Canada's Employment Equity Acts and the communications industry: effective social regulation in a neo-liberal era.

"Canada's Royal Commission on Equality and Employment drafted in the early 1980s and the two versions of the Employment Equity Act it later inspired can be understood within this shift towards social regulation as defined by Nementz et. al. To appreciate how Canadian corporations are now mandated to achieve progress towards employment equity, it is critical to its history, its incarnations and its impact on corporate Canada. Curiously, while there was a sizeable amount of quantitative and qualitative research endorsing legislated employment equity written prior to the initial Act, there is only a handful of academic research evaluating its success. Academic space devoted to employment equity has existed mainly as a sidebar in a more extensive analysis of other policies such as the key works of Judy Fudge, Anver Saloojee, Patricia McDermott and Annis May Timpson which appraise employment equity, but as a benchmark against which to compare to other policies such as child care and pay equity. Through a literature review of the primary and secondary documents, which respectively shaped and critiqued the Act's two manifestations as well as case studies of communications companies, I will show that this legislation - an example of social regulation in a neo-liberal era - was particularly effective once an audit component was added."--Page 3.