The Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace (CLCW) at Queen’s recently hosted a major conference examining how rapid technological change is challenging existing legal frameworks governing work — and what it will take to adapt them.
Technology, Labour and Industry 5.0: What Kind of Future(s) for Work and its Legal Regulation? — held May 28 and May 29 in Toronto — brought together leading scholars and industry experts from Canada, the U.S., and Europe to explore the challenges that rapid technological change poses for work and its legal regulation.
“These questions are urgent now because technologies that gather employee data, enable platform work, and enable remote work are becoming very widespread and affecting many workers, employers, and unions,” says Professor Kevin Banks, Associate Dean (Faculty and Academic Policy).
Data, technology, and the limits of existing frameworks
One major theme that emerged, Banks says, is that technologically enabled collection of employee data is an important and contested development. “It raises questions like who has rights to control and receive compensation for valuable data, and what employee privacy or psychological safety interests are at stake.”
These developments pose complex governance challenges. “Employers may not control or even be fully aware of what data are collected by technology suppliers and how they are used,” Banks adds. “Unions have raised these kinds of issues in collective bargaining. But a full regulatory response may need to extend beyond the usual employer‑union‑employee relationships and include technology suppliers. This calls for some fundamental rethinking of what relationships work law serves to regulate.”
Evolving models of work and employment
Another key theme relates to remote and cross‑border work, which is now a lasting feature of many industries and raises foundational questions for labour law.
Issues arise, for example, when employers recruit workers across jurisdictions. “This raises really fundamental questions about which entity or entities should be treated as employers,” Banks says. “We saw an interesting discussion of how an employer of record within a national jurisdiction might address this set of concerns if appropriate licensing requirements were put into place.”
Discussions of digital platform work also underlined how inherited ideas about what employment has become are now outdated.
“How and why does it matter, from a labour and employment law standpoint, that a worker can choose when to work if that worker has no real scope for entrepreneurship and remains vulnerable to risks of arbitrariness and opportunism in much the same ways as employees?” asks Banks, who shared his reflections on Ontario’s Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act on a conference panel.
“Conversely, do we need to apply a one‑size‑fits‑all approach to regulating working time if a worker really can choose when to work and not to work? We need to think more clearly about why we regulate employment, and to ask how a definition of employment that meets those purposes should apply to platform work.”
Professor Samuel Dahan, who participated in panel discussions on cross‑border work and chaired a session on data and the world of work, points to emerging global hiring models as a key pressure point.
“The employer of record model is the clearest example of a labour‑market arrangement that legacy frameworks cannot quite contain,” he says. If an employer is in one jurisdiction and the employee in another, accountability becomes complex. “Traditional laws don’t deliver what enforcement needs — an entity in the worker's jurisdiction that can answer and pay.”
Connecting technology, data, and legal regulation
For Dahan, a key contribution of the conference was bringing together issues often considered separately.
“The conference made a distinctive contribution by treating cross‑border work, AI, and accountability not as separate silos but as parts of the same broader question — how legal frameworks designed for a particular conception of work need to evolve as the conception itself shifts,” he says. “That kind of integration is hard to find in any single venue, and Queen’s Law has built genuine convening authority around it.”
Bringing together legal professionals, academics, students, policymakers, HR professionals, and representatives from labour organizations and employer associations, the event also created a rare opportunity, Banks adds, “for the perspectives of empirical researchers, technological change makers, and legal practitioners and scholars to consider the implications for law of our rapidly changing technological landscape.” As the only labour law research centre in a Canadian law school, he notes, the CLCW is uniquely positioned to foster these conversations.
Informing the CLCW’s future work
The conference also highlighted how labour law is already beginning to respond — albeit unevenly — to the challenges posed by technological change.
“The discussions provided an opportunity to explore ways in which labour laws are already attempting to respond to these emerging challenges, including through negotiated collective agreements,” says Professor Bethany Hastie, Director of the CLCW.
At the same time, the discussions underscored the extent of the gap between legal frameworks and the realities of work today.
“First, the conference brought to light a multitude of ways in which traditional labour and employment law frameworks no longer reflect the world of work today,” Hastie says. “Our future research and activities, as well as ongoing projects, will continue to explore the many ways in which that misalignment manifests.”
The work of the CLCW will also continue to bring a unique interdisciplinary, international lens to the contemporary challenges posed for — and by — labour and employment law.
“This not only contributes to richer dialogue and understanding of the challenges,” says Hastie, “but also provides an important foundation for identifying and analyzing pathways forward.”
See more photos in the CLCW conference photo gallery.
By Kirsteen MacLeod