Source: https://doubleaspect.blog/tag/freedom-of-association/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 18:14:50+00:00

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Everyone talks as if bosses have the better end. But talk is very different from action. If everyone were trying to start their own businesses and hire workers, that would count as “acting as if bosses have the better end of the deal.” Most workers, however, make no effort to become entrepreneurs. You could object that most workers don’t have the money to open their own businesses, but most rich workers make no effort to become entrepreneurs either.
Most workers in the U.S. aren’t in unions. Most aren’t even close to being in unions. Yet most U.S. workers earn well above the minimum wage. A simple supply-and-demand story can explain this. [The “unequal bargaining power means unions are necessary”] story doesn’t.
Please, please, please read the whole thing ― and pass the link on to a Supreme Court judge the first chance you have. Thank you!
I have a new post at the CBA National Magazine’s blog, which follows up on my posts (here and here) arguing that the Suprme Court’s recent decisions constitutionalizing a right to collective bargaining and a right to strike were bad mistakes. In National Magazine post, I review the various ways in which these mistakes might be corrected or mitigated: invoking the notwithstanding clause, re-litigating the issue, and constitutional amendment. I argue that the notwithstanding clause, despite being quick and easy fix, should not be resorted to. The other solutions should be attempted, despite their difficulty and uncertainty.
In my post criticizing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 1 and Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, 2015 SCC 4, which constitutionalized rights to collective bargaining and to strike, I suggested, without elaborating, that they are inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in that they constitutionalize organized labour’s economic rights and impose constitutional burdens on private parties. In this post, I want to develop this argument a little more.
The framers of the Charter chose not to include economic rights in our constitution ― neither the old-fashioned property rights and freedom of contract, nor the newer “social and economic” rights such as a right to housing, healthcare, or a pension. And, generally speaking, the Supreme Court has been extremely reluctant to protect anyone’s economic rights of either sort under the Charter. For instance, in Siemens v. Manitoba (Attorney General), 2003 SCC 3,  1 SCR 6, the Supreme Court held that “[t]he ability to generate business revenue by one’s chosen means is not a right protected under s. 7 of the Charter” , while in Gosselin v. Quebec (Attorney General),  4 S.C.R. 429, 2002 SCC 84, it refused to find that s. 7 required governments to provide welfare.
Now I have argued, here and elsewhere, that the failure to protect property and contract rights has been counter-productive, leaving the marginalized and the poor at the governments’ mercy, even as the well-off can use their political connections to avoid shakedowns. “Social and economic” rights are probably different, because ― as the majority of the Ontario Court of Appeal pointed out in a recent case where housing rights were alleged to be protected by s. 7, Tanudjaja v. Canada (Attorney General), 2014 ONCA 852 ― there are no judicially discoverable or manageable standards for courts to apply in such matters. Be that is it may, it is quite clear that Canadian constitutional law, as it now stands, recognizes no economic rights of any sort ― with one glaring exception.
“Workplace goals” here is, quite clearly, a bit of a fig leaf. The judges may not understand the economics, as I’ve argued in my previous post ― they may be ignorant of the fact that nobody in a competitive labour market (or any other competitive market) has much bargaining power, and that employees are not under some special disability. But they surely understand that the “workplace goals” employees pursue are about compensation, whether it takes the form of a higher salary, greater fringe benefits, or even more leisure. So there you have it: employees are entitled to constitutional protection for their ability to get more money out of employers ― by means of cartelizing their output and eliminating competition.
The question is, why them? Why are employees given a constitutional privilege which freelancers, small businessmen or, for that matter, welfare recipients are not? The Court’s assumption seems to be that employees are uniquely vulnerable, but surely they are not more so than the people on welfare. And even businessmen can have a hard time making ends meet, in the face of competition. This, indeed, is their favourite argument for forming cartels of their own. You know the story: competition is too cut-throat, we need to limit the number of companies operating in a market, yada-yada. Let’s license restaurants, prohibit foreign law firms from operating in our jurisdiction, or just divide up the market, stop competing, and make everybody ― except the consumers of course ― happy. What is there, in the Supreme Court’s logic, that would have prevented the confectioners who thought you weren’t paying enough for your chocolate from arguing that they had a constitutional “right to join with others to meet on more equal terms the power and strength of other groups or entities” (Mounted Police ) ― such as the consumers? Score one for labour lawyers ― the Bay Street types, presumably, just hadn’t thought of making the argument.
Then again, I suspect that the Supreme Court wouldn’t have gone along with it, coming from a cartel of businesses. What about other forms of associations? Does, say, a religious community have a right to force a government to bargain with it, in good faith, about tax credits? Or do the members of a coalition of taxpayers have a right to strike, constitutionalized in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour ― to stop paying taxes ― as part of an exercise in joining with others to meet on more equal terms the power of the most powerful entity of them all, the government? Am I being facetious here? Well, yes, somewhat. But really, what does “the right to join with others to meet on more equal terms the power and strength of other groups or entities” mean, as applied to groups other than trade unions?
Unlike the other two aspects of the freedom of association identified in Mounted Police, namely “the right to join with others and form associations; [and] the right to join with others in the pursuit of other constitutional rights,”  this “right to join with others to meet on more equal terms the power and strength of other groups or entities” seems to be simply inapplicable to any association other than a trade union. It is not a right in which all citizens can share, but a privilege granted, for reasons unexplained, to a single group in Canadian society. As such, it should not exist.
This unique privilege has a counterpart ― a unique burden imposed on one group only. Generally speaking, the Charter does not apply to private parties. By its own terms, it binds governments and legislatures alone. Yet the invention of a right to collective bargaining imposes a constitutional obligation to engage in it ― on employers. This is done indirectly, to be sure, since strictly speaking, the constitutional duty is that of legislatures to create a labour law regime which, in turn requires employers to bargain collectively. Still, the relationship between the constitutional requirement and the private party who must bear its burden is straightforward, and without obvious parallels in the Charter realm. I suspect that the fact that government ― which is subject to the Charter in all its capacities, including both as regulator and as employer ― is in fact the employer in these cases might have obscured the fact that the Supreme Court’s decisions ended up imposing Charter duties on private parties, but that’s hardly a good excuse for the Court’s muddled thinking. (It does make me wonder whether the Charter ought to apply to the government as an employer at all, but that’s a question for another time.) The Court doesn’t distinguish between the rights of government employees and those of private firms, and the correlative obligations of their respective employers, and there is nothing in its reasons that would support such a distinction.
In short, in addition to being based on economic myth and misconceiving the Court’s role vis-à-vis legislatures, the decisions constitutionalizing labour’s economic rights are out of step with the Court jurisprudence denying such rights to all other Canadians, and that which refuses to impose Charter obligations on private parties. It erects labour as a privileged class in Canadian society, endowed with greater constitutional rights than others. This is wrong. I will consider the options for remedying the situation shortly.
Over the last few weeks, the Supreme Court re-wrote yet another part of the Constitution ― this time, the Charter’s freedom of association provision. Section 2(d) now means that labour unions have a constitutional right to participate in a “meaningful process of collective bargaining,” created in Mounted Police Association of Ontario v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 1, and in many if not in all cases, to strike in order to achieve their goals within that process, created in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, 2015 SCC 4. After the first of these decisions, Omar Ha-Redeye wrote that “everything we thought we knew” ― everything, that is, that the Supreme Court itself had been telling us ― “about labour law in Canada and s. 2(d) changed.” And then, a couple of weeks later, it changed some more. Mr. Ha-Redeye’s posts, over at Slaw (here and here), set out, with some sympathy if I read him right, the labour law story. In this post, I want to say something about the assumptions behind that story. As will quickly become obvious, for my part, I have no sympathy whatsoever for what the Court has done.
The foundations of the Supreme Court’s freedom of association jurisprudence, and especially its recent decisions, are shaky in several respects. I will skip over its cavalier approach its own recent precedents, which Mr. Ha-Redeye describes, pointing out that “when the law and interpretation of the constitution shifts so drastically, it also leads to some very creative legal writing,” including an “interpretation of existing case law” that is “open to dispute.” Geoff Plant, at Plant’s Rant, has also criticized the court (here and here) ― harshly and, in my view, with good reason. I, instead, will focus on the Court’s economics, methodology, and view of its own powers.
The Court’s utter failure to understand the economics of trade unionism taints its interpretation of the s. 2(d) right. The Court believes that “[w]ithout the right to pursue workplace goals collectively, workers may be left essentially powerless in dealing with their employer or influencing their employment conditions” (Mounted Police, para. 68). Trade unions, and the imposition on employers of a duty to bargain with them, are in its view required to redress this imbalance of power. This is simply not true. A majority of workers in Canada are not unionized. Are they all at the mercy of their employers, unable to obtain reasonable employment conditions? Of course not. At the very least, judges ought to be aware that Bay Street lawyers ― including associates ― are not exactly starving because they are not unionized. Nor are, say, executives, or the employees of Google. In a competitive market, an employer will not be able to impose unfair employment conditions on workers, no more than the buyers of goods are able to impose their conditions on the sellers. Sure, the labour market is not perfectly competitive. But nor is any other. The Court does not even attempt to explain why the labour market is somehow uniquely unbalanced.
Now some labour markets may be particularly uncompetitive. For instance, for some jobs, the government is (almost) the only employer, and might be able to exercise a monopsony power to drive down the price it pays for labour below what it would be in a competitive market. For these specific occupations, there might be a case for a prima facie right to bargain collectively, though even there, the costs it generates might be such that restrictions to that right would be well justified. But they are exceptions, and cannot justify extending, as a matter of constitutional law, a right to bargain collectively, and to strike, to all workers.
This discussion leads me to a second problem with the basis of the Supreme Court’s section 2(d) jurisprudence, which I referred to, above, as a methodological one ― its lack of grounding in the sort of social science evidence which it has been favouring in some of its recent decisions, such as Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72,  3 S.C.R. 1101. As support for its claim about the purported imbalance of bargaining power, the Court cites not some economic study, but an almost-octogenarian decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, the lengthy list of “authors cited” in the Court’s two recent decisions (which includes citations by the dissenters as well the majority opinions) consists largely of labour law scholarship, with a sprinkling of industrial relations studies, and not a single economics one. It is bad enough when judges, in Richard Posner’s words “duck, bluff, weave, change the subject” because “they don’t understand the activity from which a case before them has arisen” (Reflections on Judging, 85-86). But it is worse when think they understand it, but are in fact, proceeding on the basis of ideas that are little better than folklore. To quote Judge Posner once more, “[w]e need evidence-­based law across the board, just as we need evidence-­based medicine across the board, and not a combination of sci­en­tific and folk medicine” (62).
Now the Court is probably not alone to blame for this state of affairs. If the governments that were defending their approaches to labour law failed to adduce relevant economic evidence, or indeed any economic evidence, they missed an opportunity to force the Court to consider it. Moreover, at the s. 1 justification stage, the governments did not press cost considerations as the objectives behind the statutes whose constitutionality was challenged, focusing rather on the need for effective service delivery. Perhaps they had a sense that merely financial reasons would not be regarded as sufficient to justify infringements of rights. And indeed they often shouldn’t be. But the cost of union rights is a different matter than, say, the expense of printing ballot papers which courts surely could, under s. 3 of the Charter, require a government to incur.
That’s not so much because of the amounts in issue, but because making the Court consider the cost of its decisions would have required it to confront the third, and perhaps most fundamental problem with its reasoning ― its misapprehension of its constitutional role. As Justices Rothstein and (in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour) Wagner point out, labour law involves balancing competing interests, which is something legislatures are often better than courts at doing. But the issue is, if anything, even more fundamental. To the extent that public sectors unions are involved ― and they are the ones who drove the litigation that led to these decisions, and their main, if not their only, beneficiaries ― one of the competing interests is that of the taxpayers. The Supreme Court’s intervention in the field of labour law makes public sector workers much more expensive to employ which, at least in the short and medium term, means substantial public expenditures. The issue is not simply one of institutional competence. It is one of basic legitimacy. Allowing the citizens’ elected representatives to decide how they will be taxed, and how their money will be spent is, at least historically, the first and most basic function of a democratic constitution. Charles I lost his head over this issue, James II his crown, and Britain, its American empire.
[w]hen striking a balance between the claims of competing groups, the choice of means, like the choice of ends, frequently will require an assessment of conflicting scientific evidence and differing justified demands on scarce resources. Democratic institutions are meant to let us all share in the responsibility for these difficult choices. Thus, as courts review the results of the legislature’s deliberations, particularly with respect to the protection of vulnerable groups, they must be mindful of the legislature’s representative function.
The idea that legislatures are entitled to some deference (the extent of which, admittedly, has never been made very clear), in making decisions involving a balancing of competing claims, especially competing claims on scarce resources, has been a recurrent ― and perhaps a strengthening ― theme of the Court’s jurisprudence since then.
The defenders of the Courts’ rulings might argue that unions, perhaps especially public sector unions, are in fact “vulnerable groups,” and that the need to protect them against the government’s depredations justifies setting aside the deference to which governments might otherwise be entitled. Perhaps that’s what the Court thinks, given its acceptance of the imbalance of power myth. But experience (which, admittedly, it would be best for governments to support with empirical evidence!) disproves this idea. Public sector unions have frequently been able to hold governments to ransom, and obtain, in exchange for “labour peace,” substantial benefits and advantages for their members. This makes perfect economic sense, of course. Governments aren’t giving away their own money, but taxpayers’, when accede to the civil servants’ demands. Moreover, by paying civil servants with fringe benefits and pensions, they are able to do so relatively untransparently, and often to peddle to cost to future generations rather than imposing it on current voters. But to the extent that current voters have to pay, the government, unlike a firm selling its products on a competitive market, can make them pay more or less as much as it asks. The idea of civil servants’ unions as vulnerable groups, or “discrete and insular minorities,” is groundless.
The Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the scope of s. 2(d) of the Charter are based on economic myths, unsupported by appropriate evidence, and derogate from the Court’s normal constitutional role. They are also inconsistent with the Court’s jurisprudence in other ways, notably in that they constitutionalize organized labour’s economic rights and impose constitutional burdens on private parties, something I will discuss separately. They call for a response, and indeed a reversal, in one way or another ― something I will also discuss separately. In the meantime, they need to be denounced, loud and clear.
The ERA – the the Expenditure Restraint Act, S.C. 2009, c. 2, s. 393 – is actually the same that was at issue in Association des Réalisateurs c. Canada (Procureur Général), 2012 QCCS 3223, which I blogged about a month ago. But the conclusion of the Ontario Court of Appeal in Association of Justice Counsel v. Canada (Attorney General), 2012 ONCA 530, is different from the one Québec’s Superior Court reached in Réalisateurs. The two cases are alike, however, in being very much about the specific facts at issue.
In Réalisateurs, the ERA operated retroactively to modify an agreement concluded between the union and CBC/Radio-Canada. The court found that an interference with the union members’ Charter right to engage into a meaningful collective negotiation over fundamental conditions of their employment (which, it went on to hold, which not justified by s. 1 of the Charter).
The situation in Justice Counsel is different. By the time the ERA came into force, the union and the government had not yet concluded a collective agreement. Despite lengthy negotiations, they had been unable to agree, and decided to resort to arbitration. In these circumstances, the Court holds, “the ERA had the effect of taking wages off the table for the arbitration, [but] that does not, standing alone, amount to an infringement” of the right to negotiate collectively (par. 39). That right entails an ability to make representations, which must be listened to in good faith, but no particular outcome need follow, and binding arbitration is not constitutionally required. The union was able to make representations over the course of the negotiations, and the negotiations’ failure is no proof that they were not listened in good faith. On these facts, the ERA didn’t take away from the union anything it had a right to.
The decision is thus quite narrow, because the circumstances of the parties involved are unusual. It does not tell us very much about the ERA‘s constitutionality as applied to other unions. In my post about Réalisateurs, I criticized the courts for not showing sufficient restraint in extending constitutional protection to civil service union contracts. What I had in mind were the substantive rules applied in these cases. But here is another mode of judicial restraint: deciding a case on narrow – but relevant – facts, and avoiding broad issues altogether.
Author Leonid SirotaPosted on August 16, 2012 Categories Constitutional lawTags collective bargaining, freedom of association, government, unionsLeave a comment on A different ERA?

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