Today the University of British Columbia announced that Allard Law Professor Bethany Hastie has been awarded a UBC Killam Accelerator Research Fellowship.
The $50,000 fellowship is awarded annually to six early-career researchers at UBC who have demonstrated outstanding research achievement and the potential for significant impact in their fields.
“I’m honoured to be awarded this fellowship,” says Hastie. “It provides an amazing opportunity to catalyze my research.”
Hastie is a leading Canadian labour law expert whose research and expertise have helped strengthen rights and protections for platform workers in Canada and led to significant changes to the BC Human Rights Tribunal’s interpretation of sexual harassment law. Through this new fellowship, Hastie hopes to shed light on the challenges that new technologies are raising for workers – and the gaps in current labour law and policy in Canada.
Changing or passing new laws through the legislative process is slow, and in many cases, lawyers, adjudicators and lawmakers will rely on existing general rules and regulations to address emerging workplace issues.
The idea that technology changes the workplace is not new, says Hastie, “but the pace at which it is happening is unprecedented.”
The trend, for example, for platform companies, such as Uber or Doordash, to identify their workers as independent contractors means many workers are not covered by employment standards laws – which offer rights and protections such as minimum wage – and creates obstacles to collectively organize and start a union, as Hastie discusses in a recent paper.
The recent adoption of AI technology in the workplace has also raised concerns about a staggering increase in the surveillance of employees and the implications for privacy and workers’ mental health. Canadian companies have increasingly been using AI as part of their hiring process, despite well-documented cases of bias and discrimination in decisions made by AI.
Awareness of how technology is rapidly changing the nature of work and the disproportionate impact of changes on low-wage and equity-deserving groups is growing, says Hastie, but governments have not kept pace.
“Changing or passing new laws through the legislative process is slow, and in many cases, lawyers, adjudicators and lawmakers will rely on existing general rules and regulations to address emerging workplace issues,” Hastie says. “Together, a slow pace of change and reliance on existing rules can leave gaps for workers’ rights and protections.”
My research findings should provide valuable information for policymakers, unions and legal advocates navigating a new era of technology and its impacts at work.
Through her research, Hastie aims to identify pressing and pervasive concerns about new technologies in the workplace, and to better understand how they’re currently being regulated at the worksite and industry levels. By looking specifically at recently negotiated collective agreements, and understanding how unions are responding to concerns about new technologies through collective bargaining, Hastie will explore how these regulations might be expanded to other workers through broader law and policy reforms.
“As a periodically negotiated instrument, collective agreements are capable of responding quickly to anticipated or existing changes in a workplace,” explains Hastie. This makes them particularly useful for identifying and evaluating potential regulatory approaches for mitigating the challenges posed by new technologies.
With legislatures across Canada likely to develop regulations for technology at work over the next decade, Hastie is hopeful that her recommendations will help inform those decisions. “This is a timely and urgent project for on-the-ground labour regulation – my research findings should provide valuable information for policymakers, unions and legal advocates navigating a new era of technology and its impacts at work.”
