Exciting times for Sara Slinn in labour and employment law

Students in Sara Slinn’s classes should expect to go beyond the black letter law of labour and employment in Canada.

In addition to her role as one of the program directors of Osgoode’s part-time Professional LLM in Labour and Employment Law, Slinn teaches courses on labour law and labour arbitration, where she encourages her students to dig deeper into the subjects.

“The idea is to get at the concepts and debates that are underneath it all, driving the law in this area, by looking at interesting contemporary issues,” she says.

And there is no better time for bringing current affairs into the labour and employment law classroom, according to Slinn, who has been spoilt for choice in recent years.

“In the current economic climate, there are a lot of issues we can look at,” she adds. “It’s a very interesting period for labour law in general.”

For example, Slinn says the wage-restraint efforts of government in several jurisdictions – as well as their varying degrees of success – has been a hot topic for her students.

In Ontario, the provincial government recently repealed Bill 124, which had attempted to cap public sector wage rises at 1 per cent annually for a defined period following its passage in 2019.

The Bill attracted immediate criticism from a number of unions, who launched a successful Constitutional challenge in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. A divided panel at the province’s Court of Appeal later confirmed that the law violated union members’ Charter-protected right to freedom of association, before Doug Ford’s provincial government decided against a further appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Similar legislation in Manitoba was also ultimately repealed, although not before that province’s Court of Appeal ruled that Bill 28 was compliant with the Charter.

“There are enormous implications here for all public sector workplaces,” Slinn says.

Slinn’s own exploration of labour and employment law issues has seen her criss-cross the country several times, starting at the University of British Columbia’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, where she studied under Joe Weiler, one of the architects of modern labour law in Canada.

“I was very lucky that I had some really excellent professors,” she says.

Slinn took an immediate shine to the subject, pausing her legal studies to complete a master’s degree in industrial relations at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

After returning to B.C., Slinn practised labour and employment law with a law firm in Vancouver, as well as in-house at the British Columbia Labour Relations Board, before heading back to Ontario, where she earned a PhD in industrial relations at the University of Toronto.

Since joining the faculty at Osgoode in 2007, Slinn’s research has focused on different approaches and impediments to collective employee representation and collective bargaining structures. Her contributions to the field were recognized in 2013 when she was awarded the prestigious Morley Gunderson Prize in Industrial Relations.

Slinn also served as an academic advisor to Ontario’s landmark Changing Workplaces Review, which recommended a series of reforms to address the prevalence of vulnerable workers and precarious employment.

In the coming years, Slinn expects to have plenty of fresh material with which to engage her Labour and Employment Law Professional LLM students, who include lawyers from across the country in private practice and in government, as well as in-house counsel and other working professionals without formal legal training.

“The challenges of remote work and employers’ increased ability and inclination to engage in surveillance and monitoring of their workers is giving rise to a lot of new issues that labour arbitrators and the courts will be dealing with,” Slinn says.