Camfield, David. 2011. Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement. Halifax: Fernwood. ISBN 978-1-55266-416-2. Paperback: 19.95 CAD. Pages: 160.
Reviewed by Stephanie Ross
York University

In Canadian Labour in Crisis, David Camfield offers a bracingly honest and accessible look at the labour movement’s current impasse. Grounded in the conviction that working people’s movements are central to greater social and economic equality and the development of human capacities beyond that envisioned by profit-driven capitalism, Camfield argues that union renewal, the “attempt to energize the movement in its current form” is not enough. Rather, “sweeping changes that would reinvent the movement” are called for (6-7). Combining overviews of academic literature and political commentarywith interviews with movement leaders, staff and activists – impressive for such a short volume – Camfield gives voice to many labour activists’ frustrations with unions’ inability to halt a long-term process of decay. He also seeks to articulate the means of the movement’s reinvention.

Camfield goes beyond the union renewal literature’s typical empirical indicators – sinking or stagnant union density or organizing rates – and provides an unflinchingly comprehensive (if dismal) picture of union decline. The union movement is revealed to be a very sick patient indeed. In the workplace, unions’ bargaining power has been diminished. Although the “union advantage” – the premium in wages and benefits union members earn compared to their non-union counterparts – has been maintained, it has actually become a source of resentment for many workers outside union structures. The decline in unions’ economic power and public esteem combine to make organizing new members exceedingly difficult. Instead, unions frequently pursue already-organized union members, whether through mergers or inter-union competitions, to cope with membership (and hence financial) crises. In the political sphere, despite much energy put into lobbying and electoral mobilization of various kinds, unions’ influence over policy decisions has waned, even where labour-friendly governments are in power. Other forms of extra-parliamentary political action are also on the decline. Add to this the atrophy of internal democratic life, a crisis in membership participation, and the narrowing of debate and contestation within unions, which makes the search for effective solutions all the more difficult.

Camfield’s diagnosis of this breakdown in unions’ capacities for resistance and socio-economic transformation has five elements, a complex of unfavourable external conditions and the consequences of choices made in both the past and the present. First, beginning in the 1940s, an exceedingly narrow conception of unions’ mandate, constituency and strategic toolkit was institutionalized in both law and union practice, marginalizing other modes of worker self-organization and the potentials they carried. Second, the broader social and cultural supports for vibrant, politically informed, pluralistic and solidaristic working-class communities have eroded. Third, radical changes wrought by the neoliberal restructuring of late 20th century capitalist accumulation and state regulation severely undermined the material basis of 20th century union forms. Fourth, left organizations outside the unions, both socialist and social democratic, have also weakened since the 1970s, no longer able to organize internal union opposition or sustain inter-union activist networks. Finally, union leaders have made poor choices at crucial moments when responding to these negative political-economic conditions. Many union leaders and staff remain “doggedly loyal” (85) to bureaucratic “responsible unionism”, have opted to contain resistance where it has emerged, and thus have exacerbated the above problems and accelerated the process of decay.

Given the depth of these problems, Camfield rightly argues that revitalizing existing (deeply flawed) union practices, is insufficient. Initiatives of “reform from above”
simply reinforce rather than challenge the underlying causes of the movement’s problems. Instead, the movement’s reinvention will require initiatives “from below” to turn it in a more democratic, militant and radical direction. Camfield reviews what he terms “seeds of hope”: concrete practices evident in various parts of the workers’ movement – both inside and outside unions – that, if expanded and generalized, could form the basis of such a reinvention. He emphasizes initiatives that aim to deepen union democracy and support the emergence of member-activists who not only more truly reflect the diversity of the working class but are also capable of undertaking organizing initiatives independent of unions’ leaders and staff. Ultimately, Camfield argues that unions must adopt a commitment to mobilize and organize the entire working class, not only its unionized elements, to fight in all the arenas that shape working-class life, not just the workplace, and to generate an anti-capitalist and anti-oppression working-class politics.

Despite the powerful analysis of the movement’s problems and necessary solutions, there are contradictions, particularly over how the capacities for such thoroughgoing change are to be generated. One of the book’s strengths is its use of Richard Hyman’s nuanced understanding of bureaucracy as a set of social relations of dependence on expertise, the pedagogical effects of which are felt by both leaders and members, who internalize bureaucracy as common sense. This usefully moves us away from simplistic nostrums that leaders are always to blame for every misstep or “betrayal” and helps us understand the systemic reproduction of union habits. However, members are seen as the source of radical transformation, though they are no less bound up in bureaucratic mentalities than leaders. Many members share with their leadership counterparts a vested interest in the status quo of union life. Their economic insecurity also undermines their willingness to resist. A union activist quoted here indicates that “a lot of people don’t want to cause waves in the workplace so they don’t enforce the collective agreement” (10). If that’s so, why should we expect members to be more willing to engage in direct action, a more confrontational act than filing a grievance? The prescription of “reform from below” does not fully explore the conditions needed for members’ confidence to be regenerated, and the role that progressive union leaders with access to resources will have to play in that process.

Similarly, it isn’t clear what kinds of structures are necessary to rebuild working-class power. There is an implicit preference for localism here, even though Camfield acknowledges some of its limitations. For instance, he decries the way collective bargaining structures fragment workers’ power, and yet mega-locals, which were created (at least in part) to address such fragmentation, are “beyond hope of democratization” (61). The decline of pattern bargaining is seen as part of the roots of unions’ problems, yet Camfield calls for local autonomy and members’ democratic control over bargaining. There is an unresolved tension here between the scale of workers’ power and the conditions that allow for members’ meaningful democratic control. Undoubtedly, most collective bargaining processes should be significantly democratized, but this is no simple matter. Indeed, local autonomy framed as “democracy” often reinforces fragmenting dynamics as members retain control over their bargaining agenda in their workplace, and refuse obligations to broader collective identities and interests. What then is the way forward? The book could have paid greater attention to such difficulties.

Despite these caveats, this book is required reading for working-class activists throughout the movement. Every union education department should adopt Canadian Labour in Crisis for immediate reading by their own leadership and activist cadres. Many will find the content uncomfortable, as it challenges deeply held assumptions on which lifetimes of activism have been based. And yet, as attacks on the remnants of working-class power continue to mount, this book will spark a necessary debate over what the labour movement must do to remain a relevant force for social transformation.

(View Original)

(Close)

 David Camfield’s Canadian Labour in Crisis is an important and controversial contribution to current debates concerning union renewal. What makes the book important is its critical analysis and sober assessment of the Canadian labor movement. 

In part one of the book, Camfield comes out swinging against the “union officialdom” (p. 4), a term he uses to describe the layer of union leaders and staff  members who control and direct the labor movement’s agenda. According to Camfield, the labor officialdom’s obsession with legalistic forms of contract unionism, its propensity to weaken rather than strengthen union democracy, its discouragement of both union militancy and radicalism, and it failure to represent the diversity of the working class have rendered Canada’s labor movement weak and increasingly irrelevant in the eyes of many workers. Weak and ineffective unions, argues Camfield, will do nothing to reverse the downward trend in union density or help to restore worker power vis-a-vis increasingly hostile employers and governments.

Camfield is almost certain to ruffle feathers with his stinging indictment of Canada’s labor leadership. However, union leaders would be unwise to dismiss his contribution as the radical rant of a disgruntled leftist. The questions Camfield raises about labor’s commitment to internal democracy, equity, and militancy are central to debates concerning union renewal and his proposed prescriptions, outlined in a later chapter, deserve the labor movement’s attention and consideration.

While Camfield does not pull any punches in the earlier part of the book, he adopts a more optimistic outlook in its second half. Employing a life-grounded ethics approach, Camfield argues that what is good for working people is what maintains or enhances life. Unions, according to Camfield, are a force for good because they increase the purchasing power of workers and enhance the standard of living for all by pushing governments to address issues of both social and workplace inequality. After laying the foundation for why unions are an important and positive force in society, Camfield makes the case for how the movement needs to be reinvented in order to ensure that organized labor can live up to its potential.

Camfield categorically rejects leadership-driven proposals for reforming the movement which are imposed “from above.” Instead, Camfield argues that the workers’ movement must be reinvented from below. In a section of the book called “Seeds of Hope,” Camfield uses examples from across Canada (ranging from plant occupations to “activist sessions” for rank-and-file workers) to demonstrate how the “from below” approach has successfully been employed (p. 128).

Herein lies the controversy. Implicit in Camfield’s analysis is the idea that the union officialdom acts as a force to constrain or even suffocate the potential militancy and radicalism of the rank-and-file. However, the dichotomy Camfield establishes between strategies “from above” and “from below” in some ways oversimplifies the relationship between the union leadership and the union  rank-and-file. Camfield’s examples tend to portray the rank-and-file as more militant and radical than the union officialdom, but this is certainly not always the case. 

To offer a counter example, when the leadership of the Ontario Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) threatened an illegal political strike in an effort to gain changes to the governance structure of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System pension plan in 2006, many rank-and-file CUPE activists resisted, creating internal union divisions that ultimately forced the President of CUPE Ontario to back down from the radical and militant action he had proposed. The same union leadership’s effort to demonstrate solidarity with human rights struggles in Palestine through vocal support for a campaign of boycott and divestment against Israel also prompted a rank-and-file backlash within CUPE. Although delegates to CUPE Ontario’s 2006 convention endorsed the boycott campaign, the union leadership’s decision to actively promote the campaign prompted several locals to cut ties with the Ontario Division.

In these high profile counter examples (which Camield does not address in the book), a union leader promoted positions and actions that triggered a rank-and-file backlash from those members who saw the leadership as too militant and too radical, indicating that the orientations of (and relationships between) the union leadership and the rank-and-file are far more complex than Camgield’s approach suggests. These counter examples also force us to ask deeper questions about whether or not strategies “from below” will necessarily lead to more radical political approach for labor.

Overall, Canadian Labour in Crisis is a must-read for union activists who are frustrated with the state of the workers’ movement and eager for new approaches to its reinvention. The book is well written, highly accessible, and unapologetically frank in its critical assessment of the current direction of the Canadian labor movement. Readers may not agree with everything Camfield prescribes, but his engaged analysis will force them to reevaluate whether existing strategies to renew the labor movement  are capable of breathing new life into a union movement that finds itself increasingly on the defensive.–Larry Savage, Brock University for Labor Studies Journal 36(3)

(Close)

It isn’t news that the U.S. labor movement is in profound crisis, and has been for some time. Readers of this magazine are by now all too familiar with the symptoms: waves of concessionary contracts, eroding labor laws, vicious government and employer attacks, defeated strikes, the precipitous decline in union membership.

They are also all too familiar with the U.S. labor officialdom’s response: calls for labor-management “partnership,” often coupled with consternation at employers’ unwillingness to “play fair.” Entreaties to support labor’s “friends” in the Democratic Party, invariably followed by blustering but empty protests when those “friends” betray labor’s cause. Handwringing about union member apathy, combined with quick denunciations when members take action in ways that aren’t carefully scripted at union headquarters.

Facing such a dire situation, it is understandable that U.S. labor activists would look to Canada through rose-tinted glasses. After all, things do seem to be going much better up north labor-wise. Canadian unionization rates are now nearly three times higher than in the United States, at 30.8% versus 11.9%.

Designers of the failed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) explicitly modeled it on Canada’s stronger labor laws, which for them explained labor’s strength in that country. Canada also has an established labor party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), which has governed in five provinces and won status as the Official Opposition in the most recent federal election.

Throw in Canada’s single-payer health care system and overall lower levels of socio-economic inequality, and our neighbor to the north can indeed start looking like some sort of social democratic paradise to a beleaguered U.S. left.

David Camfield’s Canadian Labour in Crisis offers a bracing corrective to such views. While acknowledging that the situation south of the border is worse than in Canada, he paints a picture of the Canadian labor movement that will be eerily recognizable. Contract givebacks, defeated strikes, calls for labor-management “partnership,” weak and unimaginative labor leadership, unreliable political “allies,” and right-wing backlash all make an appearance.

Camfield’s book serves as a sharp reminder that as much as U.S. activists bemoan the fate of workers in this country, labor’s crisis extends far beyond U.S. borders. These similarities make the author’s analysis deeply relevant to U.S. readers.

A Movement in Name Only

Camfield’s diagnosis of the fundamental problem in Canada should ring true to U.S. labor activists: the Canadian “labour movement” today is a movement in name only. He quotes a long-time Canadian union staffer as saying that “‘organized labour is not functioning like a movement at all,’ but as ‘individual, isolated organizations.” (4-5)

Camfield traces this phenomenon to the rise of “contract unionism” in the postwar period, a form of unionism “based on contracts, not direct action.” He carefully lays out how contract unionism was not inevitable, but was rather “the result of historic changes in labour law and the nature of unions that took place in the 1940s.” (10)

These changes, alongside the erosion of what he calls the “infrastructure of dissent,” i.e. “the infrastructure that fosters workers’ capacity for collective action” (69), capital’s renewed offensive starting in the 1970s, the decline of the left, and the strategies developed by top Canadian union officials in recent decades, have combined to produce the current crisis.

Moving from diagnosis to prescription, Camfield considers possibilities for reinventing the workers’ movement, as indicated in his subtitle. He looks first at “reform from above” strategies, as enacted by the Sweeney AFL-CIO leadership and SEIU here in the United States.

He criticizes this staff-heavy, growth at all costs model of “corporate unionism,” with its focus on building “market share,” as a failed strategy. On a more promising note, he identifies a minority trend towards what he calls “mobilization unionism” among Canadian advocates of reform from above.

As Camfield explains, “mobilization unionism involves a serious commitment to fighting for social justice, not just raising union density. Its supporters are more critical of employers and right-wing governments.” (113) He identifies the current incarnation of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) and the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW) of the late 1990s as key exemplars of this trend.

It is no accident, however, that Camfield qualifies his characterization of the CAW by date. Throughout the book, the decay of the CAW over the past decade serves both as a bellwether for the general crisis of Canadian labor and an illustration of the limitations of mobilization unionism.

Since the CAW broke away from the U.S.-based United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1984 on a militant anti-concessions platform of “social unionism,” it has used its size and influence to shape the broader Canadian labor movement. For their part, U.S. labor activists have looked to it hopefully as an alternative to the U.S. labor officialdom’s strategy of partnership and concessions.

A quarter century later, Camfield sees that the CAW’s “social unionism” is in tatters. From the leadership’s embrace of concessions in the face of the 2008 auto bailout, to the “Framework of Fairness” deal with auto parts giant Magna that trades employer neutrality in organizing for a strike ban and no shopfloor representation, to the “strategic” electoral embrace of the lesser-evil Liberal Party, the CAW now acts very much like its U.S. business unionist counterparts.

Democracy, the Missing Link

According to Camfield, the problem underlying the CAW’s decline is symptomatic of the problem with mobilization unionism: the lack of a culture of democracy within the union. As he argues, “if membership control is weak, changes can easily be reversed when official leaders decide to steer in a different direction.” (116)

For all its militant rhetoric and action of the 1980s and ‘90s, the CAW retained the authoritarian internal culture passed down from its estranged parent union, including the one-party dictatorship imposed by the Administration Caucus. Once top CAW officials abandoned the mobilization model in favor of a more “pragmatic,” concessionary approach, there was no organized force within the union capable of stopping them.

How then to build a workers’ movement that is not only a militant advocate for social justice, but is able to stay that way? Here Camfield considers the alternative: reform from below. It starts with

“a simple idea: workers themselves are the key players in changing the working-class movement. People should try to change unions and other labour bodies by working from the inside and from the bottom up to promote democracy, militancy, and solidarity. The emphasis is on activism where the largest number of wage-earners can get involved and where they have the most potential power: in the workplace and at the level of the local union. This grassroots emphasis goes along with a vision of building a fighting movement of the working class for social change.” (118)

The goal is to get unions to stop functioning as “individual, isolated organizations,” and start functioning as a movement. That necessarily involves not simply bridging labor-community divides, but overcoming the very notion of divisions between “labor” and “community” groups. The challenge is to forge a common identity as organizations of the working class.

This is an admittedly ambitious agenda, but Camfield is not simply engaging in wishful thinking. Instead, he is able to close his book with a variety of recent concrete examples, small if taken individually, which nonetheless provide “seeds of hope” if viewed collectively.

If Canadian Labour in Crisis were simply a Canadian spin on the many critiques of business unionism and programs for labor revitalization that have appeared in recent years, then perhaps it would only be of interest to those wanting to gain insight into the specifics of the Canadian labor movement. But Camfield’s crisply written, deceptively slim volume offers not only an explanation of what’s wrong with the Canadian labor movement and how to fix it, but a view of the historical roots of today’s problems, a moral and political rationale for why these problems are worth fixing, and a vision of how to do things differently.

In this, the book is of use to all who want a deeper understanding of what the working class is, why it (still) matters, and how it can help to create a new, more deeply democratic society. Although now a university professor, Camfield brings to his subject years of sustained activism in several working-class organizations. Through this work he developed a dense network of organizers and leaders at all levels of the Canadian labor movement, whose insights and analysis give the reader a unique perspective into what the movement actually looks like on the ground, and how it has changed in recent decades.

At the same time, Camfield combines this connection to the grassroots movement with careful, erudite thinking about the big picture. It is rare to find a book that lists both shopfloor reports by rank-and-file autoworkers and meditations on ethics by academic philosophers in its bibliography. Camfield deftly negotiates between the concrete and the abstract aspects of his argument, discussing complex ideas about the nature of class, defining what is good, and more, always in clear, accessible language.

Of course, the book necessarily has limitations, given its size relative to the issues it seeks to address. Some will undoubtedly take issue with certain historical interpretations, or critical struggles left unmentioned. Others might find the theoretical analysis overly simplistic. But overall, for what it seeks to accomplish, Canadian Labour in Crisis does so admirably.

All too often, books seeking to diagnose labor’s ills can read like extended case reports, stringing together anecdotes about this successful campaign or that failed initiative, and tying it all together with a neat list of recommendations at the end. At the same time, academic treatises on class struggle and the nature of exploitation under capitalism, while (sometimes) useful, tend to be ponderous, opaque, and inaccessible to anyone without several years of graduate-level training.

Camfield’s book moves beyond case studies to articulate a broader social vision, while avoiding opacity. Moreover, it dares to think about labor and working class movements in terms of ethics and morality.

For Camfield, workers’ organizations are important not only because they are strategically positioned to create social change. They are important because they “preserve and enhance human life,” allowing “people to have better access to what they require to meet their needs and flourish as human beings.” (5) In reminding us of the broader visions of workers’ movements, Canadian Labour in Crisis does in fact make it worthwhile to look north for labor revival.

—Barry Eidlin, Against The Current magazine, Nov/Dec 2011

November/December 2011, ATC 155

(View Original)

(Close)

Unions still relevant but face challenges

By: David Camfield

The Canadian Labour Congress, the main umbrella organization of unions in the country, held its triennial convention in Vancouver from May 9 to 13. As delegates met, some pundits argued unions are no longer relevant.

Plenty of evidence suggests otherwise. Much has changed in the world of work in recent decades. However, the basic realities that have led many workers to form unions haven’t gone away.

One is that workers who bargain as a group with their employer about wages, benefits and rights on the job have more power than if they negotiate individually. That’s why unionized workers make seven to 14 per cent more than comparable workers who aren’t unionized. This advantage is greatest for those who need it most, women, visible minorities, young people and others who are more likely to be lower paid.

Unionized workers are also much more likely to have a workplace pension plan as well as medical and dental benefits.

Something else that hasn’t changed is the interests of employers and workers aren’t the same, and employers have a lot more power in the workplace and in society. Unions are still the main organizations workers have to defend their independent interests.

But unions are facing major challenges. Most public sector workers remain unionized. However, the union presence among private sector workers continues to decline. In 2010, only 17.5 per cent of private sector workers were covered by a union collective agreement, continuing the decades-long shrinkage from a high of about one in three. This decline has been driven by the loss of jobs in unionized companies and the creation of many new jobs by non-unionized firms.

Another challenge is visible minorities — who make up a growing proportion of the population — are unionized at a lower rate than white workers.

The belief that unionized public sector workers are somehow responsible for higher government deficits is also a challenge. There is no evidence to support this idea — the main cause is the global economic crisis, which reduced revenue at the same time the federal government engaged in stimulus spending to avert an even-deeper recession. But governments intent on attacking public services in the name of cost-cutting are only too glad to see unions cast in a negative light.

Some workers question the relevance of unions because many unions, faced with more aggressive employer demands, have been losing ground in recent years. “You don’t need a union to go backwards,” is an old union saying. When union leaders accept employer demands for concessions — giving up past gains — without a fight, some workers inevitably wonder if the union matters. This attitude can be reinforced when union officials don’t encourage the widest possible democratic participation in union affairs.

In short, unions are vitally important but face daunting challenges. To meet them more effectively, unions need to start to change in significant ways. Unions can become stronger defenders of the common good by taking vigorous action to prevent ordinary people — who didn’t cause the economic crisis — from being made to pay for it through job losses, reduced wages, weaker benefits, increasingly stressful work lives and fewer, lower-quality public services.

By forging closer relationships with immigrant communities and indigenous people — from which growing numbers of wage earners will come in the years ahead — unions can become more effective at taking up their issues on and off the job.

Increasing democratic membership control within unions can increase member participation and enhance the ability of workers to make gains through unions.

If unions start to change in these and other ways, they can become even more relevant to 21st century workers.

David Camfield teaches labour studies at the University of Manitoba. His book Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement has recently been published by Fernwood Publishing.

 Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 20, 2011 

(Close)