Uber may get you where you need to go fast, but the app is also challenging labour laws. That’s because it’s part of the growing gig economy.

Ron McCallum, AO, LLM’74, LLD’16, will delve into this hot topic and more during his time at Queen’s Law as the William R. Lederman Visitor from September 22 to October 1. 

“I chose the gig (or ‘sharing’) economy because it has brought about profound changes in Canada and in Australia in the way much work is being performed,” says McCallum, an internationally renowned labour law scholar, professor emeritus and former Dean of the University of Sydney Law School. “This work, including apps like Uber and Internet platforms usually means that workers are casual as distinct from permanent. These disruptions to the performance of work are a challenge to labour law.”

How should our laws respond? Should they provide minimum benefits for gig economy workers, even if they are contractors and not employees? These are two of the questions he will explore in his upper-year seminar “Challenges of the Gig Economy,” as well as in his presentation hosted by the Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace on October 1 from noon until 2:00 pm.

During his visit, McCallum will also be delivering the Lederman Lecture titled, “Deconstructing ‘Disabling’ Legal Barriers: My Life, Disability, Queen’s Law and the Australian Royal Commission into Persons with Disabilities.” The lecture will be held on September 30 from 1:00 – 2:30 pm. 

“I want to comment on what Queen’s Law was like to a foreign graduate student almost half a century ago,” says McCallum, who wrote about this experience in his recently published memoir Born at the Right Time. “This training enabled me to embark upon an academic career.”

McCallum’s work on disability topics and his former service as Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities resulted in his July 2018 appointment as a special advisor to Australia’s Royal Commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability. “I am working on a number of legal and related issues, which I will speak about,” he says. “These issues include the doctrine of unfitness to plead, the giving of evidence in sexual assault cases by persons with cognitive disabilities, our current guardianship laws, and the right to housing. I thought this might interest my Queen’s colleagues.”

McCallum remains close with his alma mater. “As I have been a law school teacher for about 47 years, the thing I am most looking forward to at Queen’s Law is to spend time with my students,” he says. “As a blind person especially, I’m looking forward to those special fall smells of the trees with their falling leaves. These smells are one of my best memories of when I was a student at Queen’s from 1972 to 1974. It will be good to reconnect with academic friends and families.”

The William R. Lederman Visitorship was established with a generous donation from the Honourable Hugh Landerkin, QC, Law’67, in September 2017. Through the visitorship, which commemorates the school’s first Dean, distinguished individuals of national or international renown in law are brought to Queen’s for short-term visits, engaging in the intellectual life of the Faculty.  

By Lisa Graham