Monday’s schedule included a well-organized forum held at the new Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace (I attended by videoconference). The discussions centred on the issues raised by the Supreme Court’s decision in Fraser, especially the extent of the constitutional protection for collective bargaining under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Fraser‘s relevance to my own research derives not only from its focus on freedom of association, but on the Court’s increasing reliance on international labour law. As has become typical of discussions of this issue since the release of the BC Health Services decision, the most controversial comments came from Brian Langille, law professor at the University of Toronto. Without getting into too much detail, Langille’s criticisms (and his indictment of the majority was scathing) reiterated two themes of his recent work. First, he suggested that the court had lost sight or failed to correctly answer the fundamental question: “what is it we are trying to do?” Second, he suggested that the court did a bad job of two forms of derivation, both the transposition of international responsibilities into constitutional commitments and the translation of constitutional principles into constraints on government law-making.
When it comes to international labour law, I think there’s a deep problem with Langille’s approach. His criticisms share a basic premise with formalist approaches to law, namely that rules can be correctly derived from higher-level principles; and that these principles can also help resolve conflicts between rules whose application would be in conflict in specific cases. Now, the original critique of this claim from the critical legal studies movement was that such derivation is non-deterministic: that there is no politically neutral, logically coherent process by which legal conclusions can be drawn regarding the application of principles in specific situations. However, it is not this claim which concerns me – even most “crits” have retreated from this version of the claim – but rather a precondition for its possibility. What bothers me is that in some cases, it is not the interpretations of the principles which are contested, but the principles themselves.
Lawmaking, after all, is a political process. The players and participants in the process want different things. In a review of Bauer, Pool and Dexter’s 1964 study of the political process surrounding antebellum US trade policy,[1] Theodore Lowi notes an important finding:
The outcome depended not upon compromise between the two sides in Congress but upon whose definition of the situation prevailed. If tariff is an instrument of foreign policy and general regulation for international purposes, the anti-protectionists win; if the traditional definition of tariff as an aid to 100,000 individual firms prevails, then the protectionists win.
The advantage of Langille’s framing of the question – “what are we trying to do?” – is helpful insofar as it sets aside debates between formalism and functionalism, and implicitly sides with those who see no divide between principle and policy: both are cast simply as a matter of what the law is meant to do, and how it ‘works’ to accomplish that task. Once the problem has been defined and the successful policy choice promulgated into law, legal adjudication and administration can be made to cohere on the basis of a purposive interpretation of the resulting rules.
Unfortunately, purposive interpretation in international labour law is not so easy. I have spent much of the last week scanning the record of the last ten years of discussions at the ILO’s Governing Body, regarding the reform of standards and supervision processes. These are discussions of process, mind you, not discussions leading to actual international standard-setting. What these discussions reveal is unsurprising: action being taken and rules amended despite the absence of any consensus about problem definition. Without compromise at the level of problem definition – except for an agreement not to agree – the unfortunate result is a set of processes which reflect multiple, often incoherent logics. Each party tries to convert their interest into a principle, but neither principle prevails.
Such conflict of problem definition is just as likely to be reflected in international labour standards. While it is true that the ILO Constitution sets out high-level normative aims, the relevance of international regimes relies on their possession not only of a goal, but also an operative logic, i.e. an understanding of how specific norms will be realized by the policy or standard in question. Reading those Governing Body decisions has made clear to me that the resulting rules or procedures may actually embody conflicting norms which are inherent to the system, not accidental; the high-level aims may be purposefully vague and multivalent; and the resulting institutions may rely on multiple, incoherent logics. What a ‘correct’ derivation from the resulting texts might look like, in this type of situation, is without question a non-deterministic inquiry.
[1] The book is Raymond A. Bauer, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis A. Dexter, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (New York, Atherton Press, 1963); the review is Theodore Lowi, “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory” (1964) 16:4 World Politics 677