Bethany Hastie

As part of the Wall Scholar Catalyst program, Prof. Hastie will examine the human mobility and labour dimensions of the climate emergency. While human mobility and labour, in many ways, are causal factors in producing the climate emergency, they also illustrate the acute consequences of living in the current climate. As a legal scholar, Prof. Hastie is interested in exploring how the distinct challenges presented by, and for, labour and human mobility are ameliorated or exacerbated by legal regulation, or the lack thereof. For example, extreme heat across the west coast last summer brought renewed attention to issues regarding workplace health and safety for agricultural workers, and demonstrated a need for greater rights and protections under law, as well as better enforcement of existing laws, to ensure safe working conditions as such events are predicted to become more common in the future.

As a Wall Scholar, Prof. Hastie will examine the future of collective workplace representation, investigating what a meaningful system of labour rights must account for in order to be accessible, suitable and effective for workers in the 21^st century labour landscape. Adopting an interdisciplinary lens, this project will construct an evaluative framework for collective workplace representation models, articulating both the normative commitments and material dimensions that must inhere to viable models. This project will use the evaluative framework to conduct a comparative study of both formal and informal approaches to labour organizing and collective workplace representation across an array of jurisdictions, including Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany and Japan.  Read more about Bethany’s project at: https://allard.ubc.ca/about-us/news-and-announcements/2020/rethinking-labour-law-new-world-work.