured that we have such a substantive and rich way of continuing to honor Professor Christie's contributions. I'm delighted to recognize Mrs. Shun Christie and members of the Christie family alongside our honored guests, Chief Justice Lauren Clark. The family, the faculty here owes much to Mrs. Christie and a good deal of thanks for her time, commitment, and general sociability. It sounds like the Christie Homes was served as a kind of welcoming place for the school of law school and in some ways was a well-done building away from well-done. A final note of thanks. A lively group of people have been instrumental in organizing the days that comprise this year's lecture and course. Many thanks to them for their contributions to the intellectual life of the faculty. My special thanks to Bruce Archibald, who you'll see in a minute, who took on chairing the committee in organizing this lecture with enthusiasm, and to Elizabeth Sanford, who agreed to serve as the point person charged with ensuring that no detail was left undone. I have no doubt that you will very much enjoy today's lecture. I'll turn it to Bruce Archibald, who will introduce Chris Christie. Absolutely delighted to have the privilege of introducing our fourth Innis Christie Labor and Employment Law Visiting Professor, Professor Judy Fudge. When we began talking with Judy, Judy was a lands down professor of law at University of Victoria in British Columbia. She is now with the Kent School of Law of Kent University in Canterbury in the UK. And I think people really should know that as far as I'm concerned, Judy is one of the most prolific labor law scholars, with the possible exception of Harry Arthes, who's a lot older than Jean, who's spent time. One of the most prolific scholars that this country has produced. She is known around the world and has done visiting professorship. Elizabeth, I have her a curriculum here. It's astounding. She's written over 50 articles. She's authored books singly and with other people. Judy is somebody who works well with others, which is a good thing because legal scholarship has very often tended to be a solitary activity, but the world is too complicated to go at serious legal problems in this way. And so I think it's, Judy sets a great model for the rest of us. Now Judy actually has a Nova Scotia connection, which I remember she told me when we were on a doctoral committee together on the point she was the experimenter. She went to Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth for two years, claimed she never graduated from high school, but she went to college in Quebec, you see, but she works at the same thing. She got a BA at McGill. She went to York where she did an MA. She did an LLB at Osgoode. She has a graduate diploma in legislative drafting from the University of Ottawa. A D-Phil from University College in Oxford. Paul Davies, who's your supervisor, is a leading scholar in labeling, no matter. She has been elected to the Royal Society of Canada Academy of Social Sciences this year. She's done visiting lectureships in Italy, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in the UK, in Sydney and Australia, as well as Melbourne and Canada and a variety of universities. And she paid her dues as an academic. She has served on all sorts of committees. Supervised graduate students have gone on to be famous as a huge list of grants but she's gotten more money and that's why she's very good at it. She organizes people who work with and for her, which is a trick. She's convened conferences. She's just a fabulous citizen of the world in terms of labor and quality rights. I can go on for some time but you all want to listen to Judy as I do. So let me welcome Jimmy Frum. That's a cook on a microphone because I'm going to be on YouTube for a while today. So I said, I'm going to give a public lecture. He says, who in the public would ever come to one of your lectures? Many. They're big hit on YouTube. He says to actually go and look at it. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. It's a great honor and pleasure for me to be here in Halifax. I really like Halifax. Halifax turned me on to geography. I had a great geography professor which started my Wanderlust. It's also a real honor for me to give this lecture. I had the good fortune to work with Innes on the labor law casebook with the part of the group but I knew him mostly through his writing as a researcher and a scholar. I am familiar with most of his writing on employment and labor law which I have often relied on in my own work. Innes had a capacious understanding of an interest in labor and employment law and it encompassed individual rights as well as collective bargaining. He inspired generations of students who are incredibly loyal and many went on to have illustrious careers in labor law but he also put his knowledge into practice as the deputy minister, as an arbitrator and as the chair of the labor relations and workers' compensation boards and in that capacity to shape labor law and policy in a way that very few people get to do. Innes began his prolific career as a researcher and scholar by publishing a comparative study of the liabilities of strikers in the law of torts in England and Canada. In what was his master's thesis supervised by Bill Wetterburn, he examined whether or not and if so, the extent to which the court's elaboration of the common law took the legitimate interests of trade unionists into account when deciding upon the liabilities and remedies for harms caused in the context of disputes over work. He wanted to see how judges deployed common law rules and reasoning in the context of strikes in which picketing was typically involved. Innes began his study by noting that from their origins in the late 18th century in England during the crucible of lazy fare capitalism, trade unions, organizations that depend upon combined action did not fit the framework that emphasized individualism and competition. He described how, quote, workers were regarded as individual units of labor power which in the capitalist system were to be priced in accordance with the laws of supply and demand when workers combined against an employer they interfered with those laws, end quote. He identified judges who were recruited from the elites as planting these economic ideas in the common law. Innes concentrated on how despite the widespread social acceptance of trade unions and legislative support for collective bargaining in the mid-1960s in Canada courts continued to develop new common law heads of liability, new torts for trade unions and their members who engaged in collective action referring specifically to the 1963 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal and Hershey's versus Goldstein of Woodstock which involved union members picketing a men's clothing store in order to put pressure on a supplier to enter into a collective agreement. He complained that the, quote, political maximum of a right to trade had been elevated to the status of a legal rule, end quote. He dissected the legal niceties by which judges were able to ignore the interests of workers in trade unions and in doing so revealed how economic and legal ideologies combined to restrict collective action by workers. Innes' solution to this bias in the common law was to call upon judges to be neutral in their treatment of employers and trade unions. These conflicts between employers and trade unions were best resolved by the parties in a framework to be established by legislatures and not in the courts. In the seesaw battle between the legislature and the courts over who gets to define the scope of permissible collective trade union action, he thought workers' best bet was with the politicians and not with judges. Like Innes, I am also interested in the process by which courts transform a political maxim into a legal right. Where I differ from him is that I'm intrigued by the labor rights which conflict with the right of employers to trade. These are the collective rights of workers to associate in trade unions to bargain collectively and to go on strike. In this lecture, I will examine how the slogan labor rights are human rights and consider the rule of judges and courts in turning this slogan into an enforceable legal claim. I will begin by contrasting the labor relations landscape and climate as it was in the 1960s when Innes wrote and published his monograph with the situation as it is today, almost 50 years later. Rights are not timeless, but can only be understood in context. Second, I will examine what it means to say that a labor right is a human right. Third, I will assess the role of the courts when it comes to making the maxim that labor rights are human rights a legally enforceable right by focusing on what it means to say that courts should be neutral in interpreting the freedom of association contained in the Canadian Charter of Rights in the labor context. Innes published his first monograph, The Liability of Strikers in the Law of Torts in 1967. That was a hot topic everywhere, believe it or not. Like, totally the hottest. Everyone was writing about this. This is what you did, because everyone was striking, right? And this was the period of the golden age of industrial citizenship. Industrial citizenship includes freedom of association, the right to representation and collective bargaining, and the right to strike. Its precise legal foundation in form is specific to each country. In Canada, industrial citizenship was embodied in a particular model of collective bargaining legislation called Wagner style, because it was developed in the United States in the 1930s and adopted in a modified form in Canada in the 1940s. It provides a highly detailed code of rights, duties, powers, and immunities on employers, workers, and trade unions. The enactment of collective bargaining legislation marked a rupture with the individualism of the common law. In 1966, the year before Innes published this monograph, the number of workers engaged in strikes peaked. Never so many workers on strike before. Never so many workers after. And the upsurge in militancy had two effects. First, it unleashed the third wave of unionism in Canada, which was fueled by public sector workers. In the 1960s, about one in three workers was a member of a union. Union membership was confined almost exclusively to the private sector, and the vast majority of members were men in manufacturing, resource extraction, or transportation jobs. Civil servants were prohibited from joining trade unions, and workers in the broader public sector, hospital and schools, for example, did not have the legal support needed to make freedom of association real. Beginning in 1967, collective bargaining legislation, albeit in a modified form, was extended to public sector workers across Canada. Second, governments across the country appointed expert tasks forces to study the outbreak of industrial conflict and bias them on possible solutions. The Federal Woods Task Force, for which Innis co-wrote an important background study on unfair labor practices, diagnosed the cure to the problem of labor unrest as strengthening the existing institutions of collective bargaining, especially the powers of labor boards to administer the legislation. The idea was to remove the last vestiges of the common law and the courts from the regulation of labor relations in order to protect workers' rights. Employers' common law freedoms were restricted, and the judiciary was told to defer to the expertise of labor boards. There was widespread public, as well as political support for trade unions and collective bargaining, and union membership spread in the 1970s, reaching a high point of 42% in the early 1980s. Today, almost 50 years after the golden age of industrial citizenship, almost one-third of Canadian workers are still union members, just under the level achieved in the mid-1960s. But although the decline in union density has been small, the shift in composition of the membership has been profound. Private sector membership has fallen off the cliff, and public sector membership has climbed. In 2012, only 17.7% of private sector employees were union members, in contrast to 73% union membership in the public service. Given that union membership is declining and concentrated in the public sector, it is not surprising that opinion polls indicate that most Canadians regard unions as self-interested and that gains for organized labor are a detriment to the economy as a whole. This view was cultivated in the 2011 attack against public sector unions by Republican governors, most notably in Wisconsin, across the United States. Although such a full-scale attack on public sector unions has not occurred in Canada, there's been wage controls across the country. In 2011, the federal government introduced legislation prohibiting workers employed by a private sector airline and the Crown-owned Pustle Service from Striking. I now want to turn to my second section, Labor Rights as Human Rights. In the contemporary climate where unions aren't liked and public sector unions are in fact loathed, it is understandable why trade unions argue that labor rights are human rights and therefore not subject without judicial review to the winds of political change and popular support. A core component of the project to recast labor standards as international human rights is to elevate their moral appeal. Accompanying this shift in discourse is the change in institutions for protecting labor rights from the traditional vehicles such as the welfare state, social-democratic parties and trade unions to legal instruments like constitutions and legal institutions such as the courts. In Canada, the campaign to have labor rights recognized as human rights operates at two levels, the international level and the national, which have become linked through constitutional litigation. At the international level since 1919, the international labor organization known as the ILO has treated workers' freedom to associate in trade unions as a fundamental component of social justice. After World War II, freedom of association was also protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights contained in the declaration were divided into two covenants in the 1970s, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which contained individual rights against the state, and the International Covenant for Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, whose rights require positive state action to protect individuals against immiseration in the private sphere of the market. Although the two covenants have been seen as protecting different generation or types of rights, freedom of association is protected in both instruments, so it crosses both. In 1998, the ILO, whose members include the governments of 185 states and their representative employer associations and trade union federations, issued the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which identifies freedom of association and the effective recognition of collective bargaining as core human rights. At the international level, it is clear that labor rights, specifically the freedom of association, are human rights. Beginning in the 1980s, when industrial citizenship first came under concerted attack, Canadian unions began to lodge complaints at the ILO against governments across the country for violating their freedom of association. Despite the overwhelming success of these union complaints, the observations by ILO supervisory bodies that Canada has repeatedly violated its commitment to protect workers' freedom of association have simply been ignored by governments across the country. It is, however, possible to give international human rights indirect legal effect by invoking them before constitutional courts in order to assist judges in interpreting fundamental rights in national constitutions that provide individuals with access to judicial review of state action. Freedom of association is a central component of many constitutions that protect civil and political rights, including Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. How should Canadian courts treat international human and labor rights in interpreting similar provisions in the Canadian Constitution? What is the normative justification for courts to refer to these legal norms? When a court relies on international instruments to interpret a national constitutional right, is it stepping on the toes of the executive, which has the exclusive power to ratify these treaties? These are important questions which I cannot delve into now. However, the Supreme Court of Canada has answered some of these questions. Its position is clear. It has declared that, quote, the Charter should be presumed to protect at least as great a level of protection as is found in human rights documents that Canada has ratified, end quote. Taking this proposition as the baseline, the ILO instruments that Canada has ratified, combined with their interpretation by ILO supervisory bodies, creates a human rights framework for the rights to organize, bargain collectively, and to strike. This framework imposes no particular model of collective bargaining or labor relations. In effect, it deploys a set of largely negative obligations of non-interference and non-imperiment, supplemented by limited obligations to prevent and provide remedies for interference by private actors. In Canada, the Supreme Court has on several occasions been asked to interpret the freedom of association contained in the Canadian Charter of Rights to include the rights to bargain collectively and to strike. Instead of reviewing the court's answers, what I want to focus in this, my final section, is what the role of the court should be in giving the slogan or maxim that labor rights are human rights legal effect. In order to answer this question, we first need to be clear about what's at stake when constitutional courts like the Supreme Court of Canada are asked to interpret the freedom of association to include labor rights and why it is so contentious. In my little world, this is a big issue. I can get not a raise out of this at a dinner table, unlike the spanking of children being assaulted, which everyone's interested in. But I think this is a really, really important issue and we have to figure out why it's so important. From the perspective of a constitutional court, and here I'm channeling judges, there are, and Judge Fudge, I should, I think, be elevated to the court, don't you? From the perspective of a constitutional court, there are two problems with labor rights. First, they trouble the boundary between civil and political rights on the one hand, and social and economic rights on the other. In common law jurisdictions, simply prohibiting states from interfering with workers' freedom of association is not enough. Meaningful freedom of association for working people has required the state to impose restrictions on the freedom of private parties, employers, either by granting trade unions and their members immunities from legal action, as was the case in the United Kingdom, or granting them statutory rights, as is the case in Canada. Second, labor rights, unlike other rights, have an inherently collective dimension, so they're problematic. These two features of labor rights cause difficulties for judges when it comes to interpreting the freedom of association under the charter. Why should judges tell elected governments that they have an obligation to promote the freedom of one group, workers, over those of another group, employers? Why should governments be told that they must restrict the freedom of individuals, employers, in order to support collective action? These are important questions. It doesn't seem fair. Some judges and commentators argue that there is no constitutional justification for judges to do either of these two things. They claim that as a matter of constitutional interpretation, judges should be neutral when it comes to the treatment of all associations, regardless of whether they are trade unions, gun clubs, golf clubs, book clubs or choirs. Treat them all the same. They have also argued that judges should not provide greater protection for collectivities for groups than for individuals. But what does it mean to say that courts should be neutral when it comes to interpreting the freedom of association in the labor context? It is possible to distinguish between at least two senses in which the word neutrality is being used. The first sense is the way in which Innis used it in his 1967 book. Judges should not let their class biases influence their interpretation of the common law by imposing new heads of liability against striking workers. Here neutrality refers to an attitude to judging that requires adjudicators to treat social activities and actors impartially under the law and not to impose their own values. It's obvious that judges should be neutral in this sense and not being a neutral in this sense is a bad judge. However, the second sense in which neutrality is being used in the context of interpreting freedom of association is much more controversial. According to this version, judges should avoid assessing and weighing the respective merits of associational activities. One popular method for avoiding these value judgments is to define the scope of freedom of association to include the protection of all activities pursued in association that a person could lawfully pursue as an individual. So the individual is the marker and if an individual can do it lawfully then the group can do it. Now, while this approach is called a neutral approach I think it's better understood as an equal protection, parallel liberty, or symmetrical treatment approach. The idea is to treat all activities that an individual can perform lawfully as prima facie protected by the charter if they are performed in association. This approach has been praised because it, quote, avoids gassing around in the abstract about the true meaning of freedom of association invoking history, international law, charter values, and so on, end quote. Another reason offered for taking this tact is that it does not give groups greater legal protection than individuals. Two of the most vocal Canadian champions of the symmetrical approach, Brian Langell who's given one of the innest lectures before and Benjamin Oliphant, one of his students explicitly argued that courts should not impose a positive obligation on the state to change the background common law rules that enable employers to dismiss or in other ways penalize workers who engage in these activities. They claim that because the common law applies to everyone equally courts should not interfere with it simply to promote particular interests or values that breaches neutrality. What kinds of protections would this approach to freedom of association offer in the labor context? Essentially it would prohibit governments from directly interfering with employers employees' freedom to form trade unions bargain collectively and withdraw their services to strike. However, it would leave in place all the common law rules that Innis wrote about that vitiate the freedom of association for working people as judges would be under no obligation to put positive duties on governments to change those rules. Legislatures could revert to the old legal order the common law that prevailed before industrial citizenship. Labor rights would be hollow shells as employers would be free to punish workers who exercise their freedoms. Is this approach to the interpretation of freedom of association conceptually or normatively required as a matter of constitutional interpretation? We may say those are bad outcomes but we have to take this approach because we're required in order to be conceptually and normatively honest and consistent. While an approach to freedom of association that insists on symmetry in the treatment of individuals and groups is sufficient for most cases, for example cases involving gun clubs, golf clubs and choirs, it is of no use where there is simply no individual analog to the collective activity which is the case in the labor context. There are, for example, domains of the law which can impede strikes and seem impervious to the symmetry principle because they do not recognize an individual right on which the principle could gain a purchase. An individual employee who leaves employment without notice will be deemed to have terminated her or his contractual relationship and, as Innis has written, will not be entitled to reasonable notice damages and many of the employment standards obligations. Should workers who collectively withdraw their labor in order to negotiate better terms also run this risk of having their employment terminated? Striking workers do not want to be treated the same as individual employees. What they need is a special liberty immunizing their concerted action from contractual actions by employers. In the labor context, it is important to depart from the symmetry principle if workers are to be entitled to exercise their freedom of association against the background of common law rules that render collective worker action unlawful. That's what the common law does. That's why we needed protections for trade unions. Insisting on an individual analog in order to protect collective action leads either to ignoring those situations in which there is no analogy or to constructing bad ones, and too many of us have constructed bad analogies so we can set them for exams for students who go, oh my goodness, not another bad analogy. Now, what about the normative argument in support of the individual symmetry approach? Why should judges be constrained from requiring governments to change some of the background common law rules? Here the question is whether employment is an area in which it is legitimate for the freedom of one group to be used to limit the freedom of another in order to cope with an imbalance of power. The answer to this normative question depends upon an assessment of the evidence of what trade unions do. Do unions contribute to social justice, or are they simply vehicles for narrow self-interest and rent-seeking behavior? If research and evidence supports the claim that trade unions promote social justice, for example, advance substantive equality, promote democracy by representing important perspectives and interests that would not otherwise be heard, and promote compliance with the rule of law by promoting compliance with labor and employment law, then this is a good reason for a liberal state to promote labor rights. While such a policy would not be neutral in its impact on the associational sphere, it would not violate the core liberal commitment to neutrality of justification, because it would in fact be promoting the conception of justice that is at the base of a liberal legal and political system. Interpreting the rights and freedoms protected in the Charter so as to promote the values autonomy, equality, democracy, and dignity that the Charter is designed to protect, even if it protects workers' freedom of association by restricting employers' common law freedoms does not violate the principle of neutrality. Although Charter values may be contentious and difficult to define, what is equality? What is democracy? What is autonomy? These challenges do not mean that invoking these values to support a specific interpretation of the freedom of association is simply gassing around. Any interpretation of the freedom of association that brackets out the common law rules ignores what Innis, other labor law scholars, and history have so clearly demonstrated. These rules interfere with freedom of association at work. Civil and political rights do not always need to respect the boundary rule that they not interfere with competing liberties of others. In some exceptional situations, they are allowed to cross that boundary. Freedom of association for working people is precisely such an example. In Canada, the background distribution of common law rules interferes with internationally recognized human rights, and it is appropriate for judges to refer to these international obligations that Canada has accepted when interpreting the Charter. Moreover, the need for constitutional protection of labor rights is especially significant when trade unions are economically weak and politically unpopular. You don't need a lot of support when you're popular and strong. It's when you're weak that you need the support. Rights are supposed to provide shelter from the winds of popular opinion and political change. This is supposed to give us a pause, a time to reflect. I have provided a conceptual and normative argument for why it is important to interpret the freedom of association to protect labor rights if you believe that trade unions have a positive impact on social justice. However, it does not follow from my argument that every element of freedom of association contained in a collective bargaining statue is protected by the Constitution. Not only is freedom of association a composite of three activities, organizing bargaining and striking, each activity has different elements that can be protected in a myriad of different ways. Just look at labor laws around the world. There are many different ways of protecting the same basic freedoms. Moreover, some elements are securely anchored in the heart of freedom of association. Some have a weaker means and linkage, and some are barely there at all and can be protected by legislation and case law. Collective bargaining and labor law regimes are complex and changing, and different components have different degrees of linkage with freedom of association. However, the tighter the link, the more likely there is constitutional protection. It is possible to design legal tests and remedies that protect the essential elements of freedom of association and that respect the institutional legitimacy and competency of the court. Judges need not be involved in elaborating labor relation codes even if they interpret the freedom of association in a way that requires governments to modify common law rules that make collective action by workers unlawful. Constitutional protections for labor rights will not solve the problem of organized labor's slow decline, nor will such rights revitalize their role as a vibrant social movement. Courts have neither the power nor the authority to create new institutions or influence economic conditions. However, the constitutional protection of freedom of association could be interpreted by courts in ways that would give governments a reason to pause and consider whether there are less restrictive means of attaining legitimate political objectives than by interfering with or refusing to protect workers' rights. Constitutional review of legislation by judges could legitimately be used to foster democratic deliberation and to ensure that any restrictions on labor rights are proportionate to the goals and means that governments have chosen. It could also be used to ensure that governments live up to their international human rights commitments to provide freedom of association for all workers, including those such as agricultural workers who Innis wrote so eloquently about who are excluded from rights at work. Freedom of association could be interpreted so as to embed markets in an institutional framework which makes the values of democracy and human dignity non-negotiable. While it is legitimate for courts to interpret freedom of association to protect workers' rights to organize, bargain collectively, and to strike, there is nothing that requires them to do so. In the past, as Innis showed, quote, the trend of judicial creativity in the modern tort law of industrial conflict has favored employers, end quote. Perhaps now it is time to write this imbalance, recognize that labor rights are human rights, and in doing so, plant the value of neutrality in the common law, which was what Innis asked for. Thank you very much. The 12 minutes before class comes in, will you answer the questions? Sure. So, Jimmy will accept questions and comments, and being a teacher, he doesn't mean he is a referee, but you can trouble him. So, we talked about the bill that was final, the protection. It seems to be the iron rule that people associate with the right to strike. If I myself, if you don't have the right to strike, you are already vulnerable, because of how it might be more than people talk about it, but you have more than nothing that's around me very much, and the basis of the right to strike seems to be to often ignore the reality that strikes can be lost. So, there may be important right to the actual point, but by themselves, it seems to be a little bit of a problem, and we've written both, like a lot of books history, trying to understand these standards. How do you see the relationship between the left and the right to strike and these standards? I think that without a vibrant labor movement, there wouldn't be labor standards. If you look at the history of protection, the nine-hour day, pregnancy rights, minimum wage, those haven't been fought for by employers' organizations. They've been fought for by unions, because that takes some of the things that they've bargained out of competition. So, that's an important thing. So, I think there's a symbiotic relationship, and if you look internationally, places that have the densest degree of union organization have the best labor standards. In Canada, we have a particularly weird model of labor law, collective bargaining law, which follows the American model, the Philippines followed it for a little while, Puerto Rico has it, no one else has it, and it's called a kind of industrial pluralism, where it's very workplace by workplace, except for the Michelin bill in the 70s here, organized. And what that does is it creates a kind of path dependency, where only certain kinds of people can access collective bargaining, so that what you have is a unionized sector and then a big secondary labor market. You could have broader-based structures of bargaining, such as Sweden, such as Belgium, such as Australia, where in fact what you do is you actually raise the bottom up. So, there's no necessary trade-off in my view between these two things. I do agree with you that strikes can be lost, and one of the really interesting things over the years I've been involved in doing labor law, sometimes I have to talk to people and I always think, my God, do they realize that they have to get back? So you have to get back, so you have to make compromises. It's about making a deal, and you don't win everything, and sometimes you can lose a huge amount, but it's what we say in a market economy that people are free to make bad decisions. And sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But I think without the strike you'd probably lose a lot more. Yes, that's right. I'm interested in your concept that labor rights might be embodied in a sort of human rights in a constitutional sense. But if college may seem to be identifying modern labor rights, if you've taken the atmosphere in the 60s and 70s, seniority might have been viewed as a basic right. If you'd embodied seniority, though, you would now be in the difficulty of denying the cases where unions and employers have negotiated seniority as a primary factor, but workers with disability have now been able to have their rights and trust the agreement where seniority is recognized. So where do you draw the line and why do you need this? I would actually be very conservative. I hope that comes to you, too. I would draw the line at what's recognized in international law as labor rights as human rights. And I would take the international covenant on civil and political rights and then the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights and do a then diagram. And I would protect being a gradualist and conservative, the ones that are clearly recognized as core rights by everyone. So that would be freedom of association without a question and anti-discrimination. So I would have a very thin conception and I would be prepared to move on a thin conception. And would you be prepared to take the basic employer rights that are not recognized and just have a few percent who will body them in the same way? No, because they're already embodied in the common law. I don't think they need a double leg up. I think I'm actually looking for a kind of those aren't in the common law. So I think what we need is we need to have some notions of democracy and accountability in the private sphere so that's why I would think that this would be an arguably liberal thing to do. See, as a teacher I'm also using people walking out. I imagine that we want to protect human rights and labor rights to improve the situation of workers. But I have kind of a diminishing expectation I guess that associations will actually get labor, I guess what it wants, or improve a lot of the workers with the GND economy. Very difficult to associate with people on the inside of the world and get employer everything. Do you have that much faith in protecting three percent Asians will actually need to achieve improvements I guess for workers and workers? Well, just as a first point saying that I'm prepared to go for a thin notion of labor rights as human rights and adopt the international corpus some of those don't protect unions because there's the freedom not to associate and there's also the notion of compelled dues. So they cut both ways. So mostly they'll protect workers but they will have some real threat to certain forms of union formation. So that's just one thing. In terms of freedom of association I think there are really interesting ways of organizing collectively. For example an old technique that was really popular in from about the 1880s to the 1920s has become more popular again, consumer boycotts. And that's a form of collective associational work and I think it's had a really positive impact in some of Nike's factories. So I think there are ways now. I think now with globalization transportation workers have much more power than they ever had before and certainly exercised it in the UPS strike about seven years ago. And we've seen that actually some civil servants who work on borders have a lot of power. So I think there are new ways I think that picketing isn't going to be the way that people will do this anymore because that's not what happens right, we don't have those kinds of things. But I think there are associational ways. I must admit I thought it was kind of interesting when all those fast food workers went on a day strike in cities throughout the United States. I think that's a good way of doing things. I think shopping malls just have a day of strike there, not the way we organize things. Those don't have a huge impact on customers don't have a huge impact on employers. But they actually signal a kind of unhappiness and people can see whether they get support. So I think new techniques could be quite successful but it's really hard. We all are caught in our histories and to think beyond them is a really difficult thing. But no one thought industrial unionism would ever work. We thought it would only be craft workers. We just thought those unskilled manufacturing workers would never be able to pull it off. And now most workers who are unionized have tertiary education or over the age of 45 work in the public sector and are women. And we never thought women would ever join trade unions. I think we're going to have to unfortunately call a halt. There's a class that's going to be having into this room. I would like to thank Judy for an hour providing us with a stunning, insightful overview of the problem and one which certainly engages with current debates and indeed the Dassing Around phrase is one which my dear friend Brian Landro used when he was giving inspection two years ago. So we have clearly people who reasonable people can differ and in this area boy do they have so thank you for your insights when you're gassing around the world and then perhaps when you're doing that you could remember us through this. Thank you.