Scaling up by law? Canadian labour law, the nation‐state and the case of the British Columbia Health Employees Union

Abstract

This paper examines the Canadian Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in favour of the Health Employees Union (HEU) versus the British Columbia government. Based on international labour law, this ruling recognised collective bargaining as part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While recent research in human and labour geography on labour law and the state have emphasised its contingent, topological and site‐based nature I argue: (i) that this case reflects how Canadian unions became deeply embedded in post‐war hegemonic splicings of law and space and the state’s role in the reproduction of the wage‐labour relation and (ii) while the HEU’s struggles and the use of international law contest such splicings, these are still sharply inflected by existing nation‐state legal systems that remain both relatively resilient and ambivalent about labour rights. The HEU case thus reveals that scaling up by law may not protect worker interests if labour is otherwise weak.

Restructuring legal geography

“…We see this especially though not exclusively among those who are occasional rather than regular contributors to the field. For example, some scholars have examined the constitutive role that the law has played in the rolling out of neoliberalism and other conservative political-economic agendas, and in the fighting back against them (Boyer, 2006; Weller, 2007; Hubbard et al, 2009; Carr, 2010; Pendras, 2011; Hae, 2012; Martin and Pierce, 2013; Rutherford, 2013; Andrews and McCarthy, 2014; Niedt and Christophers, 2016; Doucette and Kang, 2017; Cullen et al, 2018). And others have explored the role of law in the management of the economic and social marginalization that has followed from these agendas (Mitchell, 1997, 1998; Herbert and Brown, 2006; Belina, 2007; Mitchell and Heynen, 2009; D.…”

Labor, Geography of

“…Rutherford (2013) focuses on the relations between labor and the state. Reembedding exercises have particular implications for the classical research subject in labor geography: trade unions.…”

Public Sector Labour Geographies and the Contradictions of State Employment

“…As outsourcing and externalisation blur sectoral lines, generalisations based on economic sectors are challenged. Interestingly, it is often around the legal and practical interpretations of these definitions that political battles over public sector restructuring have been the most intense (Moon and Brown 2001; Rutherford forthcoming; Savage 2004).…”