Class vs. Special Interest

• Author: Barry Eidlin
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571280
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2015, Vol. 43(2) 181 –211

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571280

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Article

Class vs. Special Interest:

Labor, Power, and Politics

in the United States and

Canada in the Twentieth

Century

Barry Eidlin

Rutgers University–New Brunswick, USA

Abstract

Why are US labor unions so weak? Union decline has had important consequences for

politics, inequality, and social policy. Common explanations cite employment shifts,

public opinion, labor laws, and differences in working class culture and organization.

But comparing the United States with Canada challenges those explanations. After

following US unionization rates for decades, Canadian rates diverged in the 1960s,

and are now nearly three times higher. This divergence was due to different processes

of working class political incorporation. In the United States, labor was incorporated

as an interest group into a labor regime governed by a pluralist idea. In Canada,

labor was incorporated as a class representative into a labor regime governed by a

class idea. This led to a relatively stronger Canadian labor regime that better held

employers in check and protected workers’ collective bargaining rights. As a result,

union density stabilized in Canada while plummeting in the United States.

Keywords

class conflict, trade unions, politics, social movements, labor, organizations

Corresponding Author:

Barry Eidlin, Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, 50 Labor Center Way, New Brunswick,

NJ 08901, USA.

Email: eidlin@work.rutgers.edu

571280PASXXX10.1177/0032329215571280Politics & SocietyEidlin

research-article2015

182 Politics & Society 43(2)

Why are labor unions so weak in the United States? Union density, the percentage of

non-agricultural workers who are covered by union contracts, currently stands at 12.3

percent, and 7.4 percent in the private sector. This is down from a peak of 33.3 percent

in 1954, and is among the lowest rates in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation

and Development (OECD).1

Union density decline has had important consequences for politics, inequality, and

social policy. It has contributed to a dramatic rise in income inequality in recent

decades, and has weakened the ability of working class Americans to shape their lives

at work and to engage politically as citizens.2

Scholars have offered a variety of explanations for US unions’ weakness and decline.

These include structural employment shifts, flagging public opinion of unions, weak

labor laws, hostile employers, individualist national values, the lack of a labor party,

internal union characteristics, Cold War politics, and legacies of racial divisions.3

While many of these explanations are plausible, a comparative focus can help to

adjudicate among them. In this article, I do so by comparing what has happened to

unions in the United States with what has happened to them in Canada. Canada makes

for a good comparison with the United States because of their strong similarities. Both

are “liberal” welfare states. They are each other’s largest trading partner, they share the

world’s largest border, many of the same companies operate in both countries, and

they are one of the few places on earth where many of the same unions operate on both

sides of the border.4

But the two countries differ when it comes to unions. While US union density is

currently 12.3 percent, it is 31.2 percent in Canada—nearly three times higher.5 Such

a major difference between two such similar countries is already striking, but it

becomes even more interesting when placed in historical perspective.

As Figure 1 below shows, union density followed a similar trajectory in both coun-

tries for much of the twentieth century: low and unstable for the first three decades,

expanding dramatically from the 1930s through 1950s, then declining through the

mid-1960s. At that point, we see a stark divergence; union density continued to decline

in the United States, but rebounded in Canada. Although Canadian union density

resumed its decline in the 1980s, it remained far higher than in the United States, and

the decline was less steep. Canada is among the few OECD countries where union

density remains at similar levels to those of the early 1970s.6

Why then, after tracking each other for several decades, did union density diverge

in the United States and Canada starting in the mid-1960s?

Existing explanations cannot fully explain the divergence. Some, like structural

employment shifts and public opinion towards unions, were similar in both countries.

Others, like differences in national values and the structure of ethno-racial divisions,

were constant throughout the period, making it difficult to account for the divergence.

Still others, like the presence/absence of a labor party, different effects of the Cold

War, and differences in labor laws, were important, but what remains unexplained is

how and why these crucial differences emerged.

In this article, I develop an account of US-Canada union density divergence that

addresses these unexplained issues. It focuses on the effects of different processes of

Eidlin 183

working class political incorporation, and how they shaped the complex interaction

between labor militancy, labor policy, and union density. By “political incorporation,”

I refer to the process that moved organized labor into the political sphere. From the

perspective of the state, it marked a shift from viewing labor as a problem to be policed,

to being a constituency to address and administer. From the perspective of labor, it

marked a re-shaping of collective political identities from precarious voluntary group

to legitimate political actor.

In both countries, labor was politically incorporated as a result of struggles in the

1930s and 40s, in response to the crises of the Great Depression and World War II. As

a result of these struggles, US labor was incorporated as an interest group, whereas

Canadian labor was incorporated as a class representative. These different identities

reflected different organizing logics that enabled or constrained labor’s scope of action

in each country. Canadian labor’s role as a class representative fit into a class idea that

broadened and legitimated its scope of action, while US labor’s role as an interest

group fit into a pluralist idea that narrowed and delegitimized its scope of action.

Table 1 summarizes these different organizing logics.

At an organizational level, US labor became more dependent on finding sympa-

thetic political allies with whom to strike bargains, while Canadian labor learned the

Union Density

197019601950194019301920 1980 1990 2000 2010

Year

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

United States

United States

Canada

Canada

Country

Figure 1. Union Density in the United States vs. Canada, 1911–2011.

Sources: See appendix.