Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement (review)

Many who read this book will feel uncomfortable with how unions and the working-class movement are portrayed, but few will disagree with Camfield’s assessment of the crisis the labour movement faces. Given this reality, the message Camfield brings is important: unions are “necessary” to the success of a working-class movement, yet today they are “profoundly inadequate.” The inadequacies of unions in the face of corporate power are evident in major conflicts taking place even as I write this review. In St. Thomas, Ontario, 1,200 Ford workers and caw members are losing their jobs. Once the company decided that the Ford St. Thomas plant was redundant, the union simply lacked the weapons to launch an effective resistance to this decision. In Hamilton, U.S. Steel has locked out its workers, members of usw Local 1005, for nearly a year, for demanding major changes to their pension rights. While the effort to resist management demands is to be applauded, the company has just returned to the bargaining table with basically the same offer it made at the beginning of the conflict. These are real signs of the very crisis that this book seeks to explore: Why doesn’t the Canadian labour movement feel much like a movement, and what can be done to restore the labour movement as an agent of change for working people?

The raw material for this book comes from Camfield’s own experience working with unions and with other components of the working-class movement, plus from a number of targeted interviews with labour leaders and activists. While there is some discussion of the academic literature in this field, it is not the dominant focus of the book. The end result is a rich and compelling account of what is happening within unions in Canada and Quėbec, and a detailed agenda for a new kind of working-class movement. This should be read by anyone concerned with the future of unions in Canada and Quėbec and would be a useful text in a union course or an introductory university course on unions.

The first section describes the different components of the working-class movement, focusing mainly on formal unions, but also discussing some of the informal and non-union components of the movement. Chapter One begins with an overview of unions and collective bargaining in Canada. It tells the familiar story of unions as enforcers of contracts, the growing distance between union officials and the rank and file, the weakening of working-class militancy and the growing inability of unions to defend their members’ interests.

Chapter Three looks at life inside a union, examining the role of staff and issues of union democracy. Camfield lists numerous problems with how unions are organized and how government legislation limits their capacity to represent their members. While few of these concerns are new, together they give substance to the claim that unions are in crisis. Of profound importance is the observation that, despite their relatively democratic structures, unions find it difficult to tolerate internal debate and dissent. Organizing union activity around defending a contract and sectional interests limits the capacity of unions to act as broader agents of the working class or to pursue class goals.

Having identified many of the problems within unions, the volume goes on to explore how we got to this state of affairs and what we might do to improve the situation. The rise of “responsible unionism” after World War II narrowed the focus of unions to collective bargaining and limited their ability to act in solidarity with other workers. The inability to act collectively has been compounded by the disappearance of spaces where workers can gather to exchange ideas, what Camfield refers to as the “infrastructure of dissent.” The end result is a working-class movement both unwilling and unable to challenge neoliberalism. Nor does Camfield believe that the current New Democratic Party might offer a solution, as the party has increasingly come to accept the status quo in...