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Regulating AI at work: labour relations, automation, and algorithmic management
Get PDFRecent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) have been at the core of massive technological changes that are transforming work. AI is now widely used to automate business processes and replace labour-intensive tasks while changing the skill demands for those that remain. AI-based tools are also deployed to invasively monitor worker conduct and to automate HR management processes.
Through the dual lens of comparative labour law and employment relations research, the articles in this special issue of Transfer investigate the role of collective bargaining and government policy in shaping strategies to deploy new digital and AI-based technologies at work. Together, they give new insight into the conditions for encouraging broadly shared benefits from technological innovation while mitigating harm to workers and society.
The first section of this issue includes articles comparing union and policy responses to AI at the national level. De Stefano and Taes draw on research in eight EU countries to examine the risks of AI and automated decision-making systems, and union and regulatory strategies to address these risks. Collins and Atkinson discuss the intersection between legal frameworks, collective bargaining, and employers’ algorithmic management choices in ‘post-Brexit Britain’. Krzywdzinski et al. analyse how these issues play out in the more strongly regulated German system, discussing not only the risks to workers, but also how worker voice helps address the challenges management faces in implementing AI at work. Hassel and Özkiziltan also focus on Germany, but they present a more differentiated analysis of how effective responses may differ depending on the type of risk AI poses for work. Molina et al. conclude this section with a broader comparative analysis of policy and union responses to AI and algorithms in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, and Spain.
The articles in the second section are based on comparative case studies, allowing the authors to examine how and why worker representatives’ strategies and bargaining power differ across countries. Doellgast et al. compare union and works council responses to algorithmic management in two telecommunications companies in Germany and Norway. Pulignano et al. examine union strategies toward the linked digital and green transitions in the German and Belgian auto industries. Finally, Garneau et al. compare union responses to digitalisation in aerospace manufacturing in Wallonia, Denmark, and Quebec. These three articles show that unions and works councils had most influence over technology-related decisions when they could draw on formal bargaining rights and encompassing collective agreements; as well as a network of intermediary institutions that support knowledge and strategy development and exchange.
Together, the articles make a strong case that efforts to better regulate the use of AI and algorithms at work are likely to be most effective where they are underpinned by, and supportive of, social dialogue. Individual legal protections are blunt instruments without mechanisms that also strengthen worker voice in, and oversight over, how technologies are implemented. Collective labour rights are the most effective tools to give workers real voice in the distribution of benefits or costs from the AI- and data-driven ‘digital revolution’. The articles also suggest specific lessons for unions and policy-makers seeking to develop broader strategies to engage with AI and digitalisation at work. We hope that they contribute to these crucial endeavours, by providing both an analytical base and comparative examples to support these strategies
Towards meaningful research and engagement: Indigenous knowledge systems and Great Lakes governance
Get PDFFor thousands of years, Indigenous peoples governed their relations in the Great Lakes region, guided by distinct political, legal, governance, and knowledge systems. Despite historic and ongoing exclusion of Indigenous peoples from Great Lakes governance in the Canadian context and other assaults on Indigenous sovereignty, authority, jurisdiction and responsibilities, Indigenous peoples have maintained their relationships with the Great Lakes. In recent years, Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) have made inroads in Great Lakes governance, thanks primarily to First Nation political advocacy. However, it remains a challenge to include Indigenous knowledge and implement approaches that bridge Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. Instead of asking, ‘‘What needs to be done to support research into Indigenous knowledge systems?”, more appropriate questions addressed in this paper are: ‘‘What needs to be done to support Indigenous peoples to uphold, strengthen, revitalize Indigenous knowledge systems so they are able to share knowledge if they wish?” and ‘‘How can external institutions, agencies, and people engaged in sustainable management of Great Lakes ecosystems better prepare to engage with IKS respectfully and in the manner required by First Nations?”. In this paper, we demonstrate a First Nations-led knowledge sharing approach to research. In addition to making important contributions to Great Lakes governance and to the scientific research landscape in Canada, this paper points to the requirement to support Indigenous research capacity by building the necessary infrastructure and funding to ensure Indigenous people can lead their own research
Walking the Line: The Politics of Federalism and Environmental Change
Get PDFThis short paper looks at the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act decision through a wider and more critical jurisprudential lens. In so doing, I demonstrate that the courts are no less political than legislatures in making decisions about who has the constitutional capacity to decide on how the challenges of climate change should be met. This is not so much a criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada, but an inevitable feature of constitutional law. After introducing the traditional and received explanation of the differences between political decision-making and judicial decision-making, I delve deeper into the Court’s opinions and show how they fail to maintain that traditional explanation. I then unravel the political nature and effects of the different visions of federalism that animate the Court’s work in Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. Throughout the paper, the connecting trope is that the judges who claim to be walking the constitutional lines are also those who draw those lines: the lines are theirs. It is not that they are not bound by the lines, but that they draw and re-draw the lines as they walk along them. In this way, I will show through the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act decision that the Court makes it up (and then remakes it) as it goes along; the lines in the (oil) sands of constitutional law are paths of its own making
Judging Youth Time
Get PDFQuestions of time, culpability and rehabilitation permeate youth criminal law. This paper examines competing claims about time and justice in R. v. P. (C.), a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada upholding a leave requirement for youth appeals in circumstances where adults enjoy an appeal as of right. In light of the relatively low stakes of the case in terms of actual appellate practice, I question why the majority worked so hard, often at the expense of logic, to deny a formal equality claim that would have changed little in reality. I argue that an enduring, if unstated, sense that the state’s relationship to young people is qualitatively different to its relationship to adults helps to explain the outcome in P. (C.). If a prevailing vision of the adult criminal system is one of a “battle” pitting the state against individuals, with the accused afforded procedural protections to offset state power, an alternative vision of the youth system as welfarist, rehabilitative, even “familial,” exists alongside it. This paper develops this argument by tracing the genealogy and evolution of youth appellate rights and expediency claims over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. I show how even as the youth system underwent a “rights revolution” that tracked and eventually exceeded that of adults, the system’s paternalistic moorings continue to yield unexpected exercises of deference to Parliament
Unfortunate But Ordinary: A Study of Federal Court Approaches to Stays of Removal
Get PDFInterlocutory decisions issued on stay of removal motions by the Federal Court of Canada remain under-studied. A leading reason for the limited research is that stay orders were not published or publicly accessible five years ago. Since then, changes to the Court’s policies regarding publication have increased the number of accessible stay orders. The outcome of a denied stay motion may result in the immediate deportation of a foreign national from Canada. Given the high-stakes nature of these decisions, it is imperative to critically examine stay motion procedures, laws, and trends against established human rights norms. This study presents an overview of this final legal frontier followed by a multi-method inquiry to investigate Federal Court stays. The inquiry exposes an area of law that remains extremely limited and procedurally lacking, resulting in a legal process that stands in tension with human rights protections
LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models
Get PDFThe advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning—which distinguish between its many forms—correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables
Race Matters: White Dispatches From the Professional Front
No full textDavid Wilkins’s ‘bleached-out professionalism’ article is a deserved modern classic. In his characteristically modest but firm critique, he brings together two streams of intellectual thought that had not yet been integrated at his time of writing – the challenge to legal ethics as a body of neutral and professional rules and principles and the developing insights of critical race theory. He demonstrates clearly and practically how the façade of neutral professionalism is a cover for a more skewed and partial body of norms that reflects and embodies the values and practices of the dominant and, therefore, white legal establishment. In my chapter, I want to show how his critique sheds light on both bodies of critical literature – ethical and racial – as well as trace its impact on the growing and derivative work of legal ethicists and practitioners. However, I also try to push Wilkins’s approach further across the political spectrum and suggest how it can be used to advance transformative approaches to legal professional responsibility in an increasingly fractious and divisive social context
Walking The Line: The Politics of Federalism and Environmental Change
Get PDFThis short paper looks at the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act decision through a wider and more critical jurisprudential lens. In so doing, I demonstrate that the courts are no less political than legislatures in making decisions about who has the constitutional capacity to decide on how the challenges of climate change should be met. This is not so much a criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada, but an inevitable feature of constitutional law. After introducing the traditional and received explanation of the differences between political decision-making and judicial decision-making, I delve deeper into the Court\u27s opinions and show how they fail to maintain that traditional explanation. I then unravel the political nature and effects of the different visions of federalism that animate the Court\u27s work in Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act. Throughout the paper, the connecting trope is that the judges who claim to be walking the constitutional lines are also those who draw those lines: the lines are theirs. It is not that they are not bound by the lines, but that they draw and re-draw the lines as they walk along them. In this way, I will show through the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act decision that the Court makes it up (and then remakes it) as it goes along; the lines in the (oil) sands of constitutional law are paths of its own making
