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Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’: A Short Journey on a Tiny Piece of Road
Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is being mentioned more and more as a good introduction to understanding workplace motivation. I’m not familiar with any of Pink’s...
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Not Again: The “10 Year Collective Agreement” for BC Teachers Should Just Go...
Back in October of 2012, British Columbia’s premier, Christy Clark, proposed the idea of a 10-year-long collective agreement for teachers in BC’s public school system. The proposal came after a long...
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Malcolm Gladwell’s Weak Defense of the “10,000 Hour Rule”
The “10,000 hour rule” – the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the amount needed to excel in an activity, as described in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers – has been getting more attention...
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Changing the Story: A Visit with the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union
I recently returned from presenting a paper at the 8th Annual Colloquium of Current Scholarship on Employment and Labor Law, a conference that was started by a group of American law professors, and...
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The Joy of Figures
Over the past two weeks, the international competitive ice skating season has started, with the Skate America competition in Detroit and the Skate Canada competition in Saint John. In most countries,...
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Caring, Not Caring, And Success
I’ve just finished reading David Epstein’s excellent book The Sports Gene, a fascinating exploration of the research on genetic and physiological factors that may contribute to exceptional athletic...
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How the Media Isolate Academics: A Response to Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof usually produces thoughtful and insightful commentary in his columns in the New York Times. However, his recent article entitled “Professors, We Need You!” was such a lazy piece of...
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What Skating Judging can Learn from Workplace Performance Evaluation
At every Winter Olympics, it seems, there are complaints about figure skating judging. Occasionally those complaints lead to something more – as in 2002, when a second gold medal was awarded in the...
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Statistics and University “Rape Culture”
In the last few weeks, as a result of incidents such as a sexual assault investigation leading to the suspension of the University of Ottawa men’s hockey team and its coaches and a University of...
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Some Thoughts on Orly Lobel’s “Talent Wants to Be Free”
I had the pleasure of meeting Orly Lobel this past September at the Employment and Labor Law Colloquium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. As it happened, the colloquium was held just a few days...
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Paternity Leave and the Flexibility Stigma
In 1989, sociologist Arlie Hochschild published The Second Shift, a book about her long-term study of how a group of employees balanced their work and their family commitments. The title of the book...
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Blog Carnival: My Post-Ph.D. Story
Jacquelyn Gill over at The Contemplative Mammoth blog has put forward a great idea for the month of May: a “Post-Ph.D. Blog Carnival”, for bloggers to tell their stories of what they did after...
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Getting It Right About Canadian Unions’ Rights
The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) is a Calgary-based organization that bills itself as “Freedom’s defense team”. Although the CCF claims it is “non-partisan” and “politically neutral”, the...
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Flawed Data, Questionable Results: International Monetary Fund Research Gets...
Research methodology scares a lot of people. There’s this idea that you need an advanced degree and very specialized education to design and conduct a research study. That isn’t always true – a lot of...
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A Look at the British Columbia Government’s Ad in the Teachers’ Bargaining...
In a high-profile collective bargaining situation, it’s not at all unusual for both unions and employers to try to sway public opinion in their favour. And the current bargaining dispute between the...
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The Canadian LabourWatch Association and Its Latest Anti-Union Poll
Last year, the Canadian LabourWatch Association got more publicity than it expected for its 2011 “State of the Unions” poll, after the Canadian Labour Congress filed a complaint with the Market...
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Precarious Work and the Failure of “Human Resource Management”
The Globe and Mail newspaper recently ran a very thoughtful article examining the growth of precarious work in Canada – people holding multiple part-time or temporary jobs with irregular scheduling....
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Bill C-377: New Information on “The Bill That Nobody Wants”
Two researchers have uncovered some new and very troubling information about Bill C-377, the proposed Canadian law that would impose exceptionally rigorous financial reporting requirements on unions....
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Investigative Journalism: The Media Can (and Should) Do More of It
Recently I wrote a post about new information on the anti-union financial disclosure bill being debated in Canada’s Parliament. This new information was collected by two University of Regina...
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Union Grievance Procedures and the Jian Ghomeshi Story
Just over three weeks ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) fired Jian Ghomeshi, the host of its radio show Q. The CBC stated that the reason for the firing was “information” that...
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