Volume 5, Issue 2 (2015) Making Workers' Rights Work

Our First Special Issue

Special issues allow readers to delve deeply into a specific field of legal studies from a variety of perspectives. The Western Journal of Legal Studies (WJLS) is excited to publish its first special issue, which focuses on labour law. Labour law intersects with social issues of national importance including, among others, human rights, pay equity, and employee remedies. The articles in this special issue engage these overlapping themes and situate the discourse from the perspective of Canadian workers.

In "Employing Disability," Maia Abbas reveals the ways in which the jurisprudence on the duty to accommodate has developed to favour "mainstream" disabilities while ostracizing "non-mainstream" disabilities for failing to fit into conventional understanding. In "A Case for Canadian Pay Equity Reform," Sydney Kruth challenges collective bargaining as an effective site for resolving the wage gap between male and female employees, arguing that pay equity is better resolved under pre-existing human rights legislation and through union action separate from collective bargaining. Reagan Ruslim, a practicing employment lawyer in Toronto, critically reviews the Federal Court's decision in Wilson v AECL in "Unjust Dismissal Under the Canada Labour Code: New Law, Old Statute", Mr. Ruslim finds that Wilson radically alters both employee job security and administrative rights in the federal sector.

We are proud of both our authors and editors for putting together such an honest, critical, and yet still hopeful, issue. We believe this issue is helpful to labour law specialists and intriguing to those simply interested in the field.

- Denise Brunsdon, Editor-in-Chief & Deborah Perkins-Leitman, Deputy Editor-in-Chief