ABSTRACT
While the national labor law of the United States was designed to eradicate company unions and most forms of employer-promulgated employee representation plans, Canada took a different approach. Canadian labor laws across all jurisdictions affirmed the primacy of bona fide unions but maintained a deliberate silence on the status of nonunion employee representation plans. There are few legal impediments that prevent Canadian employers from dealing with nonunion employees, and nonunion employees who would prefer to represent their own interests without unionizing may meet and deal with their employers on any topic salient to the employment relationship, including items such as wages and working conditions that normally characterize union-management bargaining relations. As long as such behavior within Canadian workplaces does not thwart union organizing activities or interfere with collective bargaining at unionized locations, it is lawful. As a result, nonunion forms of employee representation constitute an important, though little known, part of the Canadian industrial relations landscape. Canadian companies practice many permutations of nonunion representation that would be considered unlawful in the United States.
