Larry Savage

Contemporary Party-Union Relations in Canada

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 more tactical and less cohesive. This article surveys contemporary party-union relationships in Canada, at both the federal and provincial levels, with a view to demonstrating that weakening party-union relations are rooted in larger macro-economic and political transformations and are shaped by factors related to region and language.

Organized Labor, Nuclear Power, and Environmental Justice: A Comparative Analysis of the Canadian and U.S. Labor Movements

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-CIO and CLC, it is argued, arise not simply from differing levels of commitment to the principles of social unionism, but from a more complex mesh of ideological, pragmatic, and institutional factors related to union-party relationships and other important differences pertaining to the culture, membership composition, organizational maintenance requirements, and decision-making power bases in both labor organizations.

Organizing the Ivory Tower The Unionization of the Brock University Faculty Association

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 the faculty association in support of certification with a view to demonstrating how discourses of professionalism and collegiality can be challenged, subverted, and redeployed by academics intent on organizing, mobilizing, and ultimately winning support for unionization.

Labor Confronts Austerity An Introduction

Organized labor and working people around the globe are experiencing sustained political and economic attacks from governments of all political stripes. From the global economic forces precipitating an international race to the bottom, to capital’s ability to tame those few governments willing to reject neoliberal imperatives, to the disorganization of unions and division and resentment within the working class, unions around the world are under attack. Throughout the European Union, hundreds of thousands of workers have had their wages frozen or have been thrown out of work to pay for an economic crisis not of their making. In the Global South, International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity measures continue to foster anti-union labor law reforms and dramatic reductions in public spending in the name of “flexibility” and global competitiveness, despite their inability to spur sustained economic development. In much of Asia, including China and Bangladesh, unprecedented and militant strike actions and protests have erupted in response to increased unemployment and intensified exploitation at work that have resulted from employer responses to the global economic crisis. In the North American context, strategically capitalizing on the electorate’s economic anxieties, the Tea Party movement’s stunning electoral success in the 2010 midterm elections and the election of a Conservative majority government in Canada in 2011 have set the stage for an all-out legislative attack on unions. In Wisconsin, ironically the first state to allow public-sector collective bargaining, and in Michigan, the cradle of American industrial unionism, the recent adoption of antiunion “right-to-work” legislation has justifiably set off alarm bells for workers’ organizations far and wide. While attacks on the labor movement are certainly not new, the most recent round of austerity measures, unleashed in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession, has been especially challenging for union members. In its simplest form, austerity

Assessing the Potential Impact of Labor Law Reforms on University Faculty Findings from a Midsized Public University in Ontario

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 legislative initiatives among unionized faculty, and, second, to determine the extent to which the passage of such laws would undermine the dues base of the faculty union. Based on the findings of a mixed methods survey, we found that a strong majority of the university professors and professional librarians surveyed were opposed to “right-to-work” and “paycheck protection” laws and that their passage would not deter them from paying dues or authorizing expenditures for political action.

ORGANIZED LABOUR AND THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPE OF LOCAL POLITICS IN ONTARIO

Abstract 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 in local politics and provides analytical context against which to examine organized labour’s attempts to pursue progressive policy outputs in this new environment.

Book Review: “They’re Bankrupting Us!” and 20 Other Myths about UnionsFletcherBillJr. “They’re Bankrupting Us!” and 20 Other Myths about Unions. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. 200 pages.

rhetoric and reality are too often indistinguishable. Thus, for the labor educator, the critical steps from knowledge to understanding to action are left unexplored. I would have liked to see more direction, analysis, and discussion of how various conceptions of work fit together or conflict, and how the interests of various classes are served by particular conceptions of work. I wanted a deeper view of how concrete changes in the nature of work are analyzed and understood. Budd’s book gives a lot but leaves me wanting much more.

15.00 (paper).

Over the past several years, there has been a gradual yet perceptible shift in the way that economic and political elites in the advanced capitalist world engage with environmental problems such as climate change. In the face of mounting public concern over global warming and an ever-solidifying scientific consensus as to its origins and dire future consequences, a stance of outright denial and inaction has become increasingly untenable. Consequently, mainstream government and business leaders have sought to take ownership of the issue, acknowledging its existence while containing and defusing its radical implications, and setting forth ways of responding to it that pose no challenge to prevailing economic interests and prerogatives. Indeed, as John Bellamy Foster (2002, 92) has argued, global warming has been increasingly framed in public debate not as a crisis requiring fundamental social transformation, but as a discrete problem amenable to ‘‘magic bullet’’ solutions that ‘‘hold out the possibility of environmental improvement with the least effect on the smooth working of the capitalist machine.’’ Far from posing a challenge to the dynamics of a corporate-dominated economy premised on endless economic expansion, such solutions promise to quicken the capitalist treadmill by creating opportunities for the profitable exploitation of new technologies, market exchange mechanisms, and a burgeoning range of ‘‘eco-friendly’’ goods and services.

Organized Labor and the Politics of Nuclear Energy: The Case of the Canadian Nuclear Workers Council

Both campaigns serve very similar functions for the groups they represent. Both are organized to defend and resuscitate people who come to symbolize their communities in the mass media and to criticize the moral systems of the law and the media. Antilynching campaigns are “defense campaigns” for individuals who do not receive trials, and, like labor defenders, anti-lynching activists compile lists of atrocities performed against their people. In the process of shaping the defense of the labor leader, the rankand-file organizer, or the anonymous Black person killed by a racist mob, both types of “defense campaigns” assert the value and strength of their own people, their own ideas, and their own movements, and they create a popular history of America as a struggle between forces of repressive terror and heroic defiance. (p. 15)