Employee relations

Employee Relations Industrial Conflict and Resolution in Canada and Britain

Larry Haiven,

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12 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN CANADA; CONTEMPORARY COMPARISONS AND CHANGE

W hy does Canada suffer a greater volume and incidence of strike activity than Britain? A comparative analysis of industrial relations policies explores this issue.

Industrial Conflict and Resolution in Canada and Britain

Larry Haiven

Introduction In the realm of industrial conflict, Canada and Britain provide a most interesting comparison. Both countries have a largely adversarial industrial relations system wherein the parties choose not to engage in extensive co- determination on the Northern European model but rather settle major differences by periodic contests of economic power. Largely decentralised collective bargaining now characterises both countries. Yet while the parties in both countries have hesitated to engage in co-management, they have co-operated in developing a "semi- constitutional" system [1] where procedural rules are laid out in a fairly explicit, jointly accepted collective agreement. While there has been more Canadian state intervention in collective bargaining procedure, both Canadian and British states have refrained from intervention in the substance or outcomes of collective bargaining (except on the few occasions in the 1970s where incomes policies were imposed in both countries).

Divergences and Intuitive Predictions The greatest divergence between the two countries arises in the procedure for resolving disputes. Since 1944,

Canadian provincial and federal governments have sought to regulate industrial conflict by a discrete interventionist formula. Its three pillars are legally enforceable collective agreements meant to circumscribe disputable issues; the outlawing of strikes during the term of those agreements and the substitution, for industrial action, of a prescribed procedure to settle the disputable issues arising during that term. In comparison, British governments have taken an almost entirely "hands-off" attitude towards the regulation of industrial conflict.

A cursory look at the characteristics of dispute resolution in the two countries practically compels the prediction of a higher level of industrial conflict in Britain. First, and perhaps most important, while Canadian unions can strike only after a collective agreement (of at least one and more often two or three years' duration) has expired, no such legal prohibition exists in Britain. British workers can strike at any time on any issue related to the workplace. Second, in most Canadian jurisdictions public employees above municipal level (including both government employees and fire, hospital and policy employees) are barred entirely from striking. In Britain, for the most part, public employees are not similarly barred. Third, Canadian collective agreements are legally binding. In Britain, they are not and enforcement is only by mutual desire of the parties to honour them or by industrial action. Fourth, due to the above conditions, the distinction between rights and interests disputes, while crystal clear in Canada, is very muddy indeed in Britain. Indeed, disputes are often over a combination of rule-making and rule interpretation.

Fifth, while the Canadian collective agreement circumscribes all disputable issues, precluding those outside, in Britain all workplace issues are disputable, whether they are in the collective agreement or not. Sixth, because issues outside the Canadian collective agreement are precluded and managerial prerogative prevails, those collective agreements tend to be quite precise and the scope for interpretation small. British, collective agreements, on the other hand, are quite indeterminate and open to interpretation. Seventh, the indeterminacy of the British collective agreement coexists with an extensive body of "custom and practice" which, especially in well-organised union shops, forms the real body of law governing the workplace. In Canada by comparison, the use of past practice in dispute resolution is still rudimentary[2].

Eighth, those issues in Canada which are disputable have long been handled through formal and well-defined grievance procedures with a minimum of informality. In Britain, formal disputes procedures at workplace level were a rarity before the 1970s[3]. Even though now widespread, they are often vague and are often bypassed by the parties if it suits their purposes. While unions pay lip-service to the concept of delaying strike action until procedure is exhausted, they are under no obligation to

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INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION IN CANADA AND BRITAIN 13

do so and strikes often occur in the middle or absence of proper procedure. Ninth, Canadian disputes unsettled through procedure must be submitted to an arbitrator for binding settlement. An encyclopaedic arbitral jurisprudence covers nearly every conceivable issue. In Britain, though available, arbitration is entirely voluntary, seldom used and often actively shunned by the parties.

Tenth, there is far more central union control of the dispute resolution process in Canada than in Britain. In the former, decisions to take a dispute to arbitration are usually vetted by a level of the union external to the workplace and this level plays a major role in policing member activity in the workplace. In Britain on the other hand power lies more with the workplace union representatives. Full-time officers may not visit some branches for years. The smaller degree of institutional control exerted by central union bodies would seem to bespeak a greater level of industrial conflict in Britain[4, 5].

Thus all of the above features point toward predictability, institutionalisation of conflict and order in Canada while they point towards procedural anarchy and the breeding of conflict and disorder in Britain. What is more, in the minds of many Canadians, Britain, especially in the 1970s, was the model of a strike-prone country.

Strikes Compared Yet an examination of the actual strike statistics in the two countries suggests a different story. Before going into them, however, it must be said that this is meant not to be a quantitative study of strikes and that the usual caveats about the use of strikes to indicate industrial conflict are acknowledged[6, 7]. Yet even the most impressionistic view of the general patterns of strike activity in the two countries dramatically belies the intuitive prediction made above.

It has long been known that Canada is a world leader in strike days lost. That is supposed to be because Canadian strikes are so long, which is certainly true, but British strikes involve more workers as can be seen in Table I. The comparison is quite emphatic. Canada's volume of strike activity has regularly been from 75 to 150 per cent higher than Britain's. But what about the actual incidence of strikes? Canada was about equal with Britain in the 1970s and has surpassed Britain throughout the 1980s.

One of the reasons commonly given for Canada's high strike activity is the inordinate reliance of the Canadian economy on industries subject to cyclical instability such as unprocessed or semi-processed natural resources, i.e. the primary sector[8,9]. But this can be corrected somewhat by comparing strikes in the two countries in manufacturing alone. Table II shows Canada actually ahead in both strike volume and incidence in this sector.

Another reason given for greater Canadian strike activity is that despite the ban on strikes during collective agreements, Canadians more than make up for it in strikes at the expiry time. This is undoubtedly true, but for the past 20 years, approximately 20 per cent of strikes per year have been illegal mid-term walkouts[10]. As England says, the high rate of wildcat strikes in a system that prohibits them:

. . . demonstrates a cleavage between the theoretical assumption of pluralist 'order' in the system and the realities of the workplace. The [Canadian] system is disorderly even within its own framework of 'orderliness'[11].

Theories of Cross-national Variation in Industrial Conflict What can explain the discrepancy between the intuitive predictions that were so compelling and the actual evidence

Table I. British and Canadian Strike Pattern (All Industries), 1980-86

1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 Average

No. of strikes Canada

0.064 0.073 0.065 0.060 0.064 0.095 0.096 0.074

per 1,000 workers Britain

0.044 0.037 0.051 0.058 0.065 0.056 0.053 0.052

% of workers affected Canada

4.2 1.4 1.7 3.1 4.2 3.1 4.1 3.1

Britain

3.0 3.3 6.2 2.5 8.9 6.3 3.3 4.8

Working days lost per worker Canada Britain

0.613 0.276 0.352 0.414 0.544 0.807 0.838 0.549

0.079 0.266 1.125 0.162 0.225 0.178 0.478 0.359

Sources: International Labour Office Yearbook of Statistics (Various Years).

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14 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN CANADA; CONTEMPORARY COMPARISONS AND CHANGE

Table II. Strikes in Manufacturing: Canada and Britain, 1970-1986

Canada No. of strikes per Working days lost 1,000 workers per worker

1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970

Average 1970-79 1980-86

0.16 0.18 0.17 0.17 0.15 0.20 0.19 0.25 0.23 0.18 0.24 0.28 0.34 0.20 0.16 0.15 0.15

0.20 0.17

0.69 0.80 1.20 0.73 0.88 2.19 1.50 1.51 1.29 0.88 2.34 2.83 2.38 1.72 1.10 0.86 2.03

1.47 1.14

Britain No. of strikes per 1,000 workers

0.08 0.16 0.12 0.11 0.12 0.10 0.09 0.17 0.20 0.23 0.15 0.19 0.24 0.23 0.21 0.18 0.31

0.17 0.11

Working days lost per worker

0.20 0.16 0.47 0.31 0.32 0.36 1.54 3.05 1.03 1.08 0.31 0.65 0.94 0.72 1.00 0.81 0.77

0.81 0.48

Source: International Labour Office Yearbook of Labour Statistcs, relevant years

of the levels of conflict in the two countries? Several sets of theories have been advanced for cross-national variations in industrial conflict.

One set can be summarised under "institutional" approaches[12,13,14], with perhaps the most sophisticated presentation coming from Clegg[4]. The institutional approach sees conflict between labour and capital as inevitable but as being resolved through various institutions of accommodation between the two — such as trade unions, employers' associations, state regulation, collective bargaining and disputes procedures. This approach is also the engine driving public policy reform in most industrialised countries. If the machinery of regulation is not working, the solution is to tinker with the machine until it works.

Clegg presents his comparison of countries by making a detailed breakdown of collective bargaining into several dimensions such as extent, level, depth, union security arrangements, degree of control of collective bargaining and its scope. He also looks at the efficiency of disputes procedures. Yet Clegg's analysis does not explain and in

fact is often contradicted by the Canada-Britain comparison. This is especially critical when he asserts that "dispute procedures which are intended to handle, as equitably and speedily as possible, all differences which arise during the currency of the agreement" (p. 24) will tend to reduce unofficial or unconstitutional strikes, especially when countries have a comparable degree of plant-level bargaining (p. 82). This phrase, like so many others, is left so poorly defined as to render it meaningless, or else as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This tendency to definitionalism is one of the major criticisms of Clegg's whole approach[15].

The institutional approaches have other problems too. They ignore macro-political developments at the level of the State and the involvement of labour movements in governments. They assume that institutions prescribed at a policy level will necessarily operate as prescribed in the workplace and that institutions that seem similar actually operate the same way in different countries. Like many overarching theories, they risk missing much of the detail which can be very important in comparing countries.

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INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION IN CANADA AND BRITAIN 15

A second group of theoretical approaches can be called the "political economy" school [6,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. This approach sees the institutions above as merely intervening variables between levels of industrial conflict on the one hand and the real source on the other, this being the organisational and political power of the working classes of different countries. These authors postulate that at a certain point in the history of the working classes of industrialised countries, a shift in the locus of struggle for equity and distribution takes place, from the industrial to the political sphere, in a process which Pizzorno[19] calls "political exchange".

According to Korpi and Shalev[20], a high level of union power as manifested in the gaining of political office by labour parties is seen to result in a lower level of industrial conflict. This is borne out in the comparison of, for example, Sweden and the United States, the former with a social democratic government, the latter without even such a party; the former with a low level of industrial conflict, the latter (until recently) with a high level.

Cameron[22] improves the theory somewhat, suggesting that it is not the mere access to political power by labour parties but rather two things; first, the ability of a labour movement to co-ordinate its efforts at a central level to bring its industrial power to bear; second, the actual payoffs that a labour party is able to bring about while it is in office, the most important being low unemployment and high social wage. If workers and unions perceive these payoffs, then there will be a trade off against industrial militancy.

The "political economy" approaches do explain many things that institutional approaches do not. They deal squarely with macro-political developments and better explain why northern European countries have less industrial conflict and they shed light on strike patterns in France and Italy. But they are still quite unable to explain variations in conflict in countries like Canada and Britain which both have low levels of working class political power, little central bargaining power and where the workplace is still the primary locus of struggle. In both countries, the labour parties have tasted political power[23] but have never been able to achieve an abiding social contract with the trade union movement and have never been able to achieve the payoffs mentioned above.

But the political economy approaches concentrate too heavily on trade unions to the exclusion of employers, and fail to see the State as a relatively autonomous actor. They also ignore the micro or workplace politics of production. And, like the institutional approaches, they have an annoying (to Canadians) habit of conflating Canada and the US into a North American model though the two countries have diverged substantially in union strength and conflict patterns in recent years.

A "Politics of Production" Approach Macro-theorisation in the field of comparative industrial relations seems to have sailed into a dead calm. New wind needs to be blown into the sails before we can have another attempt at grand theory. A somewhat new way of looking at the problem could be called a "politics of production" approach. First, there needs to be a step back from overarching views, narrowing the field to interesting pairs or triplets of countries and examining them more carefully. Second, there should be exploration of an area that has received scant attention in comparative studies — the workplace. That means good comprehensive case studies in different countries are needed to see how institutions really work and how they operate at the level of the workplace. Third, there must be a linking of developments at the level of the State to developments in the workplace rather than assuming that relationship. And fourth, there must be a concentration on the generation and resolution of so-called "day-to-day" conflict as well as the set-piece battles between labour and management. There is too much concentration on the pay issues, probably because they lend themselves so well to quantification and too little concentration on the struggle for control at the workplace.

The theoretical point of departure for this approach is the work of Burawoy[24,25] and Edwards[26]. Burawoy has explored how different production regimes have operated to generate consent from workers. He suggests that the history of capitalism is one of movement from "despotic" to "hegemonic" production regimes, wherein manage- ment fiat diminishes in importance and workers' participa- tion in their exploitation increases. He contends that the State has intervened along two dimensions in employment relations. First, it has intervened in the "constitution of the social wage", that is in protecting workers from absolute reliance on the employer for their subsistence, by providing benefits like unemployment insurance, welfare etc. Second, the State has intervened directly in the workplace to limit managerial discretion by, for instance, limiting the employer's ability to avoid unions, to discharge at will, to make workers redundant or to operate without regard to workers' safety. Burawoy theorises that the form and content of state intervention affects what he calls the "political apparatuses of production", that is those institutions that regulate and shape struggles in the workplace.

Edwards makes the argument subtler by suggesting that managers and groups of workers generate both co- operation and conflict in a complex amalgam. Employing these concepts, it is possible to look at exactly how conflict is generated and resolved at the workplace in different countries. This means looking not only at the formal and informal mechanisms (the political apparatuses of production) employed by the parties to interact with each other but also how these apparatuses articulate with key substantive conflictual issues.

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16 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN CANADA; CONTEMPORARY COMPARISONS AND CHANGE

In Canada and Britain, there are three key loci of workplace struggle between management and labour where both consent and conflict are differentially generated and the outcome of these struggles in a very large way determines the resulting levels of conflict across many workplaces. The three key substantive issues are discipline, regulation of the internal labour market and job control.

Discipline The power to discipline employees is an essential employer tool. But increasing complexity of work organisation and division of labour and the increasing power of trade unions and state intervention in managerial discretion makes it counterproductive for employers to use this tool arbitrarily. So employers have developed work rules and negotiated disciplinary procedures to interpret those rules, thereby legitimising them. Moving from the days when employers relied on common law rights of dismissal, employers now have "an arsenal of calibrated punishments"[27] to draw on and employees are no longer forced to rely on whatever industrial muscle they have to obtain equity. In both countries, unionised workplaces have moved beyond what Henry[28] calls a "punitive-authoritarian" style of discipline toward ones in which workers participate in their own discipline. Arbitrary discipline has been replaced by arbitrated discipline, by a system that promises equity and due process. But it is an imperfect system and does not always "deliver".

The system of arbitral review of discipline would seem to be the jewel in the crown of North American dispute resolution[29] compared to the industrial tribunal system in Britain. It is a far more sensitive and finely-tuned instrument with a comprehensive body of jurisprudence. So one might be excused for thinking it to be much more effective at venting worker frustration than the British system. Yet here is a perfect instance of how merely looking at institutions from afar can be misleading. A closer look reveals that the Canadian system may actually generate more conflict than the British. Precisely due to the predominance of arbitration, the actual workplace participation of Canadian unions in discipline is minimal. In Henry's terms, the parties have advanced only to the second stage of discipline, the "representative-corrective" where the "voluntary compliance" of workers and their representatives is illusory:

. . . in spite of its claim to provide fair justice there are considerable grounds for the view that justice by formal procedural equality of treatment delivers less justice than legimitation . . . Because the employers' fundamental power base is never threatened they can concede a number of points on procedural matters, allowing union representatives to win what are localised and contained victories so long as the substantial and material conflicts of interests remain suppressed[28, p. 291].

On the other hand, compared to the use of Canadian arbitration, the British tribunal is seldom used by British

unions. Most disciplinary matters are resolved between the parties and in the most strongly unionised workplaces, Henry's third stage of discipline "accommodative- participative" can be said to exist, a regime wherein disciplinary outcomes are truly bargained. Accordingly, British unions are much more effective than Canadian ones at deciding which cases need fighting and which do not, at "sorting out" their members and deciding the ground on which they will fight. The British workplace has its own, quite effective methods of mollifying conflict on this issue while the Canadian workplace system can be quite effective in doing the opposite[30].

Regulation of the Internal Labour Market The second substantive issue is regulation of the internal labour market. For many firms, there are positive efficiencies in having at least part of their workforce in a system of job allocation, training, pay and promotion that is internal to the firm and also to having another part of the workforce more subject to the external market[31,32]. But these efficiencies are not strictly economic. Several commentators[24,32] have suggested that the internal labour market is a way of securing commitment from employees and of draining potentially dysfunctional conflict away from the workplace.

Like discipline, the ability to achieve both "numerical" and "functional" flexibility[33] by hiring different classes of employee, by moving employees around the workplace and by moving them out the door when business contracts, is an essential employer tool. But because of the rise of trade unions and because states have intervened in the construction of the social wage, the employer's ability to use the whip of the market has been considerably weakened. Certain rules and procedures have come into being to regulate conflict in this area. Canada and Britain differ considerably in this area too.

The key operative concept in North America, and quite unique to it, is seniority. Next to arbitral review of discipline, it would seem to be the second jewel in the crown of North American dispute resolution. It appears fair, predictable and easy to administer, and except in those workplaces with huge differentials in employee skill requirements, not particularly disadvantageous to the employer. It would also seem that the highly structured job ladder including elaborate posting and bidding systems for promotion and bumping systems for redundancy would do much to drain away labour-management conflict[24].

In Britain, regulation of internal labour markets is not nearly so well developed. Seniority is a marginal concept and the grid of job differentiation is much flatter than in Canada. It would seem that the potential for conflict in this area is much greater than in Canada. Yet, as with discipline, here is another area where a cursory look at national institutions is misleading. For the British workplace has quite efficient methods for dealing with potential problems.

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INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION IN CANADA AND BRITAIN 17

Take redundancy as an example. The British practice of voluntary redundancy whereby older workers accept lump sum payments and early retirement bonuses in return for leaving before age 65, in fact works extremely effectively to depoliticise redundancy, especially when it is large scale. It also results in a much younger average workforce left behind. On the other hand, the promise of the Canadian seniority system almost always clashes with the imperative of managerial efficiency so that redundancy becomes a major battleground, especially when layoffs are large and touch older employees.

Job Control The third area around which conflict centres is job control. This is probably the most contentious area in both countries, the area in which management is least willing to surrender its authority. But the essential dialectic of control is that wherever management requires workers to be more than mere automatons, actually freely offer their skill and intellectual initiative, it must, in the words of Flanders "regain control by sharing it". Aspects of job control include effort bargaining, the pace of work, the design of jobs, and staffing. It is this area where the divergence between Canada and Britain is most dramatic. While there are still areas that British management holds sacred and defends vigorously, job control has long been a legitimate forum of negotiation in Britain. In fact, it has been said that British trade unions may have concentrated on it to the detriment of economic advancement[26]. In Canada, virtually no formal mechanism for its regulation exists.

In Canada, job control (except in the area of health and safety) is the realm of exclusive management rights. And yet this does not mean it is not an area of great concern to workers and that they do not attempt and sometimes succeed in winning aspects of job control. What is missing entirely however, is the sense that joint regulation in this area is in any way a legitimate preoccupation of unions.

Certainly conflict over these issues arises in the British workplace, but the very fact that they are negotiable at shop-floor level contributes much to the resolution of workplace conflict. In Canada, forced underground, conflict over job control manifests itself indirectly in three ways. First, some of it surfaces with other residual irritants at the already overloaded bargaining table at contract expiry. Second, some of it emerges in wildcat strikes. Third, some of it is displaced to the forum of discipline, emerging as the most common cause of discipline in Canada, insubordination, a cause which is seldom encountered in Britain.

Conclusion Was the three-pillared interventionist formula devised by Canadian policy-makers an adequate quid pro quo for

removal of the right to strike during the term of the collective agreement? Has it really delivered equity without the cost of strikes? The Canadian system of dispute resolution promises a high degree of equity in several areas of union-management contention. At those times that the parties cannot agree and cannot agree to disagree, surely they want a clear, unambiguous interpretation of their respective rights. And surely the Canadian system runs circles around the British which, in the end, relies more directly on the power differential between the parties.

Actually, it is fair to guess that in the actual day-to-day business of labour relations, this is not as important as it seems. For the vaunted Canadian arbitral equity really applies to a select few issues while many of the main issues of contention on the frontier of control are left untouched by joint regulation or arbitration. Workers and their shop stewards may not necessarily expect the system to be fair and may not necessarily be impressed by definitive verdicts from third parties on what may be quickly-forgotten, esoteric and tightly constrained issues. What they may prefer is some degree of control over the actual work they do. Hence, rather than reduce industrial conflict, the Canadian dispute resolution system may be a major cause.

Notes and References 1. Gallie, D., In Search of the New Working Class, Cambridge

University Press, 1978. 2. Haiven, L., "The Political Apparatuses of Production:

The Generation and Resolution of Industrial Conflict in Canada and Britain", PhD Dissertation, University of Warwick, 1988.

3. Brown, W., The Changing Contours of British Industrial Relations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1981.

4. Clegg, H., Trade Unionism under Collective Bargaining, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976.

5. Roomkin, M., "Union Structure, Internal Control and Strike Activity", Industrial and Labour Relations Report. Vol. 29 No. 2, 1976, pp. 198-217.

6. Shalev, M., "Strikes and the Crisis: Industrial Conflict and Unemployment in the Western Nations", Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 4, 1983, pp. 417-60.

7. Edwards, P.K. and Scullion, H., The Social Organisation of Industrial Conflict, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982.

8. Jamieson, S., Industrial Relations in Canada, 2nd ed., New York, St. Martin's Press, 1973.

9. Lacroix, R., "Strike Activity in Canada" in Craig Riddell (Ed.), Canadian Labour Relations, University of Toronto Press, 1986.

10. This figure accounts only for those mid-term strikes which have been reported and recorded. Because of their brevity and because of employer reluctance in reporting them, illegal strike activity is doubtless higher than government figures indicate.

11. England, G., "Some Observations on Selected Strike Laws", in Swan, K.P., and Swinton, K.E. (Eds.), Studies in Labour Law, Butterworths, Toronto, 1983, p. 242.

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14 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN CANADA; CONTEMPORARY COMPARISONS AND CHANGE

12. Ross, A.M. and Hartman, P.T., Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1960.

13. Kerr, C., Dunlop, J.T., Harbison, F. and Myers, C.A., Industrialism and Industrial Man, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1960.

14. Kassalow, E.M., Trade Unions and Industrial Relations: An International Comparison, Random House, New York, 1969.

15. Shalev, M., "Industrial Relations Theory and the Comparative Study of Industrial Relations and Industrial Conflict". British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. XVIII, 1980, pp. 26-43.

16. Shorter, E. and Tilly, C., Strikes in France: 1830-1968, Cambridge University Press, 1974.

17. Hibbs, D.A., "Industrial Conflict in Advanced Industrial Societies", American Political Science Review, Vol. 70, 1978.

18. Hibbs, D.A., "On the Political Economy of Long-Run Trends in Strike Activity", British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 8, 1976.

19. Pizzorno, A., "Political Exchange and Collective Identity in Industrial Conflict", in Crouch, C. and Pizzorno, H. (Eds.), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Europe since 1968, Vol. 2. Comparative Studies, London, Macmillan, 1978.

20. Korpi, W. and Shalev, M., "Strikes, Industrial Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist Societies", British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 30, 1979, pp. 164-187.

21. Snyder, D., "Institutional Setting and Industrial Conflict: Comparative Analyses of France, Italy and the United States", American Sociological Review, Vol. 40, 1975.

22. Cameron, D.R., "Social Democracy, Corporatism, Labour Quiescence and the Representation of Economic Interest in Advanced Capitalist Society", in Goldthorpe, J.H., (Ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism, Clarendon, Oxford, 1984, pp. 143-178.

23. While the New Democratic Party in Canada has not achieved the national electoral successes of Britain's Labour Party, it must be remembered that Canada is a highly decentralised country and that the NDP has come to power in several provinces, where it has had a hand on macro-economic levers and on labour policy. It must also be remembered that the NDP has had considerable influence on public policy when it has had the balance of power in minority governments at both the provincial and federal levels.

24. Burawoy, M., Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

25. Burawoy, M., The Politics of Production, Verso, London, 1985.

26. Edwards, P.K., Conflict at Work, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.

27. Glasbeek, H., "The Contract of Employment at Common Law", in Anderson, J.C., and Gunderson, M. (Eds.), Union-Management Relations in Canada, Addison-Wesley, Don Mills, 1982.

28. Henry, S., "Disciplinary Pluralism: Four Models of Private Justice in the Workplace", The Sociological Review, Vol. 35 No. 2, 1987, pp. 279-319.

29. Collins, H., "Capitalist Discipline and Corporatist Law", The Industrial Law Journal, Vol. 11, 1982, p. 170.

30. Glasbeek, H., "The Utility of Model-Building: Collins' Capitalist Discipline and Corporatist Law", The Industrial Law Journal. Vol. 13 No. 3, 1984, pp. 133-152.

31. Doeringer, P. and Piore, M., Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis, D.C. Heath, Lexington, Mass., 1971.

32. Gordon, D.M., Edwards, R., and Reich, M., Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

33. Atkinson, J., "Manpower Strategies for Flexible Organi- sations", Personnel Management, August 1984, pp. 28-31.

Larry Haiven is Associate Professor in the College of Commerce at the University of Saskatchewan.

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