Coercive Bargaining: Public Sector Restructuring under the Ontario Social Contract, 1993–1996

Economic restructuring, which is difficult to engineer even in the private sector, poses particularly serious challenges in highly unionized public sector environments. In 1993, the Ontario New Democratic Party government, which relied on labor support and was committed to collective bargaining, enacted the “Social Contract,” a bill that mandated spending reductions. The Social Contract has been widely criticized for failing to obtain a …