A close friend, who once was instrumental for me to accept a job offer at my first job in Canada, has recently moved into a residence, where he is waited upon by health care staff that changes from day to day and comes at all unpredictable times of the day, walking into his luxury ‘suite’, bedroom or bathroom, regardless of his washroom needs or naptimes. The residence in Yorkdale, one of the most expensive, gentrified neighbourhoods in Toronto, is adorned by Whole Foods (owned by Amazon) and Ferrari (owned substantively by Enzo’s son, Piero, and the Fiat-founders Agnelli family’s investment holding company, Exor N.V.). The residence itself is owned by Canada-wide retirement home operating company with 30 residences under management. That operating company is further owned by a healthcare services management company headquartered in Tennessee. In its mission statement, the company expresses its commitment to “personalized care plans, strong clinical outcomes, and meaningful human connection.”
My friend was a trailblazer in Canadian and transnational labour law, legal education and institution building, someone generations of students, colleagues, collaborators and policy makers on the provincial, national and international level came to rely on and trust. He is unable today to predict at what time a ‘nurse’, contracted by the residence as part of outsourced service provision and is never the same two times in a row, will come to get him ‘ready for the day’ or interrupt his regular nap to give him medicine.
I have been in Canada since 2004, following my [service in elder care] and studies in philosophy and law in Frankfurt, Paris and Cambridge MA. My arrival in Toronto followed a doctorate on the contractualization of health services under the newly inaugurated, neoconservative Kohl government in Germany and a post-doctoral Habilitation study on the battles over the ‘constitution of the firm.’ The Habilitation pitted against each other protagonists of an ‘end of history’, the triumph of capitalism and shareholder value maximization, on the one hand, and comparative political economy, on the other. The latter included scholars such as David Soskice and Peter A. Hall, who were crucial in the elaboration of ‘varieties of capitalism’, a framework through which to grasp i.e. the historically-grown and contextually-shaped trajectories of regulating the relationship between state and market, public and private, were the not to be forsaken prerequisites of a democratic society resisting the sirens’ lures of neoliberalism, on the other.
Once landed, during my car-subway-bus commutes to York, I swallowed hard at the discovery of the never-changing personnel of CBC 1’s morning show, a dismally thin, ‘leading’ national newspaper and the glaring void in the ether, where there should have been a vibrant, disruptive and inspiring radio scene. Instead, it was ‘Virgin Radio’ with corporate-driven, top-10 playlists, a never-changing (he is still there, every afternoon) host for lukewarm and predictable pop music during the alleged 3 hour-long “drive” home from work, and a shockingly underwhelming “As it Happens” night in, night out. The show’s jingle has never changed. Where were the public fora, the places of societal, inclusive exchange, the headline-making works of literature, theatre, cinematography, through which the country was conducting standard-setting, critical engagement with its settler-colonialist inheritance and responsibility? Where was the innovation, the lust for making a splash, for being the best at something? Where were the places in which critical movements formed and took flight around key issues? Reading Charlie Angus’s autobiography recently, I realized that I had looked too long in the wrong places. Whether universities, or particularly law schools, can (still?) be the places of critical, society-relevant disruption, is doubtful. The ‘encampments’ and ‘public universities’ in solidarity with Palestine were remarkable feats of ‘acting out’ and acting up. But, they remain brave resistance attempts against waves of corporatization and increasing encroachments on academic freedom. leaders of the neoliberally-governed university pay millions to global consultancies like Nous to learn how to make cuts to staff and other support so that the academics to whom students might still occasionally look for critical leadership, become themselves jaded cynics and increasingly exhausted of trying to fight this overwhelming trend.
In 2004, as Canada Research Chair in the Comparative and Transnational Law of Corporate Governance, I successfully applied for a substantial grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. We launched the interdisciplinary Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Network (CLPE), convened conferences, formed mentor and support networks for graduate students around the world and created the first-ever SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network) paper series and e-journal at Osgoode. The CLPE papers, which I jointly edited with John Cioffi at UC Riverside, himself the author of some of the best political economy writing on US corporate law and financialization, soon rose into the top ranks of SSRN e-journals globally outside of the US. Some of the events hosted by the CLPE became legendary and faithful to the dictum of quod non est in actis, non est in mundo, we made sure to bring contributors together in lasting, widely regarded collective publications, including the 2007 Symposium issue of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (IJGLS) and the 2011 edited volume, The Embedded Firm. Corporate Governance, Labor, and Finance Capitalism (C. Williams & P.Zumbansen, eds., Cambridge UP).
Osgoode was the ideal place for such an undertaking, offering up the right and productively stimulating context of enough people who immediately got ‘the bug’ and saw the value in putting Osgoode and CLPE ‘on the map’ while others were still wondering whether ‘globalization and the law’ was really a topic for law schools. Local faculty comrades without whom this would never have gone further included Harry Arthurs, Simon Archer, Craig Scott, Daniel Drache, Robert Wai, Neil Brooks, Liora Salter and others. But, the key to the wonders that were created with both CFI projects – CLPE and CURL – as well as the editorial work on the two law reviews German Law Journal and Transnational Legal Theory lay doubtless in the JD and graduate students who invested their time, energy and love in these endeavors. Together we merged CLPE and CURL into the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society to create a transnationally connected, inclusive and immensely productive research and collaboration hub.
Much of the work the students and I launched at the time unfolded amidst an institutional climate that oscillated between sentiments of ‘whatever’ and bewilderment as in ‘what is all this?’ That might have been part of the fun. I, to be sure, was electrified by collaborating with such immensely talented, curious and transnationally diverse groups of students. Focusing on Toronto as an example of the ‘global city’ and York University as case-in-point of a global university meeting the demands of a diverse, immigrant society, we secured a second major CFI grant to establish the Collaborative Urban Research Laboratory, at the centre of which was a documentary film production suite. For York University’s 50th Anniversary in 2009, CURL produced a 30-minute long documentary, The University and the Global City, written by the Canadian film-maker Mars Horodyski and myself, and directed by Mars. CURL hosted conferences on the future of city-building and on the all-too-tangible spectres of deeply invasive gentrification and brought together urban scholars, activists and civil society members.
Fast forward to 2014, when I was recruited to launch and develop the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College London, which we built into a soon-very-visible and attractive magnet for a new generation of global law students eager to study law in a global context and to break the boundaries of doctrinally confined legal ‘fields’ with the view to exploring the cross-irritations between, say, labour and corporate law, international law and postcolonial legal theory, migration and climate law. Its new Transnational Law LL.M. (Masters of Law) program and the TLI’s events such as the annual Transnational Law Summer Institute (TLSI) soon brought graduate and post-doctoral students to London and, with our collaborators, to Sydney, forging collaborative networks that are global and active to this day. Some of the key work emerging from the TLI and TLSI has focused on transnational climate change law, food governance, migration and the trials and tribulations of securitization and ‘anti-terrorism’ law. Building on my experiences with Indigenous Law and experiential learning projects at Osgoode, the TLI increasingly became focused on thinking outside the (Western) (epistemological) box and framings. We were privileged to be able to invite inspiring, postcolonial scholars and activists, legal activists and cutting-edge socio-legal scholars to the Institute who helped us shape a new and different, distinctly critical and interdisciplinary research and teaching agenda.
Some twelve, thirteen years later, I am in year 6 at a world-renowned university in Montreal, Quebec, some three years of which I have spent as part of the negotiation team for the Faculty of Law’s first collective agreement. That CA is still pending, and the flow of public tax money the University is pouring into the fight against unionization seems never-ebbing. Meanwhile, McGill has become a unionized University – despite the administration’s ardent efforts to prevent this transformation. In our work, the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL) has received tremendous, indeed humbling and electrifying support from unionizers locally and nationally. We are presently forging ahead under the auspices of COFAM, the Coalition of Faculty Associations at McGill, a confederation of unions which – again unsurprisingly – the University at first and before the Press acknowledged to be its fair-and-square negotiation party on the other side of the table – only to pursue, day in and day out, every trick in the book to slow us down and to divide us.
Through the many precious conversations with peer unionizers of university associations across Canada, we learned to appreciate the value of patience, time and persistence and the need to be graceful also to those (colleagues) who think it doesn’t concern them. Many colleagues, particularly in the well-paid, vocational faculties, choose willfully to ignore this “it”, which is the everywhere tangible manifestation of the restructuring of public institutions and public services through the introduction of financial logics into the modern university. This logic fuels the divide-and-conquer strategy through the introduction of tiered salary and pension schemes which dramatically discriminate between administrators and academics, it provides ‘justifications’ for ever-deeper staff cuts while relentlessly pushing forward encroachments on public speech and academic freedom as the new normal.
Meanwhile, it is important to continue to let one’s gaze wonder to take in and assess parallel political economy changes all around us. We can see, for example, that after a recent regulatory change, anyone – literally anyone living in the US state of Indiana – can scandalize an IU professor’s course outline on a mandatory public database and file a ‘complaint’ if they find the content offensive. What is at stake here? Was this predictable? The right, for example in the state of Texas, of anyone to incriminate women who allegedly have had an abortion after different US States including Texas changed their criminal provisions in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision might still seem like a radical exception. But, that ‘this too shall pass’ is ever more unlikely in the current political climate. And how different is this kind of civil empowerment really from empowering populist thought policing at universities with dramatic consequences for (for now) untenured faculty members? Then, look to Europe, to Germany specifically, where two momentous elections on the Länder level have seriously shaken the landscape. The newly elected, perhaps soon to assume governmental functions party of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has never tried to hide its disdain for and its commitment to eliminate all privileges for gender, inclusiveness or anti-discrimination, and is demanding clear “patriotic” commitments and pledges instead. Who provides, who enforces the standard for such pledges? How can these be made justiciable?
Meanwhile, this is not the time to doom-scroll and distract oneself. The sphere into which we dive in our feeble attempts at escapism are themselves corporate-infested spaces of corrupted public discourses. Captured in our echo chambers of algorithmically targeting ads and ‘posts’, we waste our hamster-like lives away. We love scandal and have no idea what it really means or stands for. We think that “Doge” is behind us, but Muskism surely isn’t. It is the emblem of the structural usurpation of democratic spaces and a stunning array of essentially public, sensitive regulatory functions by corporate actors who continue to elude and evade scrutiny and accountability. They now deeply embedded, not as the masked stormtroopers of distant rogue regimes, but as the warmly embraced collaborators of Western governments all over. The public, governmental reliance in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and beyond, on privately provided ‘web services’, data storage and processing capabilities, and the execution of an increasing range of sovereign functions is a central characteristic of our time. Important political economy analytics of “capture”, outsourcing, public-private partnership etc., fall short of adequately capturing the degree to which private corporate power has assumed sovereign functions today. A new era for political economy research is just beginning, the time for democratic resistance is now.
