Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

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Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada - by Barry Eidlin

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Barry Eidlin
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Introduction
On February 14,2014, workers at a Volkswagen (VW) auto assembly
plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 712 to 626 against joining the
United Auto Workers (UAW) union. The defeat was the latest in a series of
failed attempts by the UAW to organize foreign-owned “transplants”in
the US South, going back decades (Minchin 2017; Silvia 2016). It was
a particularly stinging rebuke for then-UAW President Bob King, who had
staked his legacy on the transplants. “If we don’t organize these transna-
tionals, I don’t think there’s a long-term future for the UAW,”he warned
in 2011 (Thomas 2011).
This time was supposed to be different. The UAW had secured an
agreement from Volkswagen management to remain neutral in the elec-
tion campaign. In previous organizing drives at other manufacturers,
management had waged fierce campaigns to convince workers not to
unionize. Without the employer trying to influence the outcome, UAW
leaders thought that workers would be much more likely to join the union
(Brooks 2016; Greenhouse 2014). But those leaders were wrong –the
UAW lost.
Anti-union observers quickly cheered the result, suggesting that it
showed just how obsolete and unpopular unions are today. “If UAW
union officials cannot win when the odds are so stacked in their favor,
perhaps they should re-evaluate the product they are selling to workers,”
opined National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix
(Woodall 2014). For their part, UAW officials blamed a campaign of
outside interference led by Tennessee’s political establishment, including
Governor Bill Haslam and US Senator Bob Corker. They threatened to
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withhold state subsidies if workers unionized, and intimated that
Volkswagen would only guarantee new production if workers rejected
the UAW.
The politicians were helped by Washington-based anti-union groups
like Mix’s organization and the Grover Norquist–backed Center for
Worker Freedom. These groups funded sophisticated media outreach
and backed anti-union workers in the plant. Their campaign linked the
UAW to the Obama administration –unpopular in Republican-
dominated Tennessee –and blamed it for the disappearance of
US manufacturing jobs. Additionally, despite VW upper management’s
neutrality pledge, lower-level managers actively supported the anti-union
campaign (DePillis 2014; Elk 2014).
Analysts more sympathetic to the union recognized that outside inter-
ference contributed to the drive’s defeat, but they also criticized the
UAW’s own strategy. They highlighted provisions in the neutrality agree-
ment with VW that hampered the UAW’s ability to organize –including
a ban on union house visits, a key tactic that organizers use to build union
support and inoculate against management attacks. UAW organizers also
made little effort to build community support. Instead, they relied on VW
management’s willingness to “partner”with the union. As King said in
response to the anti-union campaign in Chattanooga,
Our philosophy is, we want to work in partnership with companies to succeed ...
With every company that we work with, we’re concerned about competitiveness ...
[W]e are showing that companies that succeed by this cooperation can have higher
wages and benefits because of the joint success ...What I hope the American public
understands is that those people who attack this are attacking labor-management
cooperation. They don’t believe in workers and management working together
(quoted in DePillis 2014).
Such rhetoric may have softened management opposition, but it left the
union vulnerable to charges that it was too soft on management –that
“the UAW has already sold us out,”as anti-union VW worker Mike Jarvis
put it (quoted in Pare 2014).
UAW leaders appealed the election results with the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB), citing the outside interference from state politi-
cians and Washington think tanks as improper. But they withdrew their
appeal just as hearings were about to get underway, amid concerns that
those charged with interfering would obstruct the legal process and drag
out the appeal for years, defeating the union through endless delay.
Instead, they cut their losses. “The UAW is ready to put February’s tainted
election in the rearview mirror and instead focus on advocating for new
2Introduction

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Barry Eidlin
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jobs and economic investment in Chattanooga,”King said (quoted in
Becker and Woodall 2014).
The city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, lies about 1,400 miles, or 2,200 kilo-
meters, northwest of Chattanooga, across the US–Canada border from
North Dakota. In early 2015, a group of workers at a branch of the iconic
Tim Hortons coffee chain in the city’s Wolseley neighborhood connected
with a union called Workers United (WU), and started talking about
unionizing their workplace. They were concerned about low wages,
unpredictable scheduling, and management favoritism.
Management soon caught on. They responded by organizing
a mandatory meeting of all thirty-five branch workers, also known as
a“captive audience meeting.”While franchise owner Kamta Roy Singh
was at the front of the room, he told those assembled that Tim Hortons’
head office had instructed him to hold the meeting. In it, he leveled a series of
threats against the workers, including that he would shut down the location
if they unionized. After the meeting, the general manager took aside one of
the workers and fired her for talking to a union representative.
In response, WU filed an Unfair Labour Practice charge with the
Manitoba Labour Relations Board and reached out to allies at the
Manitoba Federation of Labour, the Winnipeg Labour Council, and
the University of Winnipeg Students’Association. Together, they
launched a public campaign to get the fired worker reinstated.
Management quickly caved under the pressure and reinstated the worker
within weeks.
In June 2015, the Manitoba Labour Relations Board issued a ruling that
found franchisee Singh guilty of several labor law violations. As a remedy,
the board issued a consent order granting WU “discretionary certification,”
meaning that the board automatically recognized them as the workers’
union. Additionally, the board awarded the previously fired worker $1,500
to compensate for emotional stress. The ruling made the Wolseley restaurant
one of only a handful of unionized Tim Hortons locations across Canada
(Kirbyson 2015;Nesbitt2015; Workers United Canada Council 2015).
After nine months of tough negotiations, WU managed to negotiate
afirst contract with Singh. The win at the Wolseley Tim Hortons sparked
interest among other food service workers in Winnipeg. WU has since
gone on to unionize workers at two KFC/Taco Bell restaurants in the city,
as well as a second Tim Hortons location (Fowlie 2017; Kostuch Media
2016;2017).
Introduction 3

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Both stories offer insights into the challenges that workers and unions
face in the United States and Canada today. On the US side, the UAW’s
failure in Chattanooga shows just how dire organized labor’s situation
is. Organizing a union has never been easy, but the obstacles that
US workers face today are truly formidable. Staunch employer opposi-
tion is a given, meaning that workers who try to organize a union often
put their livelihoods on the line (Bronfenbrenner 2009). Even in cases
where employers agree to remain neutral, as with VW, other employers
andpoliticiansmaystepintoleadtheanti-unioncharge–especially in
the South, a region of the United States where unions have never estab-
lished a strong foothold.
Once workers have mustered the courage to confront their employer
and start on a unionization campaign, they face a thicket of legal regula-
tions that, while originally intended to facilitate unionization, now create
opportunities for employers to thwart workers’organizing efforts
(Friedman 2015; Rogers 1990). As with the UAW’s election appeals in
Chattanooga, many workers and unions decide to cut their losses and
move on when faced with these legal obstacles.
Even as legal hurdles and employer hostility to unionizing persist,
unions themselves have struggled to respond to the challenge. Some, like
the UAW, have sought to dodge the anti-union onslaught by pitching
a message of “cooperation”with management, even as management
seeks to avoid unions entirely. Others have plowed resources into devel-
oping innovative organizing strategies (Bronfenbrenner and Hickey
2004). The latter have produced some results, but not enough to turn
the tide.
As a result, US unions are in crisis. Today, barely one in ten workers
holds a union card. In the private sector, that number is barely one in
twenty. This is down from one in three workers overall in the 1950s, and is
the lowest level seen since the early days of the Great Depression (Carter
et al. 2006; Hirsch and Macpherson 2011).
On the Canadian side, the situation is challenging, but not quite as
bleak. As the Tim Hortons campaign shows, Canadian workers seeking to
unionize often face stiff employer resistance, just like their
US counterparts. And, as in the United States, they also have to navigate
bureaucratic legal procedures to exercise their labor rights. Although
some Canadian unions are committed to organizing, the overall level of
commitment is uneven (Kumar and Schenk 2006).
The main difference between Canada and the United States is that in
Canada, the labor laws still work. Employers like Kamta Singh may
4Introduction

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threaten and fire workers for trying to organize, but they pay the price
for breaking the law. In Singh’s case, that meant being forced to com-
pensate the fired worker and bargain with the union. By comparison,
when the UAW appealed the Chattanooga election, those they charged
with illegal interference openly vowed to flout any subpoenas and gum
up the proceedings. “Everyone understands that after a clear defeat, the
UAW is trying to create a sideshow, so we have filed a motion to revoke
these baseless subpoenas,”said Senator Corker’s chief of staff. “Neither
Senator Corker nor his staff will attend the hearing”(quoted in
Williams 2014). There was little that either the state or the union
coulddotostopthem(Brooks2016).
This is not to say that the situation for labor is great in Canada.
The thirty-five Tim Hortons workers in Winnipeg may have won their
union, but only after a tough fight. Meanwhile, the chain as a whole
remains mostly nonunion, as does most of the Canadian service sector
(Doorey 2013). The community and labor mobilization in defense of the
workers’organizing campaign was an important gesture of solidarity, but
such mobilization is nowhere near the scale necessary to get unions back
on track.
Compared to the United States though, Canadian unions are in much
better shape. Overall union density –the percentage of nonagricultural
workers who are union members –currently stands at 28.4percent in
Canada, nearly three times higher than in the United States (Hirsch and
Macpherson 2011; Statistics Canada 2016). Canadian unions have taken
some hits, but they have managed to hold steady.
Why is this? As much as Canadians insist on their “not-Americanness,”
and as much as Americans remain unaware of their neighbor to the north,
thetwocountrieshavemuchincommon(Lipset1989). Yet when it comes to
unions and the broader climate for worker organizing, the differences are
vast.
But US and Canadian union density rates have not always been so
different. Figure 0.1shows how union density changed in the United
States and Canada between 1911 and 2016. We see that prior to the
1960s, union density looked remarkably similar in both countries.
Indeed, it was often higher in the United States than in Canada. It was
only in the mid-1960s that union density diverged, declining in the United
States and stabilizing in Canada.
Why then, after tracking each other for decades, did union density
diverge in the United States and Canada starting in the mid-1960s? That
is the question at the heart of this book.
Introduction 5

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why unions (still) matter
But first we should ask a more basic question: why does it matter that
US unions are in worse shape than Canada’s? In an era when unions every-
where seem to be in decline and many dismiss the very idea of trade unions as
antiquated, focusing attention on the state of organized labor may seem
hopelessly out of date. Why bother with what looks like a dying institution?
At a fundamental level, unions matter because they powerfully influ-
ence workers’everyday lives. On average, unionized workers earn more
and are more likely to have adequate health insurance, pension coverage,
paid leave, and other benefits than their nonunionized counterparts doing
similar work (Buchmueller, DiNardo, and Valletta 2002; Budd and Na
2000; Fang and Verma 2002; Freeman and Medoff 1984; Murray 2004).
This is particularly the case in countries like the United States and Canada,
where many social benefits are provided through employers rather than
the government, and collective bargaining is largely done at the firm level.
This means that contracts negotiated between employers and the unions
representing their workers apply only to those specificfirms and work-
places, which ties the negotiated wages, benefits, and work rules closely to
those specificfirms and workplaces.
1911 1921 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2011
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
Year
Union Density
United States Canada
figure 0.1 Union density, United States and Canada, 1911–2016
Source: See Appendix A
6Introduction

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But union density has important implications even for those who are
not union members. Unions play a key role in reducing economic inequal-
ity throughout entire societies. Inequality has been on the rise across the
industrialized world for the past three decades, but the magnitude of that
growth has differed considerably across countries. Using data from the
World Wealth and Income Database compiled by Piketty and his colla-
borators, Figure 0.2shows that inequality in both the United States and
Canada, defined as the share of total income accruing to the top 1percent
of earners, has been above the average for available industrialized coun-
tries. However, the increase has been dramatically higher in the United
States. The share of income going to the top 1percent in the United States
grew by 125 percent between 1980 and 2015 (from 8.18 percent to
18.39 percent), as compared to 52 percent in Canada (from 8.06 percent
to 12.22 percent in 2010)and58 percent for available industrialized
countries (from 6.43 percent to 10.16 percent in 2013).
1
0%
5%
10%
Income Shares of the Top 1 Percent
15%
20%
25%
1913 1923 1933 1943 1953 1963 1973 1983 1993 2003 2013
Year
United States Canada Average of Selected Industrialized Countries
figure 0.2 Income shares of the top 1percent in the United States, Canada, and
selected industrialized countries, 1913–2015
Source: World Wealth and Income Database, http://www.wid.world
1
Industrialized countries for which data are available include Australia, Canada, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United
States.
Why Unions (Still) Matter 7

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Much of that difference can be attributed to differences in union
strength. Existing research shows that higher unionization rates are asso-
ciated with lower levels of economic inequality (Alderson and Nielsen
2002; Alderson, Beckfield, and Nielsen 2005; Atkinson 2003; Western
and Rosenfeld 2011). This is due to unions’ability to “decommodify”
labor: they can limit the degree to which workers’wages and working
conditions are set by brute market forces, in the same way that the price of
commodities such as oil or corn are set (Esping-Andersen 1990). Given
sufficient union density, this effect extends beyond unionized workplaces,
such that unions can set standards for wages and working conditions
throughout the labor market.
As union density declines, so too does unions’wage-setting capa-
city. Thus, Western and Rosenfeld (2011)find that union density
decline accounts for roughly one-third of the increasing gap in
US income inequality between the top and bottom quintiles among
males over the past forty years, similar to the effect of growing gaps in
educational attainment in the same time period. Using different meth-
odologies, Card et al.’s(2004) comparative study of the United States,
United Kingdom, and Canada shows that unions continue to play
a key role in reducing inequality for male workers, and that differences
in union density explain a large portion of cross-country differences in
male wage inequality. And in a study of twenty advanced economies
from the early 1980sto2010, International Monetary Fund econo-
mists found that “a10 percentage point decline in union density is
associated with a 5percent increase in the top 10 percent income
share”(Jaumotte and Osorio Buitron 2015:17).
Stronger unions also have a stronger political voice, meaning they can
fight for more redistributive social policies and regulations to check
employers’power (Rosenfeld 2014). Globally, this power is often exerted
through relations that unions have with labor-based or socialist political
parties. While party and union interests are not always perfectly aligned,
and party-union relations can be strained, unions that are numerically
stronger can generally exert greater political power. Existing research
comparing US and Canadian social policy highlights the role that stronger
unions and their links to a labor-based political party, the New
Democratic Party (NDP), play in explaining Canada’s more extensive
set of protective policies, including its universal public health-care system,
more generous unemployment insurance and pensions, and more equita-
ble education and community planning policies (Chen 2015; Maioni
1998; McCarthy 2017; Zuberi 2006). Union strength thus has important
8Introduction

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consequences for the shape of the political and policy landscape more
broadly.
Beyond questions of dollars and cents and particular policies, stronger
unions make for a stronger democracy. It is workers, often organized into
unions, who have pushed to expand democratic rights and notions of
“social citizenship,”usually by creating disruption and social instability
to which political elites had to respond (Ahmed 2013; Marshall 1992;
Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). And as one of the only
types of membership organizations run not only for working-class people,
but by them, unions offer workers the opportunity to develop the con-
fidence, leadership, and organizational skills necessary to be politically
active (Levi et al. 2009). In this sense, they can serve as “schools for
democracy”that incorporate working-class voices into the existing poli-
tical system (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman 1956; Sinyai 2006). Research
shows that there is a lack of working-class political representation in the
United States, and that this skews the political landscape in favor of the
wealthy and powerful (Carnes 2013). Unions can provide a fertile training
ground for working-class political leaders, and where they are stronger,
we find more working-class political representation (Carnes 2015).
Beyond “regular politics,”some unions have been vehicles for pushing
a more transformative political vision (Ahlquist and Levi 2013;
Gourevitch 2014; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003). Union decline in the
United States has thus narrowed the scope of political debate, as well as
the range of actors contributing to that debate. By contrast, while it is
important to acknowledge the real limits of labor’s political power in
Canada (Ross and Savage 2012), the combination of a stronger labor
movement and a labor-based political party (the NDP) has created an
organizational infrastructure for developing working-class leaders and
keeping unions in closer dialogue with social movements and a broader
left politics (Bernard 1994; Schenk and Bernard 1992).
In the workplace, unions don’t just mean higher pay and benefits for
workers. They also allow workers to make their voice heard on the job
(Freeman and Medoff 1984). They can offer recourse and respite from the
pettiness and arbitrary treatment that far too many workers experience far
too often at the hands of management. This is why workers often cite the
need for dignity and respect on the job even more than pay or benefits as
their primary motivation to unionize (Bronfenbrenner et al. 1998; Forrest
2000).
Unions provide voice by creating mechanisms at work for exercising
and defending many of the basic rights we take for granted as citizens in
Why Unions (Still) Matter 9

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a democracy, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, due process
and equal protection under the law, and more. Without unions, workers
have to check these rights at the door when they show up to work
every day (Anderson 2017; Edwards 1979; Jacoby 1985). While these
rights do exist in some nonunion workplaces, they are there at manage-
ment’s discretion and are subject to change without notice (Edelman
1990). To be sure, just as the reality of political democracy often falls
far short of its promise, the same can be said of efforts to build workplace
democracy. But whereas citizens in a democracy are at least theoretically
given opportunities to have a say in politics and society, union decline has
meant that many workers have no means of implementing, let alone
improving, mechanisms for articulating and defending their rights at
work (Hyman 2016; Summers 1979).
Far from being an arcane statistic tracking the decline of an antiquated
institution, then, union density shapes broader social trends affecting
inequality and democracy. Understanding why union density changes,
and why it varies across countries, helps explain a lot about the shape of
politics and social policy in those countries.
explaining us–canada union divergence
Unions are still crucial social institutions. But the question remains: why
did union density diverge in the United States and Canada? Many others
have sought to answer this question. Common explanations point to
cross-border differences in the structure of employment, worker and
employer attitudes toward unions, labor policies, political institutions,
national values, internal union cultures, and the structure of racial
divisions.
As I will show in Part I, these explanations are incomplete.
The argument I advance in this book is that US–Canada union density
divergence was the outcome of political struggles organized by parties –
a process of political articulation (De Leon, Desai, and Tuğal 2015).
Specifically, it resulted from different ruling party responses to worker
and farmer unrest during the Great Depression and World War II.
My core argument is that in Canada, the outcome of these struggles
embedded what I call “the class idea”more deeply in policies, institutions,
and practices than in the United States, where class interests were reduced
to “special interests.”By this I mean that in Canada, politics and policy
recognized class divisions –and the power imbalances underlying them –
more than in the United States. There, politics and policy delegitimized
10 Introduction