Canadian and American Unions Respond to Economic Crisis

Why have Canadian unions fared relatively well in the difficult industrial relations environment of the 1980s, while United States unions, operating in a continentally integrated economy and under a similar legal framework, are in quantitative and qualitative decline? After reviewing the four patterns of peak council response to the economic restructuring of the 1980s, the paper goes on to situate both national union movements, and to examine the historical source of contemporary United States union weakness, in contrast to the strategic sources of contemporary Canadian strength. Dissenting from the fashionable deterministic explanations, which relesate unions to a passive and reactive role, the paper returns to the idea of unions as actors and centres its comparative analysis on the notion of historically cumulative union strategy. The contemporary weakness of United States unions is thus presented as the result of a generation of strategic choices, which together have resulted both in the current anti- union environment and in the paucity of union strategies for defence. Canadian unionism, in contrast, has conserved its political influence and, in so doing, has both blocked the deterioration of the labour relations environment and maintained its own strategic margin of manoeuvre. The paper finishes with a brief questioning of the impact of the Free Trade Agreement on the future strategy of Canadian unions.