Larry Savage

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Brock University

Despite achieving substantial contract gains, including significant wage increases, the 2023 pattern agreement reached between Unifor—Canada’s largest private sector union—and Detroit Three automakers was met with mixed reactions from union members, with particularly low support from skilled trades and more senior members. This study reveals how in...

This article explores union responses to workplace-based covid-19 vaccine mandates in Canada. Specifically, the authors examine the complex interplay of factors that drove unions to adopt their respective positions on vaccine mandates and to frame those positions in particular ways for the benefit of their members and the wider public. Interviews w...

In the decades following the Second World War, autoworkers were at the forefront of the labour movement. Their union mobilized members to rally in the streets for social change and make their voices heard at election time. But by the turn of this century, the Canadian Auto Workers union had begun to pursue a more defensive political direction. Shi...

This article discusses the dangers of voluntarily substituting binding interest arbitration for the right to strike, with a focus on Ontario teacher unions.

This fourth edition of Building a Better World offers a comprehensive introductory overview of Canada's labour movement. The book explores why workers form unions; assesses their organization and democratic potential; examines issues related to collective bargaining, grievances and strike activity; charts the historical development of labour unions...

Given the documented advantages of unionization, why don’t more workers support, let alone join, unions? This article presents findings from the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Niagara (PEPiN) study as they relate to precarious work and the union advantage. While precariously-employed workers in Canada’s Niagara Region enjoyed a demonstrable un...

SOCIOLOGY FROM TURKEY Turkish Sociology: Challenges and Possibilities by N. Beril Özer Tekin, Doğuş University, Turkey, and member of ESA Research Network on Sociology of Health and Illness (RN16) Sociology in Turkey has a very dynamic character, and some specific issues and areas of discussion. In this regard, civil society, politics, policies,...

This article seeks to explain both convergence and divergence in Ontario teacher union electoral strategy. After coalescing around a strategy of anti-Progressive Conservative (PC) strategic voting beginning with the 1999 provincial election, Ontario's major teachers' unions developed an electoral alliance with the McGuinty Liberals designed to adva...

This article explores the effects of COVID-19 on collective bargaining in Canadian universities. Specifically, the research considers how the pandemic created both crises and opportunities for faculty associations, primarily through a case study of the Brock University Faculty Association’s 2020 round of bargaining. More broadly, the article examin...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to re-establish the labour movement’s political capacity to exert collective power in ways that foster greater opportunity and equality for working-class people has taken on a greater sense of urgency. Understanding the strategic political possibilities and challenges facing the Canadian labour movemen...

This article maps the major changes taking place in academic work within the broader context of the neoliberalisation of universities. Recognising the great variability in the form and pace of neoliberalisation across institutions and national contexts, the article identifies a set of features and indicators to aid in the comparative assessment of...

This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non...

This article explores the role of interunion conflict in the rise and evolution of faculty unionism in Canada. We argue that competition and tension between the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in the early 1970s played a key role in driving professors’ support for the certificatio...

This case study of a union campaign to organize personal trainers and fitness instructors at GoodLife Fitness, the world’s fourth-largest fitness chain, is used to highlight the challenges and possibilities of organizing precarious workers in the multi-billion-dollar fitness industry. Drawing on the broader literature on union organizing and strate...

This study of Canadian university teacher militancy explores the dynamics and strategies of resistance in the neoliberal university. While responses to the neoliberal reorientation of higher education are complex, uneven, and sometimes contradictory, the authors demonstrate how neoliberalization has fostered greater conflict, more militancy, more s...

This report presents an analysis of key findings from a survey completed by gym and fitness club workers in Ontario.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Canadian unions have scored a number of important Supreme Court victories, securing constitutional rights to picket, bargain collectively, and strike. But how did the labour movement, historically hostile to judicial intervention in labour relations, come to embrace Charter-based legal activism as a first...

This article presents the findings of a survey of unionized professors and professional librarians at a public university in Southern Ontario to examine their views on the prospect and desirability of “right-to-work” legislation and “paycheck protection” laws. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to assess the level of opposition to such leg...

This study examines the views of full-time unionized university faculty at four primarily undergraduate universities in Ontario, Canada, on a broad range of issues related to postsecondary education, faculty associations, and the labor movement. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to better understand the views of unionized professors regar...

Larry Savage et Dennis Soron nous dévoilent dans cet article que la question du nucléaire n’est pas spécifiquement française. Il se produit autour de cet outil un attachement assez particulier, qu’on trouve dans peu d’autres domaines, mis à part peut-être la terre. Les auteurs montrent aussi que les réserves sont ancrées dans la perspective bien co...

The shifting provincial-municipal landscape in Ontario, which has positioned local government as central to the neoliberal project, has created both strategic opportunities and risks for organized labour. This article explores how the provincial state has used downloading and neoliberal municipal restructuring to shift the balance of class forces i...

Socialist Cowboy is a political biography detailing the life and activism of longtime New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos, one of the most colourful and controversial political personalities in the history of Ontario politics. Throughout his illustrious twenty-three year career as a member of the Ontario legislature, Kormos’s unapologetic commitment to d...

Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews and analysis of relevant primary documents, this article explores the 1996 unionization of full-time academic faculty at Brock University, a public and primarily undergraduate university in southern Ontario, Canada. The case study examines both the impetus for unionization and the strategies employed by th...

From factory workers in Welland to retail workers in St. Catharines, from hospitality workers in Niagara Falls to migrant farm workers in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Union Power showcases the role of working people in the Niagara region. Charting the development of the region's labour movement from the early nineteenth century to the present, Patrias and...

Nuclear energy is one of the predominant false solutions being offered up by contemporary capitalism's power elite in a futile effort to reconcile the goal of environmental sustainability with limitless growth, profit, and accumulation. Incorporating environmental needs into the economy ultimately means not only developing new eco-friendly products...

This article seeks to engage Jansen and Young’s recent research on the impact of changing federal campaign finance laws on the relationship between organized labour and the New Democratic Party. Jansen and Young use models from mainstream comparative politics to argue that unions and the NDP retain links due to a “shared ideological commitment” to...

This article engages in a comparative analysis of the U.S. and Canadian labor movements’ attitudes toward nuclear power, in both historical and contemporary periods, with a view to explaining the divergent policy positions on nuclear power adopted by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the AFL-CIO, respectively. The contrasting views of the AFL-...

The longstanding political alliance between the Canadian labor movement and the New Democratic Party (NDP) has experienced new stresses in recent years. Whereas the NDP was widely considered the political arm of the labor movement during the Keynesian post-war period, under neoliberalism, the relationship between most unions and the NDP has become...

In the wake of a series of prolabor Supreme Court decisions in Canada, the mantra of “workers' rights as human rights” has gained unprecedented attention in the Canadian labor movement. This article briefly reviews the Canadian labor movement's recent history with the Supreme Court before arguing that elite-driven judicial strategies, advocated by...

The Quebec labour movement's decision to withdraw its support for Canada's, federal system in the 1970s and instead embrace the sovereignist option was unquestionably linked to the intersection of class and nation in Quebec. In this period, unions saw the sovereignist project as part of a larger socialist or social democratic societal project. Beca...

On 13 November 2006, a record number of labour-endorsed candidates were elected to municipal councils and local school boards in Ontario's munici-pal elections. Although the labour movement's foray into municipal politics was not altogether new, 1 the 2006 elections in Ontario represented a strategic shift in the political priorities of organized l...

Often dismissed as the political preoccupation of the chattering classes, constitutional politics has nonetheless had an immense impact on working people in English Canada and Québec. Constitutional questions have played an important role in dividing workers along regional and linguistic lines, and divisions within the labour movement have closely...