Employee-Employer Relationship

Wallace v. United Grain Growers Ltd., 1997 CanLII 332 (SCC), [1997] 3 SCR 701

91 The contract of employment has many characteristics that set it apart from the ordinary commercial contract. Some of the views on this subject that have already been approved of in previous decisions of this Court (see e.g. Machtinger, supra) bear repeating. As K. Swinton noted in “Contract Law and the Employment Relationship: The Proper Forum for Reform”, in B. J. Reiter and J. Swan, eds., Studies in Contract Law (1980), 357, at p. 363:

. . . the terms of the employment contract rarely result from an exercise of free bargaining power in the way that the paradigm commercial exchange between two traders does. Individual employees on the whole lack both the bargaining power and the information necessary to achieve more favourable contract provisions than those offered by the employer, particularly with regard to tenure.

92 This power imbalance is not limited to the employment contract itself. Rather, it informs virtually all facets of the employment relationship. In Slaight Communications Inc. v. Davidson, 1989 CanLII 92 (SCC), [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1038, Dickson C.J., writing for the majority of the Court, had occasion to comment on the nature of this relationship. At pp. 1051-52 he quoted with approval from P. Davies and M. Freedland, Kahn-Freund's Labour and the Law (3rd ed. 1983), at p. 18:

[T]he relation between an employer and an isolated employee or worker is typically a relation between a bearer of power and one who is not a bearer of power. In its inception it is an act of submission, in its operation it is a condition of subordination. . . .

93 This unequal balance of power led the majority of the Court in Slaight Communications, supra, to describe employees as a vulnerable group in society: see p. 1051. The vulnerability of employees is underscored by the level of importance which our society attaches to employment. As Dickson C.J. noted in Reference Re Public Service Employee Relations Act (Alta.), 1987 CanLII 88 (SCC), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 313, at p. 368:

Work is one of the most fundamental aspects in a person's life, providing the individual with a means of financial support and, as importantly, a contributory role in society. A person's employment is an essential component of his or her sense of identity, self-worth and emotional well-being.

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